Office of the Historian

714.00/6–2454:Telegram

The United States Representative at the United Nations (Lodge) to the Department of State

top secret
New York, June 24, 1954—6 p.m.

876. For the Secretary. Re Guatemala. I told Dixon and Hoppenot this morning that we had worked hard all yesterday to get OAS to take some action in line their position1 yesterday. OAS did take action last night2 which met their position. Dixon had informed me this morning his government’s policy had changed and they now insisted on UN observation. I had immediately reported3 this to Washington. I now had an important statement to make to them and I had asked them to come to my office so that I could do so in person. I said that this statement was not in any sense of the word a threat because of course they represented strong independent governments that would do whatever they wanted but that I was instructed by the President to say to them that if Great Britain and France felt that they must take an independent line backing the present government of Guatemala, we would feel free to take an equally independent line concerning such matters as Egypt and North Africa in which we had hitherto tried to exercise the greatest forbearance so as not to embarrass Great Britain and France.

My announcement was received with great solemnity.

Lodge
  1. In telegram 867, from New York, dated June 23, 1954, Ambassador Lodge stated in part the following: “Hoppenot and Dixon called on me in private and told me that if the Soviet Union moved to send a peace observation commission to the region of Guatemala they would have to vote in favor of it unless the OAS had taken action to send observation of its own.” (714.00/6–2354)↩
  2. On June 23, 1954, the Inter-American Peace Committee decided to authorize the formation of a subcommittee of information, composed of members of the IAPC, which might visit Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Honduras, and with consent of those governments, conduct an investigation of the complaints they had laid before the committee.↩
  3. Reference is to telegram 870, from New York, dated June 24, 1954, not printed (714.00/6–2454).↩