Despicable Me 2
The Banana Republic
I’m sure you’ve heard of Chiquita Banana, right? If not you’ve at least seen their product. They are the banana company in the U.S. But what I’m sure you didn’t know is that behind that logo of the lady with a basket of fruit on her head is a long history of bloodshed and imperialism all throughout South and Central America.
A news story came out a couple of months ago about Chiquita Banana being in some legal trouble for hiring terrorist death squads decades ago in those areas. It shocked me, obviously, so I read more about it and found out it went much deeper than just that. To fully understand the context of this story, we need to look all the way back to around 1900 A.D. Refrigeration was just invented and produce companies were popping up left and right because of it. The big three in the Americas were United Fruit Co., Cuyamel Fruit Co. and the Vaccaro Bros. These companies grew primarily bananas down in South and Central America to ship back to the U.S. and they made obscene amounts of money off of it.
One of the countries that was used to harvest bananas was Honduras. Countries like this one would give land grants to the companies in exchange for a large sum of money in the form of taxes. Now, at this point, Cuyamel had a substantial amount of land here and they were happy with this. But then Honduras gave another grant out to the Vaccaro Bros. instead of Cuyamel. Cuyamel, being the reasonable organization that they are, hired a mercenary army and overthrew the entire government of Honduras. Executions and all. The CEO then left the country to his best friend who gave all the land grants he wanted and made the company pay no taxes on it.
After hearing this you’re probably wondering, “wait, how did all of this happen so close to the U.S. without them doing something about it?” Well, the United States did actually take notice of these events and were reasonably disturbed by them. But, the banana trade was so lucrative that (being the bastion of freedom that they are) they condoned the whole as an effort to “help the country succeed”.
Sadly, it’s pretty hard to succeed when you have to run a country and let a large company operate there without making them pay any taxes. Because of this, Honduras was absolutely crushed with debt. But don’t fear! Cuyamel swoops in to save the day once again. This time, the CEO negotiated with his friend and got him to just let the company run the country to pull it out of it’s financial ruin. The other two companies saw this and eventually followed suit in many other countries as well. These countries became known as…
Banana Republiucs!
These three companies now own countries all over Central America. They are offered HUGE tax cuts in exchange for infrastructure and, obviously, they take the deals.
Now, this may sound fantastic for those 3 CEOs but life is infinitely more miserable for the citizens that have to work for them. They are essentially forced to work under horrid conditions with no time off for crippling injuries, no consolation for family members killed on the job, such a small amount of money that you could barely call it a salary, and long, grueling hours. This goes on for a long while and these companies go through some rebranding. Cuyamel & United Fruit Co. merge into just United Fruit (but it’s still managed by the Cuyamel guy?) while the Vaccaro Bros. change their name to Standard Fruit.
Guatemala (one of the countries owned by U.F.) eventually decides that they’ve had enough and rise up under Juan Jose Arevalo and start the Guatemalan Democratic Revolution. The people begin demanding outlandish things like a fair minimum wage and equal voting rights. The Fruit companies all hate this because the more rights people have, the less they can profit off of them. Succeeding Arevalo, Jacobo Arbenz stands strong and refuses to give the country back to these banana companies.
United Fruit starts to get desperate and goes to the U.S. for help. The CEO has a talk with Eisenhower and explains that the people are demanding fair wages and taking back unused land from them. No one knows that exactly they said to convince Eisenhower, but he decides that all of this sounds a lot like…
Communism! Boom! The CIA kills the Guatemalan president and rules the country using U.S. backed dictators until 1996. Like before, it wasn’t just one country this ended up happening to. This whole operation took place during the Red Scare, so citizens were very supportive of it all. I think I heard the feeling best described as “Red Fear Yellow Love.”
That’s about the end of the story really. Standard Fruit is now Dole Food Company while United Fruit Co. is Chiquita Banana. And, of course, all these countries gained independence again. But before that…
Surprise! That’s not the end of the story. One of the later U.F. CEOs threw himself from the top of the company’s skyscraper after he was questioned about their actions years ago, which prompted the whole need for a rebranding into Chiquita Banana.
I can’t think of a better way to end this than with a fun fact about how all of our bananas got their yellow color. You may be surprised to hear this, but bananas can come in red, orange, green, and yellow. The yellow ones are called Cavendish bananas and they became the standard in America. In order to make sure they had enough, the fruit companies inbred these bananas to mass produce them. When a disease broke out that started killing a couple of the crops, all of them caught it since they were genetically the same. The harvests became thinner and thinner until, sadly, there was a widespread famine that devastated the countries affected.
