Few people realise bananas shaped the course of the Cold War.
It happened in Guatemala - the original banana republic - a little country about the size of Ireland, but with four times the population, a quarter of the GDP., and no luck. It had no oil to attract the dangerous attention of superpowers, not much in the way of mineral wealth, just incredible scenery and a whole lot of jungle that’s only really good for growing fruit.
Antigua, the former Spanish colonial capital of Guatemala. Today, it’s a tourist destination.
The trouble started because the Guatemalan people didn’t own their own bananas. In the early twentieth century, US entrepreneurs started buying up the best growing land, and by 1944, around 40 percent of it belonged to one corporation - the United Fruit Company.
In theory, United Fruit was supposed to provide infrastructure in exchange for land. In practice, no.
While the rest of the world was busy fighting Nazis, Guatemala decided to experiment with democracy. They kicked out the dictatorship that had run the country as a personal piggy bank since 1823, and brought in crazy ideas like universal education, and land reform.
“Land reform - ugh!” I hear you.
Bear with me. Crimes and covert ops are coming.
Tell me these guys aren’t the coolest looking revolutionaries you’ve ever seen. They’re standing in the square outside the cathedral in Guatemala City.
Guatemala started buying back all its prime banana growing land. The problem was, the price they paid was based on the valuation the owners had reported in their tax returns. United Fruit didn’t like tax. For decades they’d valued their land at a dollar an acre to avoid paying any.
“A dollar!” You can imagine how well this offer was received at Fruit HQ, but they couldn’t argue against Guatemalan law in Guatemala, so the corporation turned to the US government for help.
Why should the US government care about a tax squabble in a banana republic?
‘Investment in infrastructure’ = donkeys
It’s a good question. In a sane world, this issue would not require action by a military superpower, but we live in the crazy timeline. The Eisenhower administration was initially reluctant to get involved, until the fruit guys said the magic word…
‘Communism.’
It was the fifties. That word was enough to make America reach for its guns. A socialist state on the southern border was the stuff of nightmares for most of Washington DC, and United Fruit waged a PR campaign to make them vivid. Adam Curtis touched on the story in his documentary ‘The Power of Nightmares’. If anything, he underplayed it.
The number of Communists in the US was tiny, but hey, let’s make a feature film about an imaginary threat anyway.
They convinced President Eisenhower that Guatemala was flying the red flag, and could be the first domino, toppling the rest of Latin America into communism.
It was utter insanity. It’s hard to say now whether the lobbyists believed their own lies, but it worked.
The truth matters less than who you know, and United Fruit had friends in very high places. US Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, was a partner in a law firm that worked for them. Eisenhower’s personal secretary happened to be the wife of United Fruit’s CEO.
The reluctant president didn’t want a full-on war, but he authorised a CIA covert Op. The CIA was run by a guy called Allen Dulles. If the name sounds familiar, that’s because he’s the Secretary of State’s little brother.
How’s that for cosy?
Oh, and he was a former board member of United Fruit.
Eisenhower with John Foster Dulles. I genuinely don’t think Ike was malevolent, but he didn’t realise how unscrupulous so many of the people around him were.
Little brother’s CIA puts together a mercenary army, including a few WW2-vintage planes to overwhelm Guatemala’s barely existent air force. They pick out an ambitious Colonel from the Guatemalan army to lead a ‘revolution’ against the ‘tyranny’ of the country’s democratic government.
The P47 Thunderbolt was obselete by 1954, but that doesn’t matter when the enemy has no planes.
Around 400 men and a few old planes is all it takes to end Guatemala’s ten year flirtation with democracy. The colonel, Castillo Armas, becomes El Presidente. The country sinks into a civil war that lasts for 36 years, but United gets its bananas and the imaginary Red Menace is defeated.
I wish I could say there was a happy ending, but there really isn’t. Their Guatemalan experiment in regime change (hot on the heels of their Iranian op) gives the CIA an appetite for more. It inspires all the disastrous interventions of the following decades – Cuba, South-East Asia etc…
Prisoners after the failed ‘Bay of Pigs’ invasion of Cuba. If Guatemala hadn’t happened first, they’d never have tried it. For better or worse, the Cubans were a tougher proposition.
The CIA was only seven years old when it started the banana war. The ‘success’ built the careers and reputations of a generation of spooks who learned the wrong lessons and took them all over the world, right up to Iraq in 2003. All because one corp didn’t want to pay tax.
And the United Fruit Company – what happened to those guys?
They must have received some karmic payback by now, right?
Nope. They’re basically still around, re-branded as Chiquita. The lady doesn’t look like a killer, but those are some expensive bananas.
