Fidel Castro, whom the C.I.A. made at least eight plots against, speaking with reporters in 1964 in a car. An assault rifle lies in the seat pocket.Jack Manning/The New York Times
The United States has a long and, often sordid, history of intervening in Latin America. Washington once went to war with Mexico, landed troops on Cuba and invaded Panama to depose its ruler.
But for much of the 20th century, U.S. involvement in the region was in the hands of the C.I.A.
Now, long after the Cold War’s end, the Trump administration has secretly authorized the agency to conduct covert action in Venezuela, according to U.S. officials, stepping up a campaign against the country’s authoritarian leader, President Nicolás Maduro.
The order has once again raised the specter of operations by an agency that had its hands in coups, assassination plots and the contra fight against Nicaragua’s leftist government in the 1980s.
Here are some of those high-profile operations.
A coup in Guatemala
Guatemala’s elected president, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, left, with Luis I. Rodríguez, a senator from Mexico, in 1954.Bettmann, via Getty Images
When Guatemala’s democratically elected president, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, was overthrown in a coup in 1954, the Eisenhower administration described it as an uprising against a Communist government allied with the Soviet Union.
But the coup had been supported by the C.I.A., which drew up assassination lists and discussed recruiting exiles to take part, according to files released decades later. President Dwight D. Eisenhower approved a request to give the insurgents bombers, and C.I.A. pilots helped build an opposition force.
Mr. Árbenz had also made powerful enemies in a major U.S. corporation, the United Fruit Company. His government had tried to confiscate unused land owned by the company to redistribute it under a land reform plan, and to pay compensation for the understated value the company had claimed on tax payments.
After the coup, Guatemala fell into three decades of civil war under a series of military leaders. An investigation by the Roman Catholic Church found that 150,000 people were killed and 50,000 were forcibly disappeared in the conflict, estimating that 80 percent of the casualties were caused by Guatemalan troops.
The Bay of Pigs invasion
Cuba’s leader, Fidel Castro, looking out from a tank during the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba in 1961.Raul Corrales/GRANMA, via Associated Press
After Fidel Castro swept to power in Cuba in 1959, his government’s relations with Washington swiftly unraveled. The C.I.A. soon began making invasion plans, helping arm and train an anti-Castro force at a secret base in Guatemala.
The agency carried out the disastrous attack in April 1961. The plan called for Cuban exiles, backed by the C.I.A., to overthrow Mr. Castro’s Communist government as C.I.A. pilots bombed part of the Cuban air force. About 1,500 Cuban exiles were dropped on the island, outnumbered, underequippedand quickly defeated by the Cuban military, which captured nearly 1,200 of them.
A scathing, 150-page review into the operation found that almost none of the C.I.A. officers involved spoke Spanish and that it had created a “complex and bizarre organizational situation” with little chance of success. “The agency was going forward without knowing precisely what it was doing,” the report said.
Assassination attempts
The automobile where Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, the authoritarian leader of the Dominican Republic, was assassinated in 1961 outside the Dominican capital. Bettmann, via Getty Images
The C.I.A. made at least eight plots to kill Mr. Castro, according to a Senate Intelligence Committee report that was partly released in 1975 and fully disclosed long afterward.
Some plots went much further than others. One scheme, “involving the use of underworld figures,” went so far as to send poison pills to Cuba and dispatch teams there, the report said.
Another plan involved giving weapons and other assassination devices to a Cuban dissident, including a poison pen. The agency also explored plots to use cigars treated with a botulinum toxin, an “exotic seashell” rigged to explode in an area where the Cuban leader went diving and a diving suit contaminated by the bacteria that causes tuberculosis.
The C.I.A. also supplied weapons to the dissidents who assassinated Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, the authoritarian leader of the Dominican Republic, in 1961. And a C.I.A. agent also helped a team of Bolivian soldiers capture Che Guevara in 1967, in a mission that ended with Guevara’s execution.
A ‘coup climate’ in Chile
Chilean Army troops firing on La Moneda, the presidential palace in Santiago, Chile, on Sept. 11, 1973, during a coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet.
As soon as Salvador Allende took office as the Socialist president of Chile in 1970, the Nixon administration began planning action against him, worried he could become a model for other countries. The C.I.A. sought to “create a coup climate” by maximizing pressure on the Chilean government, according to declassified U.S. documents.
The covert operations included a C.I.A.-funded anti-government propaganda media campaign, blocking loans to Chile from multilateral financial institutions, offering secret funds to foment strikes, and assuring the Chilean military it had full U.S. support.
Handwritten notes by the C.I.A. director at the time showed some of the president’s instructions: “One in 10 chance, perhaps, but save Chile”; “not concerned risks involved”; “full-time job — best men we have”; “make the economy scream.”
A Senate committee investigating covert actions in Chile found that there was little evidence linking the U.S. government to direct involvement in the military coup that came to pass, according to the State Department. In that coup, in September 1973, surrounded in the besieged presidential palace, Mr. Allende eventually ordered everyone still with him to surrender. He stayed behind and shot himself.
The military junta was led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who for the next 16 years consolidated power in a repressive regime accused of widespread torture, executions and disappearances.
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 17, 2025, Section A, Page 9 of the New York edition with the headline: C.I.A.’s History in Latin America: Poison Cigars and Coups. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
