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).[1][2] In a separate telling Kiriakou dates the railroad venture to 1898.[3] 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.[4][5] 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.[6][7]
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.[8][9] 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.[9]