Banana Republic: The Bloody History of Your Favorite Yellow Fruit
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Philadelphia, 1876. The United States has just turned 100 years old. To celebrate the centennial, the US hosted its first international exhibition of arts, manufactures, and products of the soil and mine, better known as the World's Fair. Things we take for granted today were unveiled for the very first time. Alexander Graham Bell set up his first telephone on opposite ends of the machinery hall.

Fairgoers could gaze upon the first steam locomotive monorail. They could test their new typing skills on the world's first typewriter. They could even pay 50 cents to climb the Statue of Liberty's right arm, which had yet to be attached. They tasted popcorn, ketchup, and root beer for the first time. But one food product stood out among the rest. The banana took the United States by storm. Nobody had ever seen or tasted one before 1876.

That's because bananas only grow in tropical climates, such as Latin America, Colombia, India, and southern China. Bananas are also perishable and difficult to transport without modern technology. Getting them from Colombia to Philadelphia before they rotted was borderline impossible. Today, roughly 135 million tons of bananas are produced and sold worldwide.

According to market research, the banana trade's global value was roughly $14 billion in 2023 and is expected to reach nearly $15 billion by 2031. About a third of that market is dominated by Chiquita, one of the world's largest banana companies. They, Dole, and Fresh Del Monte control roughly 70% of the industry.

If you have bananas in your kitchen, they likely come from one of these three powerhouses. But only one of those companies has blood on their hands. Chiquita, formerly known as United Fruit Company, had dominated the banana trade since 1899. In that time, they've allegedly overthrown governments, smashed worker strikes, and sparked civil war in Colombia and Guatemala.

They've pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting a terrorist organization and could be tangentially blamed for roughly 500,000 deaths between South and Latin America. All of it was in the name of power and money. In fact, United Fruit's hold over Latin America is where the term "banana republic" comes from. So, let's peel back the layers of history's most controversial fruit. How did it get so bad? And what are we doing to help today?

Part 1: Railroading United Fruit Company can trace its origins to 1871, when railroad entrepreneur Henry Meigs made a deal with Costa Rica to build a railroad from San Jose to the Port of Limon. Henry's nephew, Miner Keith, helped him on the project and inherited everything after Henry died in 1877. Keith had a major problem on his hands: railroads didn't build themselves.

They required a massive labor force, which was expensive to pay, house, and feed. To save on food, Keith began growing banana trees on his property. He realized how tasty they were and, more importantly, how cheap they were to grow. After the 1876 World's Fair, America was going bananas for… well, bananas. Keith could capitalize on the emerging market if he struck while the iron was hot.

In 1882, the Costa Rican government defaulted on its railroad payments. Keith borrowed 1.2 million pounds from London banks and private investors to keep the project going. Next, he cut a deal with Costa Rica for 800,000 acres of tax-free land along his soon-to-be railroad. Take one guess as to what Keith planted. Initially, the Costa Rican railroad was to profit from transporting people from San Jose to Limon.

Keith pivoted at the final hour and instead used the train to transport bananas. When they reached the port of Le Mans, the bananas were loaded on steamships and sent to the United States. Within a few years, miner Keith was the banana king of Central America. Keith hit a roadblock in 1899 when his New York City broker went bankrupt.

It cost him $1.5 million, or roughly $57 million today. Desperate for cash, Keith merged with his bitter rival, Boston Fruit, the only other player in the American banana trade. Technically, Boston Fruit was the first banana seller in the United States. They began in the 1870s when Captain Lorenzo Dow Baker sailed back to Boston from Jamaica with a boatload of bananas in tow.

At the time, bananas were far cheaper than US-grown fruits like apples. For example, 25 cents in 1913 could buy you two apples or roughly a dozen bananas. What's more impressive is that Baker, and soon to be United Fruit, made a 1000% profit selling bananas in the US.

If bananas earned him a 1000% profit at 25 cents per dozen, imagine what they paid the Central American farmers they bought from originally. Pennies on the dollar would be too much. It was more like pennies on the penny.

the merger created the United Fruit Company. Keith took a backseat as vice president, while American businessman Andrew W. Preston acted as president and CEO. Their combined assets were worth roughly $11.23 million, or in eye-popping, $427 million today. United Fruit went on to buy as many competitors as it could. Within a few years, they controlled 80% of US banana imports.

It's one thing to control the imports, it's another to control the means of production. In 1901, United Fruit expanded to Guatemala, where it was hired to manage the country's postal service. In 1913, it created the Tropical Radio and Telegraph Company, which gave it control over telecoms in Central America.

By the 1930s, United Fruit was the single largest landowner in Guatemala. In total, they occupied 3.5 million acres between Central America and the Caribbean. That would be like planting banana trees across the entire state of Connecticut. Buying up land is the best way to prevent small farmers from moving in on your market share. This is also called forming a monopoly, which United Fruit excelled at.

They claimed that impending hurricanes and tropical storms required them to hold extra land. Governments in Guatemala, Colombia, and Honduras agreed. And United Fruit became an unstoppable juggernaut. In fact, their domination over Central America inspired American author William Sidney Porter, better known by his pen name O. Henry, to coin the term "Banana Republic."

The phrase first appeared in his book "Cabbages and Kings" and was used to describe the fictional Republic of Anchuria. Anchuria, however, was based on Honduras, where O. Henry had fled to escape embezzlement charges in Texas. While in Honduras, he learned how heavily the country relied on banana exports. United Fruit had an iron grip on the country, as it did in Colombia, Guatemala, and Cuba.

It allegedly used that grip to bend foreign governments to its will. The banana was the end-all be-all. Money mattered more than people, and United Fruit would be damned if a small worker uprising would impact their Q4 margins.

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Part 2: The Banana Massacre As you probably guessed, working conditions on Depression-era Latin American banana farms were abysmal at best. Employees worked long hours and were grossly underpaid.

Workplace accidents simply meant you lost your job. United Fruit didn't even have the decency to call these workers their employees. Technically, the thousands of people working on their banana farms were subcontractors. So, any abuses they suffered were at the hands of the contractor, not United Fruit. Regarding payment, many employees were paid in coupons instead of cash.

These coupons were worthless outside of company-owned stores. Even worse, the products in those stores were sold at inflated prices. In other words, United Fruit paid their workers in monopoly money and still gouged them for a profit in the end. Worker uprisings are inevitable when conditions are so poor.

To squash these rebellions before they got out of hand, United Fruit hired private law enforcement groups and right-wing militias to police the land. By 1928, the workers on banana farms in Cienaga, Colombia, had reached their boiling point. On November 12, they left work and refused to pick another banana until United Fruit agreed to negotiate. Here were their demands:

They wanted to be considered employees, not contractors. United Fruit was to provide them with mandatory collective insurance and compensation for workplace accidents. The workers wanted hygienic dormitories and six-day work weeks. They were currently working seven. Finally, they demanded increased wages and cash instead of coupons. At the time, some workers were only making 100 pesos per month.

Some historians consider the 1928 strike the first organized worker movement in Colombia. The workers' demands were reasonable. Today, we'd consider them basic human rights. United Fruit begged to differ. They refused to negotiate, and the holdout lasted several more weeks. At one point, 25,000 banana farm workers were on strike. United Fruit's bottom line was taking a hit.

but they believed they could easily outlast the workers. After all, giving in to their demands would cost too much money. Money their shareholders and C-suite executives weren't willing to lose. By late November, several socialist, anarchist, and Marxist groups had joined the strike. This allowed United Fruit to call them a communist uprising. And nothing got the American war machine turning quite like the threat of communism.

As the strike rolled into December, Colombia mobilized its army to squeeze the workers on all fronts. United Fruit and, therefore, the Colombian state, were losing tens of thousands of dollars for each day of stalled production. Banana sales were down 75%, and banks between the US and Bogota struggled to collect on debts. Violence was brewing, and American interests in Cienaga were under threat.

On December 5th, a telegram arrived in Washington from the US Embassy in Bogota. It mentioned how US representatives were keeping close tabs on the strike. The Colombian government would also arrest all strike leaders and give adequate protection to American interests involved. Later that night, Colombia declared martial law against the strikers.

General Cortes Vargas surrounded 1500 demonstrators who had gathered after Sunday Mass in the Cienaga town square. Meanwhile, Vargas had roughly 300 armed Colombian servicemen with him. They were positioned on rooftops with machine guns ready to fire. Vargas issued a warning, giving the group five minutes to leave. When they didn't budge, he ordered his men to shoot. The army opened fire into a thick crowd of workers and their families.

The first reports on what came to be known as the "Banana Massacre" claimed 8 dead and 20 wounded. A week later, the same paper said 100 people were dead and over 230 were wounded. Another telegram from the American Embassy in Bogota claimed that the total number of strikers killed by the Colombian military exceeded 1,000. Vargas claimed his men only killed 47 people, but the actual number is unknown.

One Colombian congressman believes the bodies were cast into the sea. Other sources claim the corpses were removed by train and buried in a secret mass grave. When asked why he issued the order to shoot, General Vargas argued that American boats were ready to land in Cienaga to protect their interests and people. He issued the order, believing the US would invade Colombia if the strike wasn't squashed.

The disinformation campaign following the banana massacre claimed there was no strike but a revolution. Demonstrators were called bandits who were in combats with the Colombian army. Of them, only eight were killed and 20 were wounded, as initially reported. In America, the New York Times claimed that turmoil in the Colombian banana region was thanks to Mexican incendiaries, which had sparked the Mexican Revolution two decades earlier.

The Banana Massacre ignited violence in Colombia, known as the Colombian Conflict. It gave rise to actual revolutionary groups who leaned on terrorism when peace didn't work. The conflict is technically ongoing.

It divides into three historical pieces, coinciding with the Cold War, the War on Drugs, and the War on Terror. According to one study, roughly 220,000 people were killed in the conflict between 1958 and 2013. About 177,000 of them were civilians, and the rest were paramilitary fighters. Countless others were affected, and millions of children were displaced from their homes.

And all of it can be traced back to united fruit, corporate greed, and an unwillingness to pay their workers a reasonable wage. And they were just getting started.

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Learn more at phrma.org slash IPWorksWonders. Part 3. La Voz de la Liberación. Colombia was on fire. People were dying in the streets. A brutal civil war gripped the nation. And all the while, United Fruit made more money than they knew what to do with. Next, they set their sights on Guatemala, where they were already the majority landowner.

Remember, they also owned the telecom lines, meaning United Fruit controlled the narrative coming in and, more importantly, the narrative coming out. For the longest time, United Fruit exploited cheap Guatemalan labor under Jorge Ubico, a military dictator who held power from 1931 to 1944. He doubled down on the cozy relationship United Fruit had with the Guatemalan government.

Harsh labor laws bent the population to the bananas' will, and anybody who stepped out of line was met with the full force of Jorge's police state.

Then, in 1944, pro-democracy students organized and launched a military coup led by Jacobo Arbenz. They forced nationwide elections, in which their candidate won in a landslide. The new president, Juan José Arevalo, was a progressive philosophy professor who quickly became the face of Guatemalan democracy. That means he was a thorn in United Fruit's side.

He dared fight for minimum wage laws and safer working conditions. He was succeeded in 1951 by Jacobo Arbenz, the man who helped organize the initial coup. Arbenz built upon Arevalo's "For the People" policy by reclaiming 400,000 acres of United Fruit's unused land and giving it back to displaced peoples.

At the time, 90% of Guatemala's poor and indigenous people lived on 10% of the nation's land. Meanwhile, United Fruit owned an unused plot the size of Houston, Texas. When Arbenz came into office, United Fruit was earning $65 million in annual profits. That's roughly $851 million today, or twice the annual GDP of Guatemala as a country.

Arbenz was a threat, so United Fruit dipped into their playbook and pulled out everyone's favorite word: communism. The first step was another vast misinformation campaign. United Fruit hired Edward Bernays, who's long been considered the father of public relations and a propaganda pioneer. He mounted a multi-year campaign to paint United Fruit as the victim of a communist Guatemalan regime.

It worked like a charm and eventually won the ear of President Dwight Eisenhower, elected in 1952. Eisenhower and other members of Congress were given a 235-page study that was highly critical of the Guatemalan government. Many historians consider this study to be full of exaggerations, scandalous descriptions, and bizarre historical theories.

The study, backed by United Fruit, cost the company about half a million dollars. It proved to be some of the best money they ever spent. It convinced the US that the new communist government in Guatemala must be overthrown. Here's where the CIA gets involved. Operation PB Fortune was the official plan to overthrow the democratically elected president of Guatemala.

The plan rallied behind Carlos Castillo Armas, an exiled Guatemalan army officer sympathetic to United Fruit and the US's anti-communist mindset. He had a small army at his disposal and knew how to manipulate people using the Cold War and the threat of communism.

With US support, Armas formed the National Liberation Movement, a right-wing authoritarian party rooted in neo-fascism, ultra-conservatism, and anti-communism. Operation PB Fortune launched in the fall of 1952. United Fruit lent a freighter to the CIA to transport weapons and grenades from New Orleans to Armas' army in Central America.

Meanwhile, CIA agents compiled a list of assassination targets within Arbenz's government to dispose of during the coup. They knew Armas and his sub-500 man army couldn't take Guatemala by force. Therefore, the US government allocated $2.7 million for psychological warfare and political action.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of articles and reports were written that backed the US's version of events in Guatemala. They were distributed around Latin America to try and choke Guatemala from the outside. US-friendly governments in countries like Honduras and El Salvador screened anti-Arbenz footage to support the coup. The US also authorized death threats against political leaders who may be loyal to Arbenz.

Some of these loyalist leaders would find wooden coffins and fake bombs outside their homes. They got the message and quickly flipped sides. The most potent psychological weapon at the CIA's disposal was the radio station La Voz de la Liberación, or the Voice of Liberation.

They began broadcasting anti-communist propaganda in the spring of 1954, about a month before Carlos Armas was to invade with his small army. The station convinced listeners to resist Arbenz's communist regime and back Armas in his attempt to liberate the country. La Voz claimed to be broadcasting from deep within the Guatemalan jungles, as they feared for their safety.

Most Guatemalans believed them. Even the New York Times fell for it. In reality, they were broadcasting from Miami, Florida. The CIA blasted those broadcasts across Guatemala and Central America. They told fake stories about rebel troops advancing on the capital and winning small battles outside the main cities. Remember, there was no internet back then, so there was no way of fact-checking these stories.

People in Guatemala truly believed that Armas's rebel army was winning, and winning fast. The people were demoralized. The army was demoralized, and soon, President Arbenz admitted defeat. He stepped down on June 27, 1954, making way for Carlos Armas and the banana-loving National Liberation Movement. The coup was a success. Armas's new military dictatorship worked to crush trade unions.

They weren't afraid to use force either, and some of the most violent actions were taken against striking workers on United Fruit banana plantations. The sad part is that overthrowing the government and destabilizing the country didn't yield the profit results United Fruit wanted. Their stock value declined along with yearly profits. Eisenhower pursued antitrust actions against United Fruit, forcing them to divest in 1958.

By the mid-1970s, the company had sold off the last of its Guatemalan assets. Once again, civil war broke out in Guatemala, killing upwards of 200,000 people. United Fruit was now at the center of half a million deaths between Guatemala and Colombia. Many CIA records of the 1954 coup, including their assassination list, were destroyed.

When the US Senate Oversight Committee asked to see the CIA's history of assassination programs, they claimed that no such records existed. Over the years, some documents have resurfaced but are heavily redacted. It remains unclear if the CIA carried out any assassinations during the takeover.

Thank you.

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Part 4.

Rebranding. The company known as United Fruit vanished in 1984. They rebranded and restructured into Chiquita Brands International, which you're likely more familiar with. But, as they say, old habits die hard.

In the early 90s, Chiquita, among other brands like Dole and Fresh Del Monte produce, made several payments to paramilitary groups in Colombia, most notably the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or the AUC. According to the New York Times, the AUC was formed in 1997 as a coalition of heavily armed far-right groups.

Drug traffickers and business people often turn to them for security when transporting goods through regions occupied by left-wing guerrilla fighters. The US government labeled the AUC as a terrorist organization in 2001, but that didn't stop Chiquita from paying them upwards of $1.7 million.

Payment aside, Chiquita was also accused of helping the AUC secure weapons, upwards of 3,000 AK-47s. There are rumors that Chiquita also helped the AUC smuggle drugs into Europe. In 2007, Chiquita pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting a terrorist organization and agreed to pay a $25 million fine.

The terrorist saga continued into the summer of 2024, when a South Florida jury ruled that Chiquita was liable for eight killings in Colombia carried out by the AUC. The jury ordered them to pay an additional $38.3 million to 16 family members of Colombian farmers who lost their loved ones to the AUC.

Lawyers for the families argued that Chiquita's payments helped sow fear across a 7,000-square-mile area along the fertile border between Colombia and Panama. The AUC forced out farmers so Chiquita could swoop in and buy the land. If the farmers refused to leave, well, you can guess what happened next. In one tragic case, a little girl traveling with her mother and stepfather was stopped by AUC gunmen.

The terrorists executed her stepfather and then shot her mother as they tried to run away. Then, they gave the girl 65 cents for a bus ticket back into town. In a different case, AUC members grabbed a farmer off a bus and beat him to death in front of his fellow passengers. They then covered his body with a banana tree to send a message: "Sell your farm or die."

According to some sources, cows consumed his body, and his daughter and sister-in-law were kidnapped weeks later, never to be seen again. "The name Chiquita resonates in the recent history of the country," said a Medellín lawyer who's also suing the company. "When you investigate a corporation with significant financial muscle in a country like Colombia, the judicial system is vulnerable to being co-opted by that company."

In other words, he had little hope that Chiquita would ever be held responsible. But the Florida verdict reinvigorated his hope. As of this writing, Chiquita Brands International is among the world's leading banana producers and distributors. Although it moved its corporate headquarters to Etoy, Switzerland, it still maintains a US-based branch in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. They operate in 70 countries and employ roughly 20,000 people.

Aside from bananas, you're probably most familiar with their Fresh Express pre-packaged salads, which dominate 40% of the market share in the United States. So the next time you peel back a banana, consider where it came from. Consider its long, bloody history between 1899 and 2024.

Remember the Banana Massacre, the Guatemalan coup d'etat, and the civil wars that erupted all in the name of profit. Banana execs could sail their yachts down a river of spilled blood. Then, they'd turn around and buy the land on either side, lining the river with more money trees. Thanks for listening. Be sure to click that follow button with all notifications on to get notified every time a new episode is released.