They already fuked over Central America once in the last 100 years, is this round 2? This is also the same shit South Africa went through and is going through still.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company#Aiding_and_abetting_a_terrorist_organization
Aiding and abetting a terrorist organization
Further information:
United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia
In March 2007 Chiquita Brands pleaded guilty in a United States Federal court to aiding and abetting a terrorist organization, when it admitted to the payment of more than $1.7 million to the
United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a group that the United States has labeled a terrorist organization since 2001. Under a plea agreement, Chiquita Brands agreed to pay $25 million in restitution and damages to the families of victims of the AUC. The AUC had been paid to protect the company's interest in the region.
[41]
In addition to monetary payments, Chiquita has also been accused of smuggling weapons(3,000 AK 47's) to the AUC and in assisting the AUC in smuggling drugs to Europe.
[42] Chiquita Brands admitted that they paid AUC operatives to silence union organizers and intimidate farmers into selling only to Chiquita. In the plea agreement, the Colombian government let Chiquita Brands keep the names of U.S Citizens who brokered this agreement with the AUC secret, in exchange for relief to 390 families.
Despite calls from Colombian authorities and human rights organizations to extradite the U.S. Citizens responsible for war crimes and aiding a terrorist organization, the U.S. Department of Justice has refused to grant the request citing 'conflicts of law'. As with other high-profile cases involving wrongdoing by American companies abroad, the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Department of Justice are very careful to hand over any American citizen to be tried under another country's legal system, so for the time being Chiquita Brands International avoided a catastrophic scandal, and instead walked away with a humiliating defeat in court and eight of its employees fired.
[43]
https://www.ft.com/content/778739c4-f869-11db-a940-000b5df10621
Rotten fruit
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https://www.ft.com/content/778739c4-f869-11db-a940-000b5df10621
United Fruit had dominated business and politics in Central America. It was the first truly multinational modern corporation, spreading the spirit of liberal capitalism. As well as harvesting the region’s fruit, however, the company wielded formidable influence over small nations, which were often ruled by corrupt dictatorships. United Fruit gave the world not just bananas, but also ”banana republics”. It emerged that Black, a devout family man, had bribed the Honduran president, Oswaldo Lopez Arellano, with $1.25m to encourage him to pull out of a banana cartel which opposed United Fruit. The story was about to come out in the US press. United Fruit’s Central American plantations were also struggling with hurricane damage and a new banana disease. Facing disgrace and failure, Black took his own life. His death was shocking, not least because he had the reputation of a highly moral man. Wall Street was outraged, the company’s shares crashed and regulators seized its books to prevent ”its further violation of the law”. The company subsequently disappeared from public view and was seemingly erased from the collective mind. United Fruit may no longer exist, but its legacy on world affairs endures. Its activities in Cuba, where it was seen as a symbol of US imperialism, were significant in the rise of Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution of the late 1950s. Its participation in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, in a vain attempt to overthrow Castro, led to the Cuban missile crisis. As the world stood on the brink of nuclear holocaust, few could have imagined it had anything to do with bananas.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/157625?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
Journal Article
Crown Colony as Banana Republic: The United Fruit Company in British Honduras, 1900-1920
Mark Moberg
Journal of Latin American Studies
Vol. 28, No. 2 (May, 1996), pp. 357-381
Published by:
Cambridge University Press
https://www.jstor.org/stable/157625
Page Count: 25
The Experience of the Guatemalan United Fruit Company Workers
The Experience of the Guatemalan United Fruit Company Workers,
1944-1954: Why Did They Fail?
by
Alejandra Batres
1995 ILAS Distinguished Paper Award
University of Texas at Austin
Introduction
Why do worker movements fail even when backed by the government and its policies? In the case of many Latin American countries, the government itself has commonly served to frustrate worker uprisings and taken positions that implicitly or explicitly favo r the business sector. Yet even when the government agenda matches that of the workers, some labor movements have still been unsuccessful. The experience of the United Fruit Company workers in Guatemala in the period 1944-1954 presents one example of such a movement that, despite government support, essentially failed. Before this period of "revolution," the Guatemalan governments had often ensured the failure of worker movements through either repressive means or simply refusing to take labor's s ide. The previous president, Ubico, had disbanded all unions and banned the word sindicato, claiming it had communist implications. In 1944, the "October Revolution," led by students and supported by workers, deposed Ubico and granted Guatemala a ten-year respite from this type of dictatorial leadership. With the democratic election of a self-proclaimed workers' government under Juan José Arevalo, a new relationship ensued, and the organization of workers flourished more than at any other time in Guatemalan history. Under Arevalo state policies began to shift the government's role from the side of capital to that of an advocate of labor. This included the adoption of a new labor code in 1947 that granted workers rights they never had be fore. During the second presidency of the revolutionary period, Jacobo Arbenz continued this close relationship with workers and took an even more radical step with the implementation of an agrarian reform program.
Not counting the workers themselves, the United Fruit Company (UFCO) felt the biggest effects from the changes in Guatemala. As the largest single employer and landholder in the country, UFCO had to abide by the new labor code and had a large portion of its uncultivated lands expropriated under the agrarian reform. It had begun its operations in Guatemala in the early 1900s and had expanded to the extent that Guatemala became the company's fourth largest cultivator of bananas. Through these contracts w ith past governments, it set up its first plantation, Bananera, in the northern department of Izabal near the Atlantic Ocean, and a later plantation, Tiquisate, near the Pacific Ocean in the department of Escuintla. In addition, a previous Guatemalan gov ernment basically gave UFCO the rights to the only real port in the country, Puerto Barrios. Through the port concession, UFCO could control almost all the trade the country conducted. Even though there were some independent banana exporters, in 1946 UF CO exported 61.92 percent of the bananas from Guatemala, and that grew to 84.34 percent by 1954. To add to its power, UFCO was the major shareholder in International Railways of Central America (IRCA), which owned almost all of the rail in the country.
Much of the literature during this period has looked at the political implications of the revolution. Some authors have focused on the policies of Arbenz and Arevalo, while others look at the U.S. intervention in a coup that ended the revolutionary perio d. The issue of the extent of actual communist influences in the government has also been approached from all sides. In terms of the literature about the labor movement, most of the works specifically address the general urban worker movement in the cap ital. While the UFCO unions are mentioned as well organized and active, there is very little analysis of their experience and why they failed. Through the use of the Communist Party's newspaper, the newspaper of a labor federation, Guatemalan government publications and miscellaneous flyers, manifestos, and pamphlets from the time period, this paper examines why the UFCO workers did not succeed in winning their demands. Many of these sources, especially those published by political parties and unions, have not been utilized in previous studies and therefore will help shed new light on this period of worker organization in Guatemala. However, their contribution to the research must be considered carefully given that such resources have inherent biases in line with the ideologies of the time.
Because of UFCO's virtual monopoly on transportation and bananas, it became a target not only of the government but of other leaders looking to reassert Guatemala's sovereignty. Given this environment, UFCO workers viewed this political opening as their chance to improve their working conditions and led at least three major strikes against the U.S.-owned conglomerate. Despite this window of opportunity, the movements gained few concessions to the demands and many workers even lost their jobs. By the ti me a U.S.-backed coup deposed the revolutionary government in 1954, UFCO workers had little more control over their working conditions than before 1944. This failure resulted because both the internal weaknesses and mistakes of the unions and the externa l strength of the United Fruit Company and its supporters combined to diminish the workers' and government's leveraging positions.