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.

As soon as the Eisenhower administration took the reins in 1953, the CIA quickly restarted the operation and brainstormed new proposals. Soon agents suggested hitting Guatemala’s international trade. A US boycott of Guatemalan coffee, ideally, would spark an economic crash and induce Guatemalans to overthrow their own government.

To rally the American people behind this goal, the CIA considered working with the right-wing radio host Fulton Lewis Jr. Such an approach was a tad tricky. On one hand, Lewis had mocked the US government’s seeming failures to stop the spread of communism during the Korean War, a denunciation that had taken a conspiratorial tone. He might react with hostility and blab about the plot. On the other hand, he was a popular anti-communist figure whose radio and new television program had national reach. If he were amenable, it would pay off.

The CIA’s gambit worked, and Lewis agreed to have a segment on Guatemala that would air in January 1954. His guests would be Senator Bourke Hickenlooper (R-IA) and Julius Cahn, the counsel for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Both were perfect figures for the program. The United Fruit Company had long lobbied Hickenlooper against Guatemala’s governments, while Cahn worked with the company’s public relations expert Edward Bernays to spread anti-communist propaganda.

To cover its bases, the CIA provided a list of talking points for Lewis and Hickenlooper that reduced Guatemala’s government to a Soviet puppet. These drew upon unfounded allegations that a coterie of international communists controlled Guatemalan affairs, that Guatemala’s presidents followed the orders of Soviet and even Mexican communists, and that Latin American communists used Guatemala as their base of operations to spread anti-American propaganda throughout the Western Hemisphere.

The resulting segment was exactly what the CIA wanted. On Lewis’s television program on January 22, 1954, Cahn alleged that Guatemalan communists suffocated religious freedom, and Hickenlooper warned that guerrillas and saboteurs might use the Central American country to spread chaos into the United States itself. Most importantly, Lewis himself ended his program by telling his followers that “by refusing to accept Guatemalan coffee, the United States could cause the fall of the present Guatemalan government.”

The program accomplished precisely what the CIA desired as Americans sent letters, cables, and petitions to their congressional leaders. A family in Montana begged Senator Mike Mansfield (D-MT) “to end all trade which might be beneficial to any communist government.” A wife in Wisconsin assured Senator Alexander Wiley (R-WI) that “we are very much against the importation of any coffee” from Guatemala.

Immediately, senators and representatives asked the State Department if an embargo of Guatemalan coffee was feasible. They stated that their constituents, from Utah and Wyoming to Texas and Connecticut, wanted their leaders to take action. Even Representative Charles Bennett (D-FL), who knew nothing about Guatemalan affairs, wanted “to go on record as favoring ending any trade with Communist-dominated countries.” Sparked by the CIA’s work with Lewis, this grassroots activism convinced Senator Margaret Chase Smith (R-ME) to introduce Senate Resolution 211 calling for an embargo of Guatemalan coffee.

Lamentably for the CIA, there would be no embargo. It turned out that importers did not distinguish coffee beans by country of origin, making it impossible to impose an embargo on Guatemalan coffee without adversely affecting other countries’ shipments. The CIA failed to accomplish its primary objective during this propaganda campaign.

Nevertheless, the unrealized embargo indirectly became invaluable for the US government’s efforts in Guatemala. Under Operation PBSUCCESS, the CIA unleashed an immense campaign of psychological warfare that included religious literature, military bribes, radio broadcasts, and student organizations. By the end of June 1954, Guatemala’s own military ousted its civilian leaders, realizing the CIA’s objectives and setting the path for subsequent regimes that would repress the Guatemalan people in the name of anti-communism. The entire time, Americans continued petitioning their congressional leaders to overthrow Guatemala’s government. During and even after the coup, US citizens demanded that the Eisenhower administration take action to stop “the red president of Guatemala.” Thanks to CIA propaganda disseminated by a senator on a popular television program, Americans cheered on the US government’s intervention in Latin America.

This history may seem like a relic of a cruder era of propaganda. But it may also be quite relevant in light of the recent controversies surrounding news agencies giving preferential treatment to the Trump administration. Take for example CBS News, both under new management and under pressure to portray the Trump administration in a positive light. Mere days after Maduro’s capture, it was the latest CBS Evening News anchor who publicly lauded the administration’s secretary of state for events in Venezuela.