Chiquita Banana Barons and Guatemalan Killing Fields – Part 2

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Part 1

Part 2/4 –

Chiquita Brands, headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, is the successor to the United Fruit Company and is the leading distributor of bananas in the United States. Chiquita Brands was originally formed in 1871 by railroad entrepreneur Henry Meiggs as the United Fruit Company.

United Fruit Company resulted from a merger between Andrew Preston’s Boston Fruit Company and Keith’s Tropical Trading and Transport Company in 1899. The merger became so influential in the banana industry, Alison Acker, in her book “Honduras: The Making of a Banana Republic”, wrote that by the 1930s United Fruit contributed to between 80 and 90 percent of all banana trade with the United States. And along with that trade monopoly came power, influence, and political corruption.

In fact, the term “banana republic” was first used by American author O. Henry in his book, “Cabbages and Kings”, based on Henry’s stay in Central America from 1896-97. Henry witnessed first hand the tyrannical rule by a small group of wealthy and corrupt elites.

To circumvent land reform and social programs unfavorable to United Fruit, in the 1950s, United Fruit business leaders influenced U.S. government officials to intervene in Guatemalan affairs.

In 1954, Eisenhower branded the Guatemalan president, Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, pro-soviet and a “communist”, and financed a CIA operation to overthrow the Guatemalan government. Eisenhower sent CIA operatives and US aid and equipment to the Guatemalan Army. After the CIA orchestrated the overthrew of Arbenz Guzmán, Guzmán fled to Cuba.

As a result of the coup, land was stripped from the working peasants; unions were broken up and banned along with the Banana Worker’s Union, and power was restored to United Fruit’s corporate elite. The US, under the direction Eisenhower, placed Colonel Castillo Armas, an American puppet, into power as the new president.

The names of those who supported Guzmán and opposed the coup were provided to Armas by the US Ambassador and “thousands were arrested and many were tortured and killed…Armas disenfranchised one-third of the voters by barring illiterates from voting. He outlawed all political parties, labor confederations, and peasant organizations. He closed down opposition newspapers and burned ‘subversive’ books.”

The Armas dictatorship was followed by a string of military despots that led to widespread civil war. But since revolution flourished mainly in the highlands, poor peasants fled to the cities to find work. For almost three decades, between 1954 and 1981, more than 60,000 people were murdered. And Guatemala continues to suffer the worst record of human rights abuses in Latin America.

Go here for Part 1.

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