In one of the most ignoble missions in the CIA’s Cold War history, on 18 June 1954 the intelligence agency led US-backed troops in a covert invasion of Guatemala. The objective: a coup d’état to remove from power the hugely-popular and democratically-elected president, Jacobo Árbenz. The politician had created powerful enemies in the US with his land reforms, which claimed back from the American United Fruit Company vast areas that had been given away by an earlier dictatorship, in gratitude for US support. After Árbenz was overthrown the country was ruled by a military junta for the next 4 decades, during which time the government committed genocide against the remaining Mayan population during the Guatemalan Civil War.

In the aftermath of Árbenz’s deposition and exile, the legendary Mexican muralist, Diego Rivera, responded with a vitriolic canvas. The mockingly-titled Glorious Victory depicts John Foster Dulles, CIA Director (and board member of United Fruit Company) shaking hands with Colonel Castillo Armas, the leader of the coup who would soon take the presidency for himself. At their feet stands an anthropomorphised bomb bearing the grinning face of US President Eisenhower. The trio are surrounded by the slaughtered bodies of Guatemalan workers.

Rivera was a committed communist, who gave a home to Trotsky after his exile from the Soviet Union. And the Soviet Union is where the mural (painted on linen) was sent, as a donation to the workers of the USSR. After touring behind the Iron Curtain until 1958 the painting went missing and was thought to have been destroyed. But it was only revealed in 2000 that Rivera’s mural had been in storage for nearly half a century in Moscow’s State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. It enjoyed a triumphant return to Mexico in 2007 for an exhibition at the Palacio de Bellas Artes.

Image: Diego Rivera, Glorious Victory, 1954. Movable mural painted on linen. State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts.