United Fruit

BEFORE 1970, Chiquita Brands International was known as the United Fruit Company, one of the most storied and controversial business in the history of the Americas. The United Fruit Company was established at the beginning of the 20th century, founded through the merger of four banana importing companies.

United Fruit played a key role in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-sponsored removal from power of Guatemala's democratically elected government in 1954. It also assisted in the attempt to overthrow Cuba's communist Fidel Castro regime in 1961. The company became important in trading, especially tropical bananas and pineapples, from the third world plantations to the United States and Europe.

The company, its predecessors and successors included, is an archetypal case of multinational influence extending deeply into the internal politics and policies of so-called “banana republics” and may well provide an example of neo-colonialism. The United Fruit Company owned vast tracts of land in Central America, and sometimes the company had real power of those nations, with national governments doing the company's bidding.

The company owes its existence to Captain Lorenzo Dow Baker who transported a group of miners to Venezuela from Boston, Massachusetts, in 1870 on his schooner. He put into Port Morant, Jamaica, on his homeward voyage to find a cargo to pay his expenses on the northbound trip. He purchased 160 bunches of unripe bananas there for $40 which he sold in Jersey City, New Jersey, for $320. The following year he returned to Jamaica and started steadily shipping bananas to Boston.

In 1884, Baker with J. H. Freeman and A. Preston formed the Boston Fruit Company and acquired their own steamship. Boston Fruit Co. merged with leading banana operators in 1899 to form the world's biggest banana importer, the United Fruit Company of New Jersey with plantations in Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Panama, and Santo Domingo. Along with rail lines, the company had telegraph lines and plantations all over Central America. United Fruit owned a fleet of white steamships called the Great White Fleet. The company continued to expand into Caribbean and Central American territories and to absorb competing companies.

In 1901, the Guatemalan dictator Manuel Estrada Cabrera ensured United Fruit's exclusive rights to transport postal mail between Guatemala and the United States. Cabrera allowed the company to establish a subsidiary, the Guatemalan Railroad Company, and build a railroad and telegraph lines between Puerto Barrios and the capital, Guatemala City. Furthermore, he gave permission to United Fruit Company to acquire land very reasonably and gave the company a land grant 500 yards wide and one mile long on either side of the municipal pier.

Also, the United Fruit Company was exempted from taxes for 99 years. By 1910, United Fruit Company had won a controlling stake in the British owned Elders & Fyffes Co. and ships were regularly transferred between the two fleets. United Fruit merged with Cuyamel Fruit Company in 1929. In 1970, United Fruit was absorbed into United Brands and subsequently divested itself of its American flagged ships.

The company has a long history of vigilantly political activism. For example, in 1910 a ship of armed hired thugs was sent from New Orleans, Louisiana, to Honduras to install a new president[Page 835] 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. By 1918, United Fruit Company and two other companies controlled 75 percent of the nation's banana-growing land, much of it taken through threats or violence.

...