The Trump administration has assured the American people that the capture of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro on January 3 was essential to their safety and national security. Officials tried tying Maduro’s regime to gangs and drugs to justify military strikes on boats in the Caribbean and seizing Venezuelan oil tankers. Rather than sparking some groundswell of public support, however, these claims have left the American people rather divided over the US government’s latest intervention in Latin America, with a plurality leaning skeptical or opposed.

Such ambivalence was not an issue in the early 1950s, when Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration helped overthrow Guatemala’s democratically elected government. The relative consensus, though, might have been due to the Central Intelligence Agency’s weeks-long efforts to rally Americans behind a grassroots boycott of Guatemalan coffee — undertaken despite a prohibition on the agency operating on American soil. Working through a popular radio personality and feeding materials to a well-respected senator, the CIA convinced many American households that it was necessary to destroy what was falsely alleged to be a Soviet beachhead in the Caribbean.

In 1944, a broad coalition of Guatemalans overthrew dictator Jorge Ubico, beginning the Guatemalan Revolution that lasted until 1954. Their vision of democracy quickly ran afoul of numerous forces, ranging from the region’s notorious dictatorships to the British Empire. Livid at the country’s new labor codes and an agrarian reform project that targeted its vast holdings, the United Fruit Company lobbied the US Congress and spread propaganda throughout the United States that denigrated Guatemala as an alleged bastion of Soviet communism. In 1952, the Truman administration approved the US government’s first covert operation to overthrow Guatemala’s government, only to suspend the plot in fear of its being uncovered.