Guatemala: Democratic Spring and CIA Intervention\
Conference at Long Island University’s Brooklyn Campus

Brooklyn, N.Y. – Guatemala’s decade of democracy and the covert CIA operation that ended it are the focus of a conference at Long Island University’s Brooklyn Campus. The conference, “Guatemala’s Democratic Spring and its Demise, 1944-54,” commemorates the 50th anniversary of this early Cold War event.  

The conference will take place on Thursday, November 11, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. in Library Learning Center, Room 124, to be followed by a reception and cultural event with Guatemalan food and a marimba band in the Avena Lounge.

On Wednesday, November 10, the day before the conference, a film on Guatemala, “Discovering Dominga,” with commentary by human rights expert Raul Molina, will be screened from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. in the Health Sciences Building, Room 116.

At the conference,a panel of experts will explore Guatemala’s democratic achievements during the 10-year period as well as the CIA’s role in unseating a popularly elected government in 1954, the first such intervention in the Western Hemisphere.

The speakers are Alfonso Bauer Paiz, former minister of labor and director of the land reform that sparked U.S. hostility at the time; novelist Francisco Goldman; New York University historian Greg Grandin; political scientist Susanne Jonas from the University of California at Santa Cruz; and human rights expert Raul Molina of the Campus’s history department.

The Latin American and Caribbean Studies (LACS) program is sponsoring the events, with the departments of English, Foreign Languages and Literature, History, Political Science and Sociology-Anthropology and the Voices of the Rainbow program as co-sponsors.

For more information, call LACS director Prof. J. Patrice Mc Sherry at (718) 780-4105.

Long Island University opened its Brooklyn Campus in 1926, welcoming a diverse population at a time when other major universities enforced quota systems against racial and ethnic minorities. Some 31,000 students currently are enrolled at the university’s three residential and three regional campuses, including more than 12,000 at the Brooklyn Campus. Located at the corner of Flatbush Avenue Extension and DeKalb Avenue in Downtown Brooklyn, the Campus is accessible to all major bus and subway routes and the Long Island Rail Road.