United Fruit and the Arbenz coup
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United Fruit and the Arbenz coup is John Kiriakou's account of the 1954 CIA overthrow of Guatemala's elected president. He traces it to a Boston industrialist who, while building a railway from Guatemala City to the coast, discovered his workers eating an unknown fruit, the banana, and founded what became the United Fruit Company (today Chiquita). In a separate telling Kiriakou dates the railroad venture to 1898. When President Jacobo Árbenz moved in 1953 to nationalize the banana crop, three United Fruit board members turned out to be Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, CIA director Allen Dulles, and the brother of Eisenhower's secretary. The CIA overthrew Árbenz and installed a military dictatorship that brutalized Guatemalans for half a century, and Chiquita still owns the bananas. In another telling Kiriakou frames the same trigger as United Fruit workers attempting to unionize, and says the CIA gave no thought to the aftermath, the coup gave rise to the term "banana republic," while Chiquita simply kept the bananas.

Kiriakou says the resulting military dictatorship brutalized the Guatemalan population for more than twenty years, by one account, into the early 1990s and at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, and that the country still has not recovered. He recalled a recent volunteer trip to a Guatemalan orphanage that needed a twenty-foot concrete wall around its perimeter because of nightly gunfire, saying he could barely sleep.

From the railway to the coup

Kiriakou tells the case at length because, he says, "it is so outrageous", and starts it before the agency existed. In the late nineteenth century an American railroad tycoon bought a narrow strip of land running from Guatemala City to the coast, intending to be the sole means of moving goods inland. Watching the indigenous labourers he had hired to lay the track, he noticed that at lunch "they would pick these fruits off of the trees and they would eat the fruits," and asked what they were. "He was told, ''they''re called bananas.'' He had never seen a banana before. He had never heard of a banana. So he tried one, and it was delicious and sweet, and he said, ''we should take the bananas and send them to America.'' And he did, and got even richer than he already was. He also changed the name of the company to the United Fruit Company."

The grievance that followed three-quarters of a century later Kiriakou puts in the Guatemalan government''s own terms: "we''re sending all these bananas to the United States, we''re not making any money on these bananas at all. The United Fruit Company owns the train, it owns the tracks, it owns the land on the two sides of the tracks where all the bananas are growing. We''re not making anything on this. We should nationalise the bananas."

The obstacle was the board. "Three of the members of the board of directors of the United Fruit Company were John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state; Allen Dulles, his brother, the CIA director; and President Eisenhower''s secretary''s brother. And so we overthrew the Guatemalan government. We installed a military dictatorship that brutalised the population for the next twenty-plus years." His account of what the country is like now is offered as the same story''s last chapter.

Why it is still current

Explaining the depth of Latin American opposition to American intervention in Venezuela, Kiriakou pointed to Guatemala and to the fact that the passage of time has not settled it. The overthrow "may have happened 75 years ago, but in the minds of most Latin Americans, it happened yesterday", and it need not even be Árbenz, "it can be any number of a dozen different Central and South American countries."

What that memory produces is "this real distrust of the United States when it comes to the issue of overthrowing governments and allowing chaos to ensue, or allowing military dictatorships to entrench themselves in power. Nothing good comes from this kind of US foreign policy."

See also

- Allen Dulles
- Monroe Doctrine
