In the second episode of Under the Shadow, host Michael Fox digs into the past to examine the outsized role one US banana corporation, United Fruit, played in shaping the history of modern Central America. While literally walking in the footsteps of those who worked at United Fruit’s former central Guatemalan operation in the town of Tiquisate, Fox goes in search of the legacy of the company today. Then, like taking an elevator to the past, Fox takes us to the heyday of United Fruit’s economic dominance, and to the 1954 CIA coup that overthrew Guatemala’s democratically elected president in the name of “anti-communism” and the preservation of US corporate interests (namely, the interests of United Fruit).
Later in the episode, and more in the next episode, we return to present day to look at the upcoming inauguration of new Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo, the son of the country’s first democratic president, who will be sworn in on Jan. 14, 2024.
Under the Shadow is a new investigative-narrative podcast series that walks back in time to tell the story of the past by visiting momentous places in the present. In each episode, host Michael Fox takes us to a location where something historic happened: a landmark of revolutionary struggle or foreign intervention. Today, it might look like a random street corner, a church, a mall, a monument, or a museum. But every place Fox takes us to was once the site of history-making events that shook countries, impacted lives, and left deep marks on the world.
Hosted by Latin America-based journalist Michael Fox, Under the Shadow is produced in partnership between The Real News Network and NACLA (North American Congress on Latin America).
Click here to listen to all episodes of Under the Shadow.
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Edited by Heather Gies and Maximillian Alvarez
Sound design by Gustavo Türck.
Theme music by Monte Perdido. Other music from Blue Dot Sessions
Transcript
Michael Fox: Hi, everyone. I’m your host, Michael Fox. Before we begin today’s episode of Under the Shadow, a quick note—If you haven’t listened to episode one, where we introduce the series, I suggest you go back and do that now. It really sets the scene for this episode and the rest of the podcast. OK. Here’s the show…
So, right now I’m standing in front of La Torre supermarkets. There’s this mall here, right with a couple of banks, and I know a little movie theater and a little food court-type thing. That’s on one end. And then on the other side is the highway that runs—It cuts straight through the middle of town. Crazy industrial… Crazy industrial highway.
And then people are selling things, kind of vendors selling fries, and fruit, vegetables, pools over here, some pools. But right beside—actually, underneath where there is now this mall on the side of this major highway, this is where the rails used to run. These rails used to take the bananas from here in Tiquisate all the way to the port over in the Caribbean side, on the other side of the country.
In Tiquisate, the steam engines are long gone. But the economic interests the railroad represented shaped the course of Guatemalan history in ways that are still playing out today.
This is Under the Shadow—A new investigative narrative podcast series that walks back in time to tell the story of the past by visiting momentous places in the present.
I’m your host, Michael Fox—Longtime radio reporter, editor, journalist. The producer and host of the podcast Brazil on Fire. I’ve spent the better part of the last 20 years in Latin America. I’ve seen firsthand the role of the US government abroad. And most often, sadly, it is not for the better: invasions, coups, sanctions, support for authoritarian regimes. Politically and economically, the United States has cast a long shadow over Latin America for the past 200 years.
In each episode in this series, I will take you to a location where something historic happened—A landmark in revolutionary struggle or foreign intervention. Today, it might look like a random street corner, a church, a mall, a monument, or a museum. But every place I’m going to bring you was once the site of history-making events that shook countries, impacted lives, and left deep marks on the world. I’ll try to discover what lingers of that history today. We’ll dive deep into the past, and I’ll take you there with me, on Under the Shadow.
So, in the last episode, we set the scene for this series. We looked at the Monroe Doctrine and visited Tapachula—the Mexican town right on the border with Guatemala—to get a clear sense of the US role in Central American migration going back decades. Today, we look at the outsized role of the US banana corporation, United Fruit, in Central America. You literally can’t talk about the history of Central America in the 20th century without mentioning it. We travel to the Guatemalan town of Tiquisate, which was built by the company. We dig into the past and the legacy today.
This is Season 1: Central America. Episode 2: “Guatemala: United Fruit”.
Construction of Guatemala’s railroad began in the late 1800s. But the Tiquisate branch became important in the 1930s. Tiquisate was the major center of banana plantations operated by the United Fruit Company. And those bananas needed to get from the Pacific lowlands to the ports on the Caribbean, nearly 300 miles away.
The final destination was, of course, US kitchens.
United Fruit Promotional Video: Within 12 hours, 10 million bananas have been taken aboard and the ship is on its way to the United States. From New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, and other ports in the United States, bananas are shipped by rail across country by special cars that are kept cool in summer, warm in winter.
Like the plantations themselves, the railway was owned and operated by United Fruit.
Founded in 1899 in Boston, United Fruit quickly grew to be the dominant force in the region. In addition to the banana plantations and railway, it also ran the post office. It ran the telegram service. By the 1930s, with a dictator in power, United Fruit had amassed hundreds of thousands of acres of Guatemalan land, and it was the country’s single largest landowner. Its reach was so ubiquitous people called the company El Pulpo—the octopus.
In the grip of its tentacles, the countries of Central America became known as Banana Republics.
I interviewed Steven Striffler, author of the book Banana Wars, to get some context here.
Steve Striffler: It was, again, this, kind of, just incredible sort of economic power whereby these companies came to control, kind of, entire regions and entire economies, and developed what sort of became thought of as enclaves, to a certain extent. But that along with that came, wielded sort of and brought kind of and they cultivated right political power; that is, that they were often seen as calling the shots. Which seems bizarre, right? That foreign companies involved in the production of bananas would have such an outsized political influence that it became sort of like, wow, these are the companies that are controlling the governments in these kinds of places.
Michael Fox: And they were. In the first half of the 20th century, most of the Central American countries were run by dictatorships, and they saw United Fruit as a means toward development—inserting their countries into the global market.
Nowhere was this more the case than in Guatemala.
I’m bringing in another Steve here: Stephen Kinzer. He’s a former New York Times correspondent who co-authored the book Bitter Fruit, about the United Fruit and the CIA-backed coup in Guatemala—something which, I promise, we will get to in this episode.
Stephen Kinzer: United Fruit had developed overwhelming presence in Guatemala. In fact, it was far more powerful than the Guatemalan state. It had resources far beyond anything that the local Guatemalans could come up with.
Michael Fox: And, as Kinzer points out, the United Fruit Company got along very well with dictator General Jorge Ubico. He was a tyrant. Dressed like Napoleón Bonaparte. Compared himself to Adolf Hitler. And he ran the country throughout the 1930s until 1944. He signed a contract giving United Fruit huge privileges, tax exemptions, and vast amounts of land.
Stephen Kinzer: The tentacles of the United Fruit Company—which, incidentally, was known as El Pulpo, the octopus—reached very deeply into Guatemalan life. It wasn’t just that United Fruit controlled a lot of banana plantations. They also, in addition to being the largest employer in the country, controlled two other important levers of power. Number one is they owned the electric company, the companies that provided almost all of Guatemala’s electric power.
[Train whistle]
Michael Fox: Number two was the railways. That’s the sound of one of the old Guatemalan steam engines.
Stephen Kinzer: United Fruit was also connected with another company that it controlled, called the International Railways of Central America—IRCA—and that company owned the only rail line that went from the heartland of Guatemala out to the coast. There’s one port in Guatemala, Puerto Barrios, and that’s the port on the Caribbean. The United Fruit Company owned that port, and they owned the only train that could get you there. There was no road.
Michael Fox: That was the train that ran through Tiquisate. For years, the train carried carloads of bananas on the rail lines that once ran right where the mall now stands.
See, in 1936, United Fruit set up its major operations in Tiquisate, then a backwater region of Guatemala, near the Pacific Ocean. They built homes, production centers, roads, a hospital. Within a decade, the company employed 10,000 people there. And it was shipping millions of bananas, over to the Caribbean coast and onboard the company’s Great White Fleet, to the United States, where demand would only grow.
When I traveled to Tiquisate, I was looking for the ghosts of United Fruit. But I wasn’t sure what I’d find. At first glance, the town seemed like any other industrial city, with a big car-choked highway running through the middle. The United Fruit past doesn’t exactly hang from sign posts… Though there was an old rusty water tower with a faded Coca-Cola emblem painted on the side. I wondered if, perhaps, it was left over from that era.
But when I started to scratch the surface a little, I found the past was just underneath.
That in a minute.
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Michael Fox: This was the absolute center of United Fruit production roughly 70 years ago. The heart of production across Guatemala. I’m trying to find, like, vestiges, I’m trying to find some signs of that United Fruit still here.
Green wooden homes—tin roofs, and then brick below. Two rooms, two stories. Wow. And it just keeps going for this neighborhood here.
That neighborhood is on the south side of town, and it was one of several neighborhoods built to house United Fruit employees.
I meet Carla Juarez there. She’s the receptionist at a two-story white hotel, a couple of blocks back from San Cristobal Park. Just beside the parking lot is one of the United Fruit homes, kind of collapsing and in disarray. We walk over to it.
Carla Juarez: Translated] Yeah, there are many of these little houses that are still around. They called them ‘airplane style,’ because of the slanted roofs. There are other smaller one-story homes that were called T-style.
Michael Fox: …Though she has no idea why.
I stare at the home. It looks like it’s been transplanted here from the United States. As one observer here later put it, the “Yankee flavor” replaced the Guatemalan in Tiquisate. I’m not an architect, but it’s the slanted gable roof that really stands out. You don’t see that here much in Guatemala, except for on these United Fruit homes. For a moment, I almost feel like I can transport myself back in time 90 years to this bustling neighborhood of hard-working farmworkers, coming back home from the banana fiends to these rows of green two-story houses.
Carla Juarez: [Translated] My grandmother worked there for United Fruit. She was a nurse at the company hospital, so she received one just like this.
Michael Fox: Carla’s grandmother passed away, but she says she and her mother still live in the home.
Carla Juarez: [Translated] Because we’re not rich, and it costs a lot to build or move.
Michael Fox: A few blocks away, I meet Antonio Granillo. He’s a lawyer. He’s sitting out front with his wife, in their little yard, at the bottom of the stairs that lead up to their former company home. I stop to chat. They’ve been here for almost a decade.
He says they love their home and are proud that it was from the time of United Fruit.
Antonio Granillo: [Translated] All of the homes were like this. Here, 50 years ago, they all made them like this. And they all were the same color—green.
Michael Fox: The way he describes it, the town was booming back then.
Antonio Granillo: [Translated] The people that tell this story, they get excited. Because the Guatemalan currency, the Quetzal, was worth more than the dollar, two to one. They say there were a lot of jobs. The Americans made a hospital here. One of the best in the country. It was all colonial. The company store, where they sold things to the workers.
Back in those days, big roads. It was really beautiful.
Michael Fox: This is clearly a different Tiquisate.
And here’s the thing: For many in town, those were the good old days. The company paid much higher wages than the average in Guatemala at the time—almost double. They provided housing. Workers poured in from the Caribbean coast and other parts of the country.
United Fruit Promotional Video: 1000 miles south of New Orleans, the blue waters of the Caribbean break upon the shores of Central America. For many years, these tropical countries have been served by United Fruit Companies’ Great White Fleet.
Michael Fox: This promotional video was made by United Fruit in 1952. It takes Americans on a romantic tour of Guatemala, from the cities to the countryside and to the banana fields. The video shows men happily laboring in the field, carrying huge bunches of bananas and preparing them for shipment.
Many of the workers employed on United Fruit farms in Tiquisate actually came from the Caribbean coast in search of work: Ladinos—or non-Indigenous Guatemalans—campesinos, and day laborers. In overt discrimination, United Fruit refused to hire those from nearby Indigenous communities, because the company viewed them as weak.
Of course, Guatemala had another export crop: coffee. But by this time, the banana was king.
And it was not easy work. Long hours. No rights. Dangerous, back-breaking labor—banana bunches can be the size of an adult human being, holding as many as 250 bananas.
United Fruit Promotional Video: As the plant bends, the bunch comes down and is caught on the shoulder of the backer. Each bunch weighs from 50 to 75 pounds.
Michael Fox: And it was dangerous. I know you’ve heard this song before.
[Song: “Banana Boat,” by Harry Belafonte]
Michael Fox: That’s “Banana Boat,” a traditional Jamaican folk song popularized by Harry Belafonte. And the upbeat calypso sound makes it easy to forget that the song was actually about Caribbean workers toiling on a banana plantation. But just listen to these lyrics:
“Lift six-foot, seven-foot, eight-foot bunch… A beautiful bunch of ripe bananas. Hide the deadly black tarantula.”
That’s not even mentioning the dangerous quantities of pesticides used. The grueling hours. The forced labor. The irregular pay. There are many documented stories of employees trying to demand due wages, only to be refused or fired.
And so, workers in Tiquisate began to organize.
Then came the 1944 Revolution. The start of Guatemala’s Democratic Spring. A pro-democracy movement forced dictator Ubico out of office, paving the way for the first democratic elections in 1945. President Juan Jose Arévalo was voted into power.
Amid a flurry of movement activity, Tiquisate became a hub of labor organizing. The banana workers went on strike and organized a union—the first in the country. In fact, over the next decade, they would strike repeatedly, fighting back against the octopus, United Fruit.
It’s an exciting time in Guatemala. The country is finally taking its first steps of democracy. President Juan Jose Arévalo is passing moderate reforms. Meanwhile, the United States has come out of World War II the great victor.
Grahame Russell: I think they just saw this pro-democracy movement in Guatemala and they tolerated it for 10 years.
Michael Fox: That’s Grahame Russell, the founder of Rights Action. He’s spent roughly the last 40 years defending workers and human rights in Central America.
Grahame Russell: In the first part, the government of Arévalo, the father, was bringing about some serious but not economic threatening reforms, economic education reforms, health reforms, Labor Code reforms. Enfranchisement, getting the vote out to Indigenous people, et cetera. Like, classic almost liberal democracy, stuff. And the US was, up to that point, OK with it. But by 1950-51, the Cold War kicked in full bore. And then the government of Guatemala did what they had to do, which was to start reforming how the economy works.
Michael Fox: That was to happen under the country’s new president Jacobo Arbenz, who had previously served as Arévalo’s minister of defense.
In 1951, Arbenz was elected into power, becoming the country’s second democratically elected president. Arbenz took Arévalo’s democratic revolution a step further, promising to turn the tides on the great inequality in the country and, in particular, to roll back the power of one very prominent US corporation.
United Fruit was concerned. For good reason.
In June 1952, Arbenz decreed the country’s new land reform law. In it, he stipulated that any private land over 700 acres in size that was not currently being cultivated could be expropriated by the state. At the time, less than 3% of land owners held 70% of Guatemala’s arable land. United Fruit held the lion’s share—over half a million acres. The majority of that land was just sitting around, not in production.
The Guatemalan government expropriated more than 200,000 acres of United Fruit land. Overall, the land reform led to the expropriation of 1.5 million acres of privately held land and handed it over to 100,000 rural families, benefiting roughly half a million Guatemalans.
Many of those who benefitted were Indigenous communities. Guatemala has the largest Indigenous population of any country in Central America: 24 different ethnic groups, mostly Maya. In the first half of the 20th century, more than 50% of the population was Indigenous. And, like everywhere across the region, they were discriminated against and forced to work for large landowners. As we’ll hear in the next episode, in the late 20th century, Indigenous people in Guatemala were the victims of systematic state massacre—their villages targeted for extermination. Even today, more than 20% of Guatemala’s Indigenous population lives in extreme poverty—three times the rate of those living in extreme poverty for the rest of the population.
Back in Arbenz’s Guatemala of the 1950s, the government promised to pay for United Fruit’s property. And this is great: It offered United Fruit the sum that the company itself said the land was worth, according to its taxes—$1,185,000. Of course, to dodge taxes, that land value was hugely underreported by United Fruit, which is why the company demanded 16 times that figure from the government. When Arbenz refused to budge, United Fruit looked to the US government for help.
The US was happy to oblige.
Top officials in Washington had deep, deep ties to the company. Then-Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had worked for decades as a US lawyer with a prominent law firm that often represented major US corporations abroad, including United Fruit. Dulles, himself, had actually negotiated the contract with former Guatemalan dictator Jorge Ubico. Remember, the guy who liked to dress like Napoleon. And that contract had granted United Fruit huge power and enormous swaths of Guatemalan land.
Author Stephen Kinzer, who we heard from earlier, says Dulles was not the company’s only supporter in Washington.
Stephen Kinzer: There was probably never an American company that was better connected in the White House than United Fruit. So all of the senior officials in the Latin America policy-making area were stockholders in United Fruit. And that included John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state, and Alan Dulles, the head of the CIA. United Fruit had powerful supporters in Congress, especially from Massachusetts, because almost all of New England’s wealth was based in United Fruit. Every rich family in New England, or certainly in the greater Boston area, around that period, had stock in United Fruit. It was known as the blue chip investment.
The tentacles of the United Fruit Company reached right into the president’s office, because his own secretary, Ann Whitman, was married to the public relations director of United Fruit. The policy planning staff at the State Department was also filled with people who had connections to United Fruit. This company was not only uniquely powerful in Guatemala, it was uniquely powerful in Washington.
Michael Fox: Three months after Arbenz’s land reform decree, President Harry Truman authorized the CIA to launch a covert operation to remove President Arbenz. A key part of that operation was a psyops war to paint Arbenz as a dangerous communist who had to be removed for the good of the region.
Phillip Roettinger was recruited by the Marines to join the CIA team that would attempt to overthrow the Arbenz government. He spoke to Bill Moyers for a documentary about the coup, in the 1980s.
Phillip Roettinger: It was explained to me it was very important for the security of the United States. That we were going to prevent a Soviet beachhead in this hemisphere, that we’ve heard about very recently, of course. That the Guatemalan government was communist, and we had to do something about it.
Michael Fox: The truth was…
Phillip Roettinger: Well, of course, there were not even a hint of communists in his government. He had no communists in his cabinet. He did permit the existence of the very small communist party.
Michael Fox: The truth didn’t matter. Washington set about to create a beautifully managed propaganda war, or what we might call today a “fake news” campaign, to convince the public that Arbenz had to go. It was waged both in Guatemala and the United States over print and radio.
And here’s the thing: That framing worked, in particular, because it was the same message being honed and pushed across the US, internally.
Speaker: The crusade for freedom is your chance and mine to fight communism. Join now by sending your contributions to…
Michael Fox: Remember, by this time, the United States was firmly in the grips of the Cold War. This was the peak of McCarthyism and the so-called Red Scare. US Senator Joseph McCarthy had, since 1950, been holding his trials for the Un-American Activities Committee.
Joseph McCarthy: One communist on the faculty of one university is one communist too many.
Michael Fox: McCarthy said communism had infiltrated all parts of US society. In Hollywood alone, hundreds were blacklisted for supposed Communist sympathies. Lives and careers were destroyed.
And while the pretext for US action in Guatemala was the Cold War and the fight against Communism, all of this was rooted even deeper in the Monroe Doctrine. If you remember, we talked about that in the last episode. Essentially, it’s the idea that the US had the right to intervene in Latin America in order to protect its own interests—in particular, to keep other foreign powers out of the region.
By early 1954, the stage was almost set. Remember Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, the guy who negotiated the United Fruit contract with Guatemala’s former dictator? Well, he took the campaign against Guatemala to the international stage in an attempt to drum up regional pressure against the Arbenz government. At a meeting of the Organization of American States in Venezuela in March 1954, the US managed to put anticommunism at the top of the agenda.
Speaker: In Caracas, the 10th Interamerican Conference hears Foreign Minister Torrielo of Guatemala, whose country is the target of a United States resolution against communism in the hemisphere. While accepting the resolution in principle, he warns against any concerted intervention in internal affairs. He also assails United States monopolistic interests in South America. He is followed by Secretary of State Dulles, who presses his argument for united action against what he calls “the world threat of communism.”
Speaker: They may not themselves have been communists, but they have been subjected to the inflammatory influence of communism, which avowedly uses extreme nationalism as one of its tools.
Michael Fox: The US plan moved fast.
Speaker: Armed Guatemalan insurgents stand guard on a Honduran airstrip…
Michael Fox: Three months later. June, 1954. Right-wing exiled General Carlos Castillo Armas invades from Honduras, leading 500 CIA-trained soldiers into Guatemala. They lose their first fights. But US pilots bomb parts of Guatemala City. A well-tooled machine of disinformation spreads phony reports that the invading force is huge. That Guatemalans are fleeing the country. That soldiers are switching sides.
Fake CIA broadcasts report fake victories by a fake army of 5,000.
Howard Hunt: What we wanted to do was have a terror campaign.
Michael Fox: That’s Howard Hunt. He spoke to CNN about the operation years later. In 1954, Hunt was a CIA operative.
Howard Hunt: To terrify Arbenz, particularly. To terrify his troops, much as the German Stuka bombers terrified the population of Holland, Belgium, and Poland at the onset of World War II, and just rendered everybody paralyzed.
Speaker: New York. An emergency session by the United Nations Security Council…
Michael Fox: While bombs fell on Guatemala, US ambassador to the United Nations Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.—also a stockholder in United Fruit—spoke before the UN, where he denied any US role in the unfolding coup.
Henry Cabot Jr.: This is a revolt of Guatemalans against Guatemalans.
Michael Fox: Arbenz would try to arm Guatemalan citizens, but it was too late. Faced with confusion, uncertainty, and fears of a bloodbath, Arbenz announces his resignation over the country’s airwaves on June 27, 1954.
Arbenz: [Translated] In that name of what are they committing all of these barbarities? For what cause? We all know that they have used the pretext of Communism. The truth is very different. The truth can be found in the financial interests of the fruit company, and in those other North American monopolies that have invested large capital in Latin America, fearing that the example of Guatemala would spread to the neighboring Latin American sister countries. Time will show that what I say now is true.
Michael Fox: Arbenz fled the country.
Speaker: Planes sweep across the skies over Guatemala City to herald the triumphant return of General Castillo Armas…
Michael Fox: The invading General Castillo Armas rode into Guatemala City. Black and white US news reels painted the overthrow as a tremendous victory for freedom.
Speaker: For the first time in 10 years, the people of Guatemala are breathing the sweet air of liberty, only days after the resignation of red president Jacobo Arbenz.
Speaker: Thousands of Communists and fellow travelers are rounded up in makeshift prisons. For United Fruit, it’s business as usual, as all company land seized by the Communists is returned. On television, Secretary of State Dulles announces the return of democracy to Guatemala.
Dulles: The future of Guatemala lies at the disposal of the Guatemalan people themselves. It lies also at the disposal of leaders loyal to Guatemala who have not become the agents of an alien despotism who have sought to use Guatemala for their own evil ends. The events of recent months and days add a new and glorious chapter to the already great tradition of the American states.
Michael Fox: Glorious for the United States, perhaps.
Author Stephen Kinzer.
Stephen Kinzer: That idea that the coup happened because Guatemalans were anti-communist, and the twin idea that this was a coup only carried out by Guatemalans without any American help, was the line that Foster Dulles preached in the weeks and months afterwards. That really wasn’t true. If it had not been for the conflict between Guatemala’s democratic leaders and the United Fruit Company, I doubt there ever would have been a coup there.
It was a great success in the short run for the United States. We were able to place in power a person who would not only bow down in front of United Fruit, but do everything else that we asked them to do. So this sent a great message also throughout all of Latin America.
Michael Fox: But protests rippled across the region.
People demonstrated against the Guatemalan coup in Chile. In Mexico, painter Diego Rivera led protests, joined by Frida Kalho. It was one of the last things she did. She died two weeks later. It was also a major turning point for a young Argentine doctor, named Ernesto “Che” Guevara. He was living in Guatemala before and during the coup. He had asked to fight. After Arbenz was overthrown, he fled to Mexico, where he would meet a radical Cuban lawyer by the name of Fidel Castro, who was planning to lead a revolution against Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista.
This was not the first US-backed coup in Latin America, and it would not be the last. Remember, as I talked about in the last episode, the region had suffered under the shadow of the United States and the Monroe Doctrine for more than a century. Every country had endured its share of invasions and interventions. But 1954, Guatemala, was the first coup in Latin America carried out by the CIA, which was created only seven years before, and the first in the region amid the Cold War.
Piero Gleijeses is a professor of US foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University.
Piero Gleijeses: We come to the conclusion that the best guarantee against communism are the dictators. With the dictators you don’t worry whether they may be pro-communist or not. With a democratic government, you are not sure. So the dictator is better. And second, because we realize that dictators are more friendly to US economic interests, American companies, than democratic governments.
Michael Fox: That was really the bottom line. Throughout the Cold War, the United States opposed reformers while backing brutal dictators across the region. Guatemala was the frontrunner.
Jo-Marie Burt: Because the US was sort of in the throes of the Cold War and had convinced itself that in order to fight, you know, communism, globally, it had to back anyone who was anti-communist, even if they were bloodthirsty dictators or grotesquely brutal military regimes, as was the case in Guatemala.
Michael Fox: Jo-Marie Burt is a political scientist at George Mason University and a former NACLA editor. We’ll hear a lot from her in the next episode.
Jo-Marie Burt: So when this government is overthrown, it sort of gives rise to just literally a series of military governments, one more repressive than the other, all with the support and backing of the United States government.
Michael Fox: The new US-backed military junta cracked down on dissent. The country sank into dictatorship, repression, and a 36-year civil war that, as we will look at in depth in the next episode, would cost hundreds of thousands of lives and last until the 1990s. Social gains would be rolled back.
Today, nearly 30 years after the end of the armed conflict, the promise of peace and democracy remains unfulfilled. The dismal inequality that drove the reforms of the democratic spring remains unaddressed.
But something has been brewing.
Remember President Juan Jose Arévalo? The man who ushered in Guatemala’s Democratic Spring, in 1945? Well, his son, Bernardo Arévalo, he’s Guatemala’s president-elect. He won the 2023 elections, against tremendous odds. And despite moves by the courts and the country’s attorney general to block his election and inauguration, he’ll be sworn in on Jan. 14. Today, many Guatemalans hope that Arévalo, the son, can usher in a new Guatemala, like his father did a century ago. This is huge.
Juan Jose Arevalo: [Translated] The people have again found hope.
Michael Fox: …Arevalo said during an interview after his electoral victory.
Juan Jose Arevalo: [Translated] And all society wants is for the democratic norms to be respected.
Michael Fox: As for United Fruit… It’s interesting. But you could almost say that the Guatemalan coup marked the beginning of the end of El Pulpo, the octopus. That same year, 1954, the US government brought a civil antitrust lawsuit against the company for essentially monopolizing the US banana industry. Within 13 years, it would be broken up—although its descendants would continue to grow and sell bananas under the Chiquita brand until today.
As for United Fruit’s vast plantations in Tiquisate? They wouldn’t even last as long as the company. A decade after the coup, after a devastating hurricane and banana tree disease, the company shut down production and sold its plantations there.
The railroad didn’t last much longer. A highway up to the Atlantic coast was opened. The constant bustle of banana shipments was silenced. Now the tracks in Tiquisate sat largely unused, empty. A memory of the once-bustling past. Both the good and the bad…
Michael Fox: This bridge, it used to be just for the train. Like, when they built it, it was just for the train…
Before leaving Tiquisate, I went for a drive in search of something the jubilant 1950s news reels and Secretary of State Dulles intentionally did not say.
I just pulled into… A big farm. Big Chiquita Brands truck driving out. This is the area of the big plantations. Just south of Tiquisate. Right now. I mean, there’s banana farms down here too, but right now where we are, it’s just covered and covered in palm. You know, for palm oil production. But it’s also in a place just near here which is where they took a bunch of the union leaders. Back during the coup of 1954. And shot them all.
And it wasn’t just union leaders. It was anyone unsympathetic to the coup. The banana workers in Tiquisate, they’d organized. They’d won higher wages. More rights. They’d seen their lives transformed. They’d fought and won recognition of the first union in the country. Fought to end the harsh Ubico dictatorship in 1944. And the US had just sunk them into another one.
According to accounts from that time, in the days and weeks following the 1954 coup, an estimated 1,000 campesinos and workers were rounded up, brought to United Fruit’s Jocotán plantation. Shot. Killed. And buried in mass graves.
In an oral history by historian Cindy Forster, published in the book Banana Wars, one former banana worker said, “At Finca Jocotán you could hear the machine guns going all the time. It lasted four or five months. They were grabbing people from everywhere, not just Tiquisate.”
Another campesina Forster interviewed said, “Without a doubt the company permitted the massacre, since it took place on their plantation and they allowed the army to seize people.”
I couldn’t find Jocotán. I asked around. No one I spoke with had ever heard of it. But it’s out there, somewhere. The name likely changed. Buried just underneath the surface. Like the United Fruit homes. Like the railway. Like the former banana workers. Like those who resisted the coup. The footprints of Guatemala’s devastating past, hiding in plain sight across the country’s landscape.
And the story of US-backed mass killings and disappearances done in the name of freedom and the fight against communism would be repeated over and over again in Guatemala.
That is where we’ll go, in Episode 3—
Ronald Reagan: It’s the fate of this region, Central America, that I want to talk to you about tonight…
Michael Fox: Into the 1980s, amid scorched-earth policies and hundreds of thousands dead, encouraged with staunch support from the U.S. government. And in search of the ghosts that linger today.
So I finally made it to this memorial for the disappeared here in Guatemala and it has got to be one of the most intense and powerful… amazing and tumultuous things I’ve ever witnessed.
Next time, on Under the Shadow.
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