1932
The United States Navy intervenes in the
Marti Revolt,
El Salvador.
How
United Fruit robbed and killed the people of
Central America
y
Stephen Millies, in
Workers World, 3
October 1996
"
It's important that I don't get too knowledgeable about the past."
So spoke
Wallace Booth on becoming president of
United Brands back in
1975. Booth had plenty of reason to wish for amnesia.
After all, he had just succeeded
Eli Black who left United Brands by jumping through his office window on the 44th floor of the old
Pan Am Building in
New York.
Black was just about to be exposed for giving a $1.25-million bribe to the president of
Honduras.
United Brands was then the new name for the notorious United Fruit banana monopoly. Now it's got another new name:
Chiquita Brands International.
For decades this ruthless corporation dominated the economies of the countries of Central America.
Chiquita still owns or rents over 267 square miles of farmland in
Costa Rica,
Panama and Honduras. It operates a fleet of 42 refrigerated ships and hundreds of miles of railroad.
ALL THE
NEWS FIT TO
PRINT?
In mid-September an agreement was signed in
Guatemala between the government and guerrilla commanders.
News is finally coming out about the grisly background of the long war there
.
In the 1980s alone, the
Guatemalan military and its death squads killed over
100,
000 people. Entire
Indian villages were massacred.
A front-page article in the Sept. 20
New York Times made a rare admission. It said that "the conflict had its roots in a 1954 coup sponsored by the
Central Intelligence Agency."
The Times then went on to claim that "most of Guatemala's
10.5 million people can no longer remember what started it."
But
United Fruit--now Chiquita--remembers.
What brought down the wrath of this company and of the
CIA was
President Jacobo Arbenz Guzm n's attempt to distribute uncultivated lands owned by United Fruit to landless peasants.
The big
Boston banks behind United Fruit were determined that
Arbenz must go.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave the order for a CIA-staged invasion that toppled the elected
Guatemalan government.
Among the coup's first victims were 45 assassinated leaders of the banana workers on United Fruit's plantations.
Seven years later, United Fruit paid back its debt to the CIA by donating two of its ships to the
Bay of Pigs invasion of
Cuba.
The Cuban people--under the leadership of
Fidel Castro-- remembered well the tragedy of Guatemala. They defeated the CIA invasion. And they took back all the land that United Fruit owned in Cuba--land that today's Helms-Burton Law is meant to return to
U.S. corporate owners
.
WHERE'S THE
WAR CRIMES TRIAL?
The U.S. capitalist establishment has recently been trying to organize a so-called war-crimes trial in the
Netherlands. Its aim is justify U.S. intervention in
Bosnia, once part of socialist
Yugoslavia.
Where's the war-crimes trial for the massacres in Central America?
For the 100,000-plus victims in Guatemala? For the thousands of victims of
Oliver North's
Contra war against
Nicaragua? And the countless victims of the death squads in El Salvador and Honduras?
U.S. government money paid for this terror. And it was the
U.S. Army that trained so many of these assassins at the
School of the Americas in Panama--a country itself left with unmarked mass graves and many missing after the U.S. invasion in
1989.
But the U.S. government just did the bidding of United Fruit. United Fruit really should be in the dock.
United Fruit sold its properties in Guatemala to Del Monte in
1972 for $20 million.
Under its new name of
Chiquita Brands, it still maintains its empire in the rest of Central America. It's controlled by the Lindner family in
Cincinnati through the
American Financial Group--a big insurance company.
Just one of these Lindners--Stephen Craig--owned 23,809,445 shares of Chiquita Brands stock in
April 1992. Their market value was $
351,809,445 at the time.
Meanwhile Del Monte has been gobbled up by
RJR Nabisco-- the huge cancer-stick and cookie conglomerate.
Another big player is
Castle & Cooke, which owns the
Dole brand. (No relation to
Bob Dole.)
These are the criminal companies that have benefited from the CIA wars that have left the people of Central America bloodied and impoverished. How can there be justice in Guatemala, or Honduras, or El Salvador, without at the very least a major reparations program paid for by those who became multi-millionaires off the suffering of the people?
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- published: 05 Sep 2011
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