Nacogdoches (US), Jan 18 (The Conversation) As early as the 1950s, the United States intervened against a democratically elected government in the name of an ideological threat, while simultaneously protecting
major economic interests. But while the underlying motives are similar, the methods and the degree of transparency have changed profoundly.
In the wake of the US military strike that led to the arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on January 3, 2026, the Trump administration has primarily displayed its ambition to obtain unfettered access to Venezuelan oil, relegating to the background more traditional foreign policy objectives such as the fight against drug trafficking or support for democracy and regional stability.
During his first press conference after the operation, President Donald Trump stated that oil companies had an important role to play and that oil revenues would help finance any new intervention in Venezuela.
Shortly afterwards, the hosts of “Fox & Friends” questioned Trump about these predictions: “We have the world’s largest oil companies,” Trump replied, “ the biggest, the best, and we’re going to be very heavily involved in them .” As a historian of US-Latin American relations, I am not surprised to see oil, or any other resource, play a role in American policy toward the region. What struck me, however, was the candour with which the Trump administration acknowledged the crucial role of oil in its policy toward Venezuela.
As I detailed in my 2026 book, Caribbean Blood Pacts: Guatemala and the Cold War Struggle for Freedom, American military interventions in Latin America were, for the most part, conducted covertly.
And when the United States orchestrated the coup that overthrew Guatemala’s democratically elected president in 1954, it concealed the role that economic considerations had played in the operation.
A powerful “octopus” ————————— In the early 1950s, Guatemala had become one of the main suppliers of bananas to the Americans, as is still the case today.
At the time, the United Fruit Company owned over 220,000 hectares of Guatemalan land, largely thanks to agreements made with previous dictatorships. These properties relied on the intensive labour of poor farmworkers, often displaced from their traditional lands. Their wages were rarely stable, and they regularly faced layoffs and pay cuts.
Based in Boston, this multinational has forged ties with dictators and local officials in Central America, many Caribbean islands, and parts of South America in order to acquire vast tracts of land for railroads and banana plantations.
The locals nicknamed it “pulpo”—”octopus” in Spanish—because the company seemed to influence the political, economic, and daily life of the region. In Colombia, for example, the government brutally suppressed a strike by United Fruit workers in 1928, resulting in hundreds of deaths.
This bloody episode in Colombian history served as the factual basis for a subplot in ” One Hundred Years of Solitude,” the epic novel by Gabriel García Márquez, winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature.
The company’s seemingly limitless influence in the countries where it operated fueled the stereotype of Central American nations as ” banana republics “.
The Guatemalan democratic revolution ———————————————– In Guatemala, a country historically marked by extreme inequality, a broad coalition formed in 1944 to overthrow the repressive dictatorship during a popular uprising. Inspired by the anti-fascist ideals of the Second World War, this coalition aimed to democratise the country and make its economy more equitable.
After decades of repression, the new leaders offered many Guatemalans their first taste of democracy. Under the presidency of Juan José Arévalo, democratically elected and in office from 1945 to 1951, the government implemented new social protections as well as a labour code legalising the creation of and membership in unions, and establishing the eight-hour workday.
In 1951, he was succeeded by Jacobo Arbenz, who was also a democratically elected president.
Under Arbenz, Guatemala implemented a vast agrarian reform program in 1952, allocating uncultivated plots of land to landless agricultural workers. The Guatemalan government claimed that these policies would build a more equitable society for the country’s poor and indigenous majority.
United Fruit denounced these reforms as the product of a global conspiracy. The company claimed that the majority of the country’s unions were controlled by Mexican and Soviet communists, and presented the agrarian reform as a manoeuvre to destroy capitalism.
Pressure on Congress for intervention ———————————————- In Guatemala, United Fruit sought to enlist the support of the US government in its fight against Arbenz’s policies.
While its executives did complain that Guatemalan reforms were harming its financial investments and increasing its labour costs, they also presented any obstacle to its operations as part of a vast communist conspiracy.
The company led the offensive through an advertising campaign in the United States and by exploiting the prevailing anti-communist paranoia of the time.
As early as 1945, executives from the United Fruit Company began meeting with officials in the Truman administration. Despite the support of ambassadors sympathetic to their cause, the American government seemed unwilling to intervene directly in Guatemalan affairs.
The company then turned to Congress, recruiting lobbyists Thomas Corcoran and Robert La Follette Jr., a former senator, for their political connections.
From the outset, Corcoran and La Follette lobbied Republicans and Democrats in both houses of Congress against Guatemalan policies – not by presenting them as a threat to United Fruit’s business interests, but as elements of a communist plot to destroy capitalism and the United States.
The banana company’s efforts bore fruit in February 1949, when several members of Congress denounced Guatemala’s labour reforms as communist-inspired. Senator Claude Pepper described the labour code as “manifestly and intentionally discriminatory against this American company” and as “a machine gun pointed at the head” of the United Fruit Company.
Two days later, Representative John McCormack repeated this statement verbatim, using the exact same terms to denounce the reforms. Senators Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. and Lister Hill, and Representative Mike Mansfield also took a public stance, echoing the talking points found in United Fruit’s internal memos.
No elected official said a word about bananas.
Lobbying and propaganda campaigns ——————————————— This lobbying effort, fueled by anti-communist rhetoric, culminated five years later when the US government orchestrated a coup that overthrew Arbenz in a clandestine operation.
The operation began in 1953, when the Eisenhower administration authorised the CIA to launch a psychological warfare campaign aimed at manipulating the Guatemalan army to overthrow the democratically elected government.
CIA agents bribed members of the Guatemalan army while anti-communist radio broadcasts were aired, and a narrative, championed by religious figures and denouncing an alleged communist plot to destroy the country’s Catholic Church, spread throughout Guatemala.
Meanwhile, the United States armed anti-government organisations inside Guatemala and in neighbouring countries to further undermine the morale of the Arbenz government.
United Fruit also enlisted the public relations pioneer Edward Bernays to spread its propaganda, not in Guatemala but in the United States. Bernays provided American journalists with reports and articles portraying the Central American country as a puppet of the Soviet Union.
These documents, including a film titled ” Why the Kremlin Hates Bananas,” circulated thanks to compliant media outlets and complicit members of Congress.
Destroy the revolution —————————— Ultimately—and the archives demonstrate this— the CIA’s actions led army officers to overthrow the elected leaders and install a regime more favourable to the United States, headed by Carlos Castillo Armas.
Guatemalans opposed to the reforms massacred union leaders, politicians, and other supporters of Arbenz and Arévalo. According to official reports, at least 48 people died in the immediate aftermath, while local accounts speak of hundreds more deaths.
For decades, Guatemala was under the control of military regimes. From dictator to dictator, the government brutally repressed all opposition and instilled a climate of fear. These conditions contributed to waves of emigration, including countless refugees, but also members of transnational gangs.
The backlash ——————– In order to support the idea that what had happened in Guatemala had nothing to do with bananas — in line with the company’s propaganda — the Eisenhower administration authorised an antitrust proceeding against United Fruit, a proceeding that had been temporarily suspended during the operation so as not to draw more attention to the company.
This was the first setback in a long series that would lead to the dismantling of the United Fruit Company in the mid-1980s. After a succession of mergers, acquisitions and splits, all that remains is the omnipresent Miss Chiquita logo, affixed to the bananas sold by the company.
And, according to many international relations specialists, Guatemala has never recovered from the destruction of its democratic experiment, broken under the pressure of private interests. (The Conversation) SKS SKS
