The United Fruit Company and the Banana Wars
THE UNITED FRUIT COMPANY AND THE BANANA WARS
How a fruit company ended up with its own navy, and the U.S. Marines ended up at the dock
CASE FILE // CENTRAL AMERICA
Most companies settle disputes with lawyers. The United Fruit Company had lawyers too. It also had railroads, ports, telegraph lines, a fleet of ships, and on more than one occasion the U.S. Marine Corps showing up nearby.
In Latin America they called it El Pulpo, the Octopus (Wikipedia). The nickname fit.
A RAILROAD THAT GREW BANANAS
It started with a railroad in Costa Rica. In 1871, Minor C. Keith joined his uncle Henry Meiggs on a railroad project there. When Meiggs died in 1877, Keith took over. In 1884 Costa Rica gave him 800,000 acres of tax-free land and a 99-year lease on the line in exchange for finishing it and renegotiating the country's debt. Banana sales were what made it profitable (Wikipedia).
In 1899, Keith's Tropical Trading and Transport Company merged with Andrew Preston's Boston Fruit Company to form United Fruit, capitalized at $11.23 million (Wikipedia). By 1900 it was the world's largest banana exporter. In Guatemala it controlled the railroads, the docks, and the communication systems, and it virtually owned Puerto Barrios, the country's only Atlantic port (Wikipedia).
By the 1930s, United Fruit controlled 80–90% of the U.S. banana business (Wikipedia). That's a monopoly, and it's also a lot of bananas.
WHERE "BANANA REPUBLIC" COMES FROM
Before it was a mall store, it was an insult.
The writer O. Henry coined "banana republic" in his 1904 book Cabbages and Kings, about the fictional Republic of Anchuria. It was based on his time in Honduras, where he lived for six months, until January 1897 (Wikipedia). The idea was a country whose government answered more to the fruit trade than to its own people.
THE BANANA WARS
"Banana Wars" is the name for the long run of U.S. occupations, police actions, and interventions in Central America and the Caribbean, from the end of the Spanish–American War in 1898 to the Good Neighbor policy in 1934. They included Cuba, Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic (Wikipedia).
Washington had several reasons: the Panama Canal, the Roosevelt Corollary of 1904, Taft's "dollar diplomacy," and keeping European powers out. American companies, United Fruit and Standard Fruit (now Dole) among them, had heavy investments in bananas, sugar, and tobacco across the region, and U.S. military power helped protect their plantations and railroads (Wikipedia).
The Marine Corps did most of the work. It got so much practice that it turned the experience into the Small Wars Manual, still one of the classic texts on counterinsurgency (Wikipedia).
A GANGSTER FOR CAPITALISM
The best-known voice of the Banana Wars is Smedley Butler, a Marine who won two Medals of Honor and later became one of his own era's harshest critics of it.
In 1903, Butler and several hundred Marines landed at Puerto Cortés, Honduras, aboard a converted banana boat renamed the Panther. At Trujillo they arrived in the middle of a 55-hour battle between rebels and government troops. The fighting stopped when the Marines showed up and started again when they left (Wikipedia).
In War Is a Racket (1935), Butler described himself as "a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers" and "a gangster for capitalism," and said he'd helped make Honduras right for American fruit companies in 1903 (Wikipedia). Few Marine generals have been that honest in print.
A YACHT, A MERCENARY, AND A COUP
Some of the fruit business didn't need the Marines at all.
On Christmas Eve 1910, Sam Zemurray, owner of the rival Cuyamel Fruit Company, sailed on the yacht Hornet with American mercenary Lee Christmas, former Honduran president Manuel Bonilla, a crew of New Orleans fighters, and a load of weapons. They took Roatán and went after the ports of Trujillo and La Ceiba. President Miguel Dávila stepped down, Bonilla won the 1911 election, and in 1912 he gave Zemurray's company a railroad concession (Wikipedia).
The fight was over a banana monopoly contract. Dávila's government had given it to United Fruit (Wikipedia). Zemurray later sold Cuyamel to United Fruit in 1930, then took over United Fruit itself in a hostile takeover in 1933 (Wikipedia). If you can't beat them, buy them.
It wasn't all yachts and swashbuckling. In 1928, a United Fruit workers' strike near Santa Marta, Colombia, ended with Colombian troops firing on strikers in Ciénaga. Death toll estimates range from 47 to 2,000 (Wikipedia). Gabriel García Márquez later wrote it into One Hundred Years of Solitude.
GUATEMALA, 1954: THE CIA STEPS IN
By the 1950s, the Marines had gone home and the job had moved to a newer agency.
In 1952, Guatemala's elected president, Jacobo Árbenz, passed a land reform called Decree 900. Only 15% of United Fruit's 550,000 acres was being farmed, so the rest was open to expropriation. In 1953 the government took 200,000 acres of the company's uncultivated land, paying $2.99 an acre (Wikipedia).
United Fruit spent more than $500,000 on a lobbying and PR campaign, led by Edward Bernays, to paint Guatemala as communist. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA Director Allen Dulles had both been partners at Sullivan & Cromwell, the law firm that arranged deals for the company. In August 1953 Eisenhower approved Operation PBSuccess. A CIA-trained force of 480 men under Carlos Castillo Armas invaded on 18 June 1954, backed by air attacks and psychological warfare, and Árbenz resigned on 27 June (Wikipedia).
The twist: United Fruit didn't actually come out ahead. It got most of its privileges back, but profits kept falling. It merged into United Brands in 1970, and in 1984 it was renamed Chiquita Brands International (Wikipedia). The banana in your kitchen has a longer rap sheet than you thought.
WHY IT'S IN THE MANIFEST
It's in our name. Southern Air Trade is a nod to Southern Air Transport, one of the airlines that flew for the CIA during the Cold War. Cargo ships, front companies, and covert operations in Latin America are the world this store comes from, and United Fruit was there first.
For the reading list:
- Then Came The CIA: The Early Years of Southern Air Transport
- Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Secret History of CIA Paramilitary Armies
- Guerrilla Warfare and Special Operations Handbook
For the field, a Frogskin Jungle/Beach Reversible Woobie Jacket, from the Marine Corps that came after the Banana Wars, and a Rothco Vintage Vietnam Fatigue Shirt for jungle heat.
SOUTHERN AIR TRADE // THE MANIFEST