Quite aside from all this planning, what the CIA still needed was some sort of pretext to launch the attack on Árbenz. They finally found one in the spring of 1954 when the Guatemalan president, his military withering from an ongoing American arms boycott, arranged to buy a shipment of light weapons from communist Czechoslovakia. As John Foster Dulles and others loudly proclaimed, here was final proof that Árbenz intended to create a Red fortress in Central America. Amid the increasingly energetic hand-wringing, even liberal media outlets like The New York Times clamored for the administration
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