Doing Business With The Dictators: A Political History of United Fruit In Guatemala, 1899-1944
Both the reader of this book, and the book itself, wake up once per chapter. For scholarly purposes, it may need all the detail and plodding sentences that it contains, but I can’t imagine that non-scholars will find anything captivating in it. I certainly didn’t.
In general it tells the story of United Fruit Company’s rise to power under a string of Guatemalan dictators. Paul Dosal wants to argue that United Fruit could never have done as well as it did under a democracy: by a succession of bribes, United Fruit managed to control most of the Guatemalan train system and its most important ports. It semi-secretly owned the International Railways of Central America. This ownership allowed it to charge obscene rates to any non-United banana companies. Without government support for that monopoly and its unconscionable rates, United would never have survived.
United owned the Guatemalan government; Sam Zemurray, through his Cuyamel Fruit Company, owned the Honduran. The Guatemalan and Honduran governments often came close to blows in defense of their respective banana barons, particularly at the boundary between the two countries where profitable banana cultivation happened. That dispute was only settled when Cuyamel and United merged, and Zemurray eventually took over the combined behemoth.
If you’re interested in the details of how a company exploited a government, and how a sequence of military strongmen kept 80% of their people illiterate and hungry, by all means read Dosal’s book. Otherwise, I have just given you most of what you’ll learn. You can thank me later.
P.S.: United Fruit became Chiquita Banana, though some of its plantations apparently were sold to Del Monte in the early 70’s. Chiquita solemnly declares that United et al. “made a number of mistakes — including the use of improper government influence, antagonism toward organized labor, and disregard for the environment. These actions clearly would not live up to the Core Values [Chiquita] hold[s] today or to the expectations of our stakeholders.”
You do have to wonder what part of the “Core Values” includes criminally conspiring with Colombian death squads.
P.P.S.: United Fruit was a Boston-based company. Yeah hometown monopoly pride!