Getting to know Uncle Sam

If you head to your kitchen right now, there's a good chance you'll find a banana ready to be enjoyed. Over the years, this fruit has become highly popular in households around the world. Nonetheless, bananas are a fragile fruit, mainly because they spoil quickly. So, the only way for the trade of bananas to be profitable is to have huge plantations of the fruit. And the only way to achieve this amount of massive banana production is through the absolute control of the supply chain. It is for this reason that in 1900, the different banana companies from the United States decided to merge and create a single company called "The United Fruit Company". The purpose of this decision was to finally control the entire production chain. It was at this time that this mega-company set its sights on Central America with the aim of achieving the longed-for control of the aforementioned supply chain. However, this control meant also controlling the entire life of the workers in th...

Carlos Castillo Armas, the CIA-backed leader of Operation PBSuccess, driving into Guatemala City. Source: National Archives First of all, it is important to clarify that the coup d'état that rocked Guatemala in 1954 was the result of the covert operation called PBSUCCESS (CIA Cryptonym). As Mainwaring & Schenoni (2018)  rightly points out. this operation was organized by the U.S.CIA to overthrow Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, the democratically elected President of Guatemala, for opposing the interests of the United Fruit Company and for allowing members of Guatemala's communist party - the Guatemalan Labor Party - to influence the most important decisions of his government.  The Árbenz government presented a series of reforms that U.S. espionage considered communist and attributed to Soviet influence. They then spread the fear that Guatemala was going to become what CIA Director Allen Dulles called "a Soviet beachhead in America " (enemy position for invasion). These accu...