Reddit reviews Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World

Hardly the only atrocity committed by United Fruit (Chiquita).

In 1928, workers went on strike in Columbia and United Fruit pressured the government to "deal with it" which went down in history as the Banana Massacre. Thousands were killed when the army opened fire on the strikers.

Same type of thing happened in Guatemala in the 50s. United Fruit put a president in power who gave them substantial concessions as well as used the Guatemalan military to break up strikes. That didn't go over well with the population, who replaced the politicians with a fairly extremist, Maxist regime. So United Fruit financed, and with the support of US military and CIA, eventually overthrew that government and put another corrupt group of politicians in power (which gave it about half the land in the entire country). That led to the 1960 Guatemalan civil war (which was an on-again-off-again affair for the next three decades), and generally destabilized the country, leading it to be the awful mess it is today. Thanks Chiquita!

Remember 1961? The Bay of Pigs incident in Cuba, shortly after Castro took over the country and nationalized all the United Fruit plantations? You guessed it. Because of the Bay of Pigs, Castro pressured the USSR to make Cuba a nuclear power (Mutually Assured Destruction policy seemed to be working). A year later, the USSR sent a fleet to bring Cuba the weapons they requested. That led to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. So, in short, United Fruit almost caused an all out war between the United States and the USSR.

They didn't stop there either. Much of the awful shape most of those tiny Central American and Caribbean countries are in can be traced back to United Fruit Company. There's a reason the concept of a corporate owned nation is referred to as a Banana Republic. Even after they changed their name to try to put the past behind them, they continued the same, awful policies. Chiquita went so far as to finance guerrilla militias in Central America in the 70s and 80s. It was so blatant that Colombia was able to successfully sue Chiquita for it.

There's a good book about the whole thing that came out a few years ago: "Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World"

I've been reading a lot about Middle Eastern geopolitics, mostly from leftist perspectives

• Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (2004)
  
• Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States (2011)
  
• Global Energy Security and American Hegemony
  
• America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (2006)
  
• Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (2011)
  
  Some books on my reading list:
  
  
• Congress and the Shaping of the Middle East (2015)
  
• The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide (2014)
  
• Instruments of Statecraft: US Guerrilla Warfare, Counter-Insurgency, Counter-Terrorism, 1940-1990 (1992)
  
• Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America, 2nd Ed. (1993)
  
• Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World (2009)
  
• Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe
  
  

Bananas - How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World is also good.

Seriously, I'm not banana obsessed...I was using this as the backdrop for a screenplay I once attempted and, like everything else in my life, almost immediately gave up on once I realized that it required actual work.

The video description has three 1 2 3

Indeed. It's an absolutely shameful aspect of American foreign policy in the '50s and '60s.

Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Changed the World by Peter Chapman is a good history of the UFCO and their dealings in Central America, for those interested in this topic.

Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World. Really great book.

You are actually not far off. Bananas haven't evolved in a long time, so they are very susceptible to a lot of diseases. To combat this they use loads and loads of pesticides, making the banana one of the most chemically treated crops.
Source: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1847671942/ref=mp_s_a_1_5?qid=1410632839&sr=8-5&pi=SL75

well he's a story about how america is "sorry" http://www.nbcnews.com/id/39456324/ns/health-sexual_health/t/us-apologizes-guatemala-std-experiments/#.XZV7DkZKhPY

but there's alot history about what america did to latin america. there was even instances of the govt hiring white supremacist paramilitary mercenaries CMA to fight in latin america

One recent book that was published is on how bananas led to the genocide of Guatemalans at the hands of people supported by the US govt and other violence in latin America

Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World

https://www.amazon.com/Bananas-United-Fruit-Company-Shaped/dp/1847671942/ref=asc_df_1847671942/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=312174369544&hvpos=1o1&hvnetw=g&hvrand=11924861066787226214&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9014969&hvtargid=aud-801738734305:pla-316480504217&psc=1



edit: Sorry forgot to add links