 In addition to the lobbying of the United Fruit Company , several other factors also led the United States to launch the coup that toppled Árbenz in 1954 . During the years of the Guatemalan Revolution , military coups occurred in several other Central American countries that brought firmly anti @-@ communist governments to power . Army officer Major Oscar Osorio won staged elections in El Salvador in 1950 , Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista took power in 1952 . Honduras , where the land @-@ holdings of the United Fruit Company were the most extensive , had been ruled by an anti @-@ communist government sympathetic to the United States since 1932 . These developments created tension between the other governments and Árbenz , which was exacerbated by Arévalo 's support for the Caribbean Legion . This support also worried the United States and the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency . According to US historian Richard Immerman , during the beginning of the Cold War , the US and the CIA tended to assume that everybody who opposed it was a communist . Thus , despite Arévalo 's ban of the communist party , important figures in the US government were already predisposed to believe that the revolutionary government had been infiltrated by communists , and was a danger to the US . During the years of the revolution , several reports and memoranda were circulated amongst US government agencies that furthered this belief . 
