In our previous discussion of Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, the former Guatemalan military general who was president of the republic from 1958 to 1963, we had focused on the fact that Fuentes allowed Cuban exiles to be trained in Guatemala for the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. This had allowed Ydígoras to leverage U.S. support for his Belize ambitions.
In his book on Fuentes, entitled MISUNDERSTOOD CAUDILLO (University Press of America, 1998), Roland H. Ebel writes on page 196, “According to Miguel Ydígoras Laparra (the son of Ydígoras Fuentes), Bob Davis promised that the U.S. would back Guatemala’s claim to Belize, and, to show its good faith, Guatemala would get a part of the sugar quota that had been taken from Cuba. The matter of Belize would be taken care of at an appropriate time.” This was around April of 1960, when Dwight D. Eisenhower was still president of the United States. “Bob Davis” is Robert Kendall Davis, who was the First Secretary of the U.S. Embassy and CIA station chief in Guatemala City.
There are two incidents which are important for us to know about with respect to the Belize question and the Bay of Pigs invasion.
One is that the training of the Cuban exiles in Guatemala provoked an unsuccessful military coup in Guatemala in November of 1960. “It was the dissatisfaction on the part of nationalistic military officers with the logistical support of the Bay of Pigs invasion that gave rise to the unsuccessful coup of November 1960 and to the guerrilla movements subsequently led by those dissident officers. The ensuing guerrilla war, which produced 140,000 deaths and at least a million refugees, has only recently ended.” (MISUNDERSTOOD CAUDILLO, Roland H. Ebel, pg. xxii)
Please note that Ebel wrote in 1998, two years after the Guatemalan civil war was supposed to have ended. Since then, most sources have revised the number of casualties upwards to around 200,000. The most prominent of the “dissident officers” were Lieutenants Marco Antonio Yon Sosa and Luis Turcios Lima, who, after four months of exile, returned to Guatemala to launch the nation’s first full-scale guerrilla movement, named after the revolt which had failed four months earlier – the MR-13 (Movimiento Revolucionario – 13 de Noviembre.)
The second incident took place on December 31, 1958. Fuentes saw an opportunity to shore up his sagging support by provoking an international incident with Mexico. On that date, Ydígoras ordered the Guatemalan Air Force to fire on unarmed Mexican shrimping ships fishing off its Pacific coast.
“Guatemala had claimed the twelve-mile limit since 1940 and while Mexico never officially contested this, neither did had it imposed any sanctions on its fishing boats that were violating Guatemalan waters. It had not had to, since Guatemala had never had a navy capable of defending its claim. However, the Ydígoras administration had moved to stimulate the shrimping industry by buying five new shrimp boats and by seeking private American capital for a joint venture. However, both foreign and local investors were concerned about the inability of the government to control poaching. Thus, on December 31, 1958, when Mexican shrimpers came to within two to three miles of the Guatemalan shoreline, Ydígoras launched Operation Drake ( named after Sir Francis Drake, the sixteenth century pirate, a term he applied to the Mexican shrimpers) which resulted in the machine-gunning of some sixteen Mexican shrimp boats with a number of dead and wounded. The President claimed that these ‘pirate ships’ were not only robbing Guatemala of great quantities of fish and shrimp, but were also making furtive landings along the coast with contraband arms and drugs.
“Mexico, which claimed that the boats had been fired on in Mexican waters, sent a formal note of protest demanding the return of all captured vessels and fishermen, and reparations for the families of the Mexicans killed or wounded. When Guatemala rebuffed these demands, the Mexican foreign minister, Manuel Tello, called for the dispute to be submitted to the International Court of Justice at the Hague. However, riding a wave of nationalistic passion, Ydígoras again refused on the ground that ordinary police actions did not require international mediation. Mexico broke diplomatic relations with Guatemala on January 23 and Guatemala sent troops to within five kilometers of the border.” (MISUNDERSTOOD CAUDILLO, pgs. 161, 162)
Here are a couple comments by Ebel on page 162 of his book. “Why had President Ydígoras been willing to risk war with a neighbor almost twenty times the size of Guatemala? Most theories center on his Machiavellian approach to the recuperation of Belize.” “ … Francisco Villagrán Kramer argues that the Mexican incursion provided an opportunity for the President to generate national support for a military action and to prepare the Guatemalan army for the eventual recuperation of Belize.”