The United Fruit Company (1899-1970) became prominent in the import-export trade of tropical fruit (notably bananas and pineapples) coming from Third World plantations and sent to the United States and Europe. The company is notorious as an archetypal example of multinational influence extending deeply into the internal politics of so-called banana republics and is frequently cited as an example of exploitative neocolonialism.

Corporate History

United Fruit was established on March 30, 1899 in Boston, Massachusetts, by the merger of two banana companies. The Boston Fruit Company was established by Lorenzo Dow Baker, a sailor who in 1870 had bought his first bananas in Jamaica, and Andrew W. Preston. The other company was founded by Minor C. Keith, who had built railroads in Costa Rica and then went into the fruit business.

In 1930, Sam "The Banana Man" Zemurray sold his Cuyamel company to United and retired. But in 1932, he returned because he felt the company was mismanaged. In June 1970, it merged with AMK Corporation, which owned the John Morrell meat company and was controlled by Eli H. Black, to become the United Brands Company. After Black's spectacular suicide on February 3, 1975 – he jumped out of the window of his New York City office on the forty-fourth floor of the Pan Am Building – Cincinnati-based American Financial, one of millionarie Carl H. Lindner, Jr.'s companies, bought into United Fruit. In August 1984, Lindner took control of the company and renamed it Chiquita Brands International. The headquarters was moved to Cincinnati in 1985.

History in Central America

The United Fruit Company owned vast tracts of land in Central America, and sometimes the Company was said to be the real power in control of those nations, the national governments doing the Company's bidding. The Company several times overthrew governments which they considered insufficiently compliant to Company will. For example, in 1910 a ship of armed hired thugs was sent from New Orleans to Honduras to install a new president by force when the incumbent failed to grant the Fruit Company tax breaks. The newly installed Honduran president granted the Company a waiver from paying any taxes for 25 years.

The Company had a mixed record of encouraging and discouraging development in the nations it was involved in. For example, in Guatemala the Company built schools for the people who lived and worked on Company land, while at the same time for many years prevented the Guatemalan government from building highways, because this would lessen the profitable transportation monopoly of the railroads, which were owned by United Fruit. A popular name for the company was Mamá Yunay ("Mommy United").

In order to administer its far-flung operations, United Fruit became a major developer of radio technology, which it later pooled with other companies to form the Radio Corporation of America.

The Guatemalan government of Colonel Jacobo Arbenz Guzman was toppled by covert action by the United States government in 1954 at the behest of United Fruit because of Arbenz Guzman's plans to redistribute uncultivated land owned by the United Fruit Company among Indian peasants. The UFC and the bankers that supported it convinced the CIA and President Dwight Eisenhower that this was the first sign of a Communist takeover in Central America. The US Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, was a determined anti-Communist whose law firm had represented United Fruit. His brother Allen Dulles was the director of the CIA. The brother of the Assistant Secretary of State for InterAmerican Affairs, John Moors Cabot, had once been president of United Fruit. Guzman's government was overthrown by Guatemalan army officers invading from Honduras. As many as 100,000 people may have died in the ensuing civil war.

Today, successor companies of United Fruit have interests in:

• Colombia
• Costa Rica
• Cuba
• Guatemala
• Honduras
• Panama

The impact of the United Fruit Company has inspired the poet Pablo Neruda to write a poem (in Spanish) with the company's name as the title. The 1929 strike of Colombian banana workers against United Fruit also inspired part of Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude. Little Steven released a song called Bitter Fruit about the company's misdeeds.

Further Reading

• Aviva Chomsky. West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 1870-1940. Louisiana State University Press.
• Pablo Neruda, "La United Fruit Co." (in his poetry collection Canto General).
• Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer. Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. 1982.
• Thomas P. McCann. On the Inside. Beverly, Massachusetts: Quinlan Press, 1987. Revised edition of An American Company (1976).
• Cameron McWhirter and Michael Gallagher. "How 'el pulpo' became Chiquita Banana". The Cincinnati Enquirer. May 3, 1998.
• Jon Lee Anderson. "Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life" Bantam Books. 1997.
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967.

External Links

• United Fruit Historical Society (http://www.unitedfruit.org)
• Banana Republic: The United Fruit Company (http://www.mayaparadise.com/ufc1e.htm)