eight arms: the power of el polpo, the united fruit company in guatemala, 1900-1954

“Entre las moscas sanguinarias / la Frutera desembarca / arrasando el café y las frutas / en sus barcos que deslizaron / como bandejas el tesoro / de nuestras tierras sumergidas.”[1]

     -Pablo Neruda

Since the passing of the Freedom of Information Act of 1966 that forced the Central Intelligence Agency to open up their records to public scrutiny, the corrupt and reprehensible relationship between the United Fruit Company and the C.I.A. in facilitating the Guatemalan coup d’état of 1954 has become accepted as public knowledge. However, historians continue to debate over the extent of UFCO’s influence on American foreign policy during this time. The coup, which forced President Jacobo Arbenz into exile, placed rebel General Castillo Armas as head of State, and catapulted the country into a thirty-six year civil war, which resulted in the deaths of an estimated 200,000 Guatemalans, primarily indigenous farmers who were targeted by army-led death squads. To what extent is UFCO responsible for the turmoil and human loss that resulted from the overthrow of democratic government under Arbenz?

The United Fruit Company did not favor Arbenz, who appropriated over 400,000 acres of unused company land in 1953 for agrarian redistribution under Decree 900.[2] The company lobbied President Eisenhower to overthrow Arbenz and had a strong voice at the negotiating table with the State Department and C.I.A. in choosing the next Guatemalan head of state. The majority of literature on the United Fruit Company’s influence on the American intervention can be divided into two factions. The first group, composed of historical revisionists, Latin American nationalists, and leftist dependency theorists, believe that the intervention of 1954 was economically-driven: a secretive conspiracy by UFCO lobbyists and stockholding state leaders, and a testament to the corrupt power of American economic imperialism. The second group, led by political realists and UFCO’s own propagandists, argues that the economic aims of UFCO were not guiding American foreign policy, rather the State was driven by Cold War aims and would have intervened regardless of whether or not UFCO land was appropriated.[3] A more nuanced view of UFCO’s role in American foreign policy during the 1950’s, as proposed by historian Piero Gleijeses in Shattered Hope and historian John Coatsworth in his 2005 introduction to Schlesinger and Kinzer’s Bitter Fruit, takes both UFCO’s lobbying efforts and American Cold War aims into consideration. Though the U.S. was primarily interested in preventing the spread of Communism in “its own backyard,” the United Fruit Company surely played a large role in shaping the state’s perception that the Arbenz administration was controlled by Soviet Communists.[4]

Though UFCO was a key agent in shaping state and public opinion in the CIA-backed coup of 1954, it acquired its supreme, monopolistic power over the Guatemalan economy through a history of corrupt, crony relationships with Guatemalan dictators who were willing to overlook national interests and human welfare in order to acquire private gain.[5] These relationships not only caused the Guatemalan economy to suffer from exploitative foreign direct investment, but also created expectations for concessions that led to path dependency and reluctance on the part of UFCO to accept any change in state regulations. By manipulating relationships with corrupt and compliant dictators in Guatemala and equally self-interested and pliable leaders in the American state, UFCO was able to force its will upon Guatemalan governance.

The following essay seeks to demonstrate the role of the United Fruit Company in the CIA-backed overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz: first, by explaining the history of UFCO’s extractive power over the Guatemalan economy, and demonstrating how this power was gained through crony relationships with corrupt Guatemalan dictators, on one end, and compliant American governance, on the other end. Second, by contextualizing Guatemalan economic conditions during the Arbenz presidency and showing the rationale and efficacy of his reforms. Third, by demonstrating American Cold War fears of Communist takeover, the disparity between actual and perceived roles of Communists in the Arbenz administration, and UFCO’s efforts to play on U.S. Cold War fears to gain support for its own interests.

El Pulpo – How the Octopus spread its tentacles

Historians John Tuman and Craig Emmert hypothesized in “The Political Economy of U.S. Foreign Direct Investment in Latin America” that foreign direct investment tends to concentrate in countries that have poor human rights records because it is easier to exploit labor and gain extractive concessions in repressive regimes. Furthermore, foreign investment tends to be higher in dictatorships where the military plays an active role in governance because it is easier for companies to negotiate favorable concessions with an authoritarian ruler than with a committee of democratically-elected government officials.[6] Both of these claims are true in the case of the United Fruit Company in Guatemala, whose prevailing presence across industries led journalists to call it “El Pulpo,” or the Octopus. UFCO’s success was cemented by two compliant states, Guatemalan and American: one that provided excessive, extractive concessions, and the other condoned the resulting monopoly.

In 1899, Andrew Preston, owner of the Boston Fruit Company, and Minor C. Keith, owner of the Tropical Trading and Transport Company, united to create the United Fruit Company; they would later also purchase competitor Sam Zemmuray’s Cuyamel Fruit Company. UFCO began investments in Guatemala under the corrupt and authoritarian regime of Manuel Estrada Cabrera, who gained power by brutally eliminating all political rivals. According to a report by the British consul, under Cabrera “the property and liberties of every individual [were] in the hands of half-a-dozen highly disreputable individuals.”[7] Extractive labor in Guatemala was enforced by a system of mandamiento, strict taxation, and vagrancy laws.[8] Cabrera enriched himself by extorting money from foreign and Guatemalan entrepreneurs, and he actively sought and accepted bribes from foreign capitalists. Historian Paul Dosal wrote that it was in this dictatorial structure of governance that UFCO found an “ideal investment climate….Guatemala was chosen as the site for the company’s earliest development activities at the turn of the century…because a good portion of the country contained prime banana land and also because at the time we entered Central America, Guatemala’s government was the region’s weakest, most corrupt and most pliable.”[9]

Cabrera allowed Minor Keith, the majority stockholder of United Fruit and the constructor of the Central Railroad in Guatemala, to buy out the Guatemalan-owned Occidental Railroad, and the state-owned Northern Railway, and thereby gain a monopoly over Guatemalan transportation through the creation of International Railways of Central America. From 1904 to 1936, UFC came to own increasing shares of IRCA stock, until it effectively controlled IRCA, and used its power over the only railroad company in Guatemala to consolidate its banana monopoly; it gained discriminatory shipping rates with the IRCA and drove other banana companies out of business.[10] Later, United Fruit also bought national telegraph lines and controled Puerto Barrios, Guatemala’s only Atlantic seaport. Under Cabrera’s regime, UFC, IRCA, and German-owned General Electric gained many extremely favorable concessions and came to dominate four key economic sectors in Guatemala: bananas, railroads, ports, and electricity.[11] With these crucial industries in the hands of foreign capitalists, Guatemala’s economic development became controlled by foreign companies.[12]

United Fruit controlled local politics by offering bribes and entertainment to caudillos, or strongmen, who would amend local labor laws, raise taxes, and favor UFCO over potential competitors.[13] It also garnered U.S. State protection of its private property overseas, and used both sources of local and U.S. power to enforce extractive labor conditions. During the Puerto Barrios strike of 1923, UFCO incited both military intervention from the Guatemalan government and a show of force by the U.S. Navy to expel strike leaders, so that it had absolute control over labor for the next twenty-one years.[14]  First, under the dictatorship of Cabrera, and later under the equally corrupt and brutal dictatorship of Ubico, which allowed the company to expand to the Pacific, UFCO garnered favorable concessions and used the Guatemalan government to prevent further agitation from strikes until the Revolution of 1944.

Historian Paul Dosal wrote of UFCO’s corrupt dealings with dictators in Doing Business with the Dictators:

The tragedy of [Guatemala’s] political history is that its leaders authorized the company’s operations, ignored viable alternatives, and virtually abdicated regulatory power over the infrastructure on which the country’s two leading exports, coffee and bananas, depended. The U.S. government also bears responsibility for United Fruit’s enterprises, for it encouraged the Guatemalan government to adopt policies favorable to American enterprise and supported the company during contractual negotiations, despite serious reservations about its monopoly power within the departments of State and Justice.[15]

Thus, the extractive operations of the United Fruit Company were empowered by morally reprehensive relationships with two governments: the Guatemalan dictatorships and the capitalist American state.  They both allowed UFC to gain enormous profits through control over transportation infrastructure, through cheap labor extracted mainly from Indians, and through virtual tax exemption. The profits that UFC earned were incredible: “$825,000,000 between 1900 and 195, during which time it never suffered a net loss….an average of 12.5 percent on its net worth per year, increasing from $12.5 million in 1900 to $319,530,803 in 1951.”[16] These profits headed almost exclusively into the pockets of American stockholders rather than into Guatemalan national development.[17] The lack of backwards and forwards linkages in banana production did not help domestic industry grow.[18] Furthermore, UFCO’s policy of paying workers in store credit, to purchase items from its New Orleans store, in addition to its already poor wages for workers, made for zero impact on the domestic economy.[19] In fact, El Pulpo had a choke hold on Guatemala’s transportation infrastructure, and it imposed high shipping costs and irregular schedules through the IRCA, which slowed down the growth of the Guatemalan domestic industry.

 Attempts to Handcuff the Octopus: Profitable agrarian reforms under Arbenz

            When Jacobo Arbenz became President of Guatemala in 1951, 2.2 percent of landowners owned 70 percent of the nation’s land – roughly four million acres, of which less than a quarter was being used for agriculture.[20] The United Fruit Company controlled nearly 40,000 jobs in Guatemala and nearly 120 million dollars worth of investments. The IRCA, under UFCO’s control, owned 887 miles of railroads, almost all the tracks of Guatemala. Historians Schlesinger and Kinzer wrote that the UFC “functioned as a state within a state, owning Guatemala’s telephone and telegraph facilities, administering its only important Atlantic harbor and monopolizing its banana export.”[21] Agriculture accounted for most of the nation’s foreign exchange, and industry lagged far behind, producing only 14 percent of the gross national product, and employing only 23,000 people, which was less than the United Fruit Company alone.[22] President Arbenz believed that in order to stimulate economic growth, he needed to utilize the land more efficiently and restructure the economy to become less dependent on exports, which would make it less vulnerable to price fluctuations in international markets.[23] According to Schlesinger and Kinzer, Arbenz desired to transform the Guatemalan economy into “a modern capitalist state…to free it economically from dependence on world coffee prices and to wrest control of the economy from the U.S. corporations controlling it….His strategy was to limit the power of foreign companies through direct competition rather than nationalization.”[24] Arbenz was not interested in creating a communist or socialist Guatemala, rather he desired to make Guatemala into a true capitalist society, and to push Guatemala to grow out of colonial trade relationships characterized by natural resource exporting, by developing Guatemala’s domestic industry.

Arbenz believed that one of the first steps towards developing Guatemala’s domestic economy was to redistribute unused land in order to stimulate more efficient use. A Library of Congress study conducted in 1949 showed that land redistribution was necessary for any real change in standard of living:

Raising the standard of living through diversification and mechanization is greatly dependent upon changes in the distribution of the profits and/or the land. The foreign corporations and the native large landowners oppose diversification and the development of a domestic market. To increase production [without land reform]…only benefits the owners who spend their profits abroad during trips or by the purchase of foreign luxury items or, as in the case of the United Fruit Company, the major portion of the profits goes abroad to foreign stockholders. The standard of living under these conditions cannot move strongly upwards without some changes in the distribution of profits or ownership.”[25]

On June 17^th, 1952, President Arbenz signed Decree 900, which stated that all uncultivated land in private estates of more than 672 acres would be appropriated and redistributed to peasants for lifetime tenures. Landowners would be compensated for their unused land at the price declared in past tax forms, and be given 25-year government bonds. Since landowners typically undervalued their land in tax forms to evade tax burden, they reacted angrily towards what they believed to be government under-compensation and unfair stealing of their land.

The United Fruit Company was particularly antagonistic towards the new law, which they claimed was targeting their private property. In February of 1954, when President Arbenz appropriated 174,000 acres of uncultivated land belonging to UFCO, the Company protested to the U.S. State Department that the land, which President Arbenz valued at $1,185,000 in accordance with UFCO’s tax forms, was actually worth $19,355,000. The State Department was quick to defend the UFCO, and in the next few months, UFCO’s complaints against the Arbenz Presidency would multiply.[26] UFCO played upon U.S. Cold War ambitions and spread propaganda about Arbenz as a Soviet Communist lackey in order to win sympathies with the state and the American people.

However, historian Piero Gleijeses proved that Arbenz’s agrarian reforms were actually rather good for the Guatemalan economy, and even stimulated UFCO’s growth. By June 1954, over 1.4 million acres of land had been expropriated, and roughly 500,000 Guatemalans benefited from these agrarian land reforms.[27] In addition, between March 1953 and June 1954, the National Agrarian Bank and the Crédito Hypotecario Nacional granted $11,881,432 in loans to peasants, who usually do not have access to credit. The surprising fact was that between March and November of 1953, of the $3,371,185 in loans granted by CHN, $3,049,092 had been repaid by June 1954, which meant that the loans were almost always being used in profitable ways.[28] The effects of the agrarian reforms were overwhelmingly positive:

The agrarian reform…unleashed new productive energies from both the peasants and those finqueros whose previously idle land was put into use….In August 1953 the Embassy reported a 15% increase in the production of corn….Almost a year later, the Embassy concluded that ‘production of food crops in 1953 was satisfactory…[and] about 10 percent higher than 1952,’ rice and wheat production had increased by 74 and 21% respectively over 1952, and bean production remained the same. In 1953 coffee production did decrease slightly, but this was ‘due principally to weather conditions.’ Furthermore, recovery was swift: the 1953-1954 coffee crop was the second highest in Guatemala’s history….The reform led to an increase of the area under cultivation….Fearing expropriation, many landowners hastened to cultivate land they had not previously tilled….And not even US officials, despite their dire prognostications, argued that Decree 900 was affecting the coffee crop of the landed elite….The former workers, now acting as independent producers, proved at least as efficient as the administrators who had overseen the Fincas Nacionales under [former President] Arévalo…. Despite UFCO’s furious complaints that the government was strangling it, and would eventually force it to leave the country, 1953 saw the highest level of banana exports since 1948, thanks mainly to favourable weather conditions and to a diminuation of labour conflicts.[29]

The data above proved that Arbenz’ agrarian reforms were successful at promoting Guatemalan economic development and world capitalism. In addition to economic gains, Arbenz increased rural literacy programs, and indigenous workers gained a sense of spiritual fulfillment through repossessing their native land for the first time in Guatemalan history.[30] Arbenz also sought to fight foreign monopoly of national resources by creating a national highway that would compete against the UFCO’s railroad monopoly, and building a public electric system to compete with General Electric, the nation’s only source of electric power. The construction of a national highway succeeded in lowering UFCO’s shipping prices, which benefited producers and consumers worldwide, and improved the global capitalism.[31] Though there were some land disputes and cases when peasant workers violently and wrongfully appropriated land from landowners, Whitten, a former State Deparment official, wrote that these cases were very few and far between compared with the number of total workers who received appropriated land peacefully and legally. Furthermore, many of these acts of violence were committed in self-defense, as landowners often perpetrated violence against peasants.[32]

Thus, Decree 900, though it had some flaws in application, was overall a very successful enterprise. In fact, Arbenz was following America’s example in creating agrarian reforms similar to those directed by the U.S. in Formosa and Japan.[33] The reforms were moderate in nature, not radical as the U.S. State Department and UFCO were eager to portray them, because they sought mainly to maximize efficiency by making use of land that was not being cultivated, and because the government legally compensated landowners for the land using the values that landowners themselves reported in previous tax forms. Nonetheless, the United States characterized the Guatemalan agrarian reforms under Arbenz as Communist, and propaganda quickly spread to justify U.S. covert action to dismantle his presidency.
Nationalism or Communism: Fact or Fiction?

Even though the U.S. State Department recognized that Decree 900 was successful at stimulating Guatemalan economic growth, the U.S. wanted Arbenz out of government because they felt he was too closely allied with Communists and was a threat to the Capitalist order in the Western Hemisphere: Gleijeses wrote:

The United States was willing –indeed eager – to subvert the most successful reform programme in Central America not just to protect its economic interests….The State Department was aware that the Communists were Arbenz’s kitchen cabinet, that they were the true champions of agrarian reform and that they were gaining influence and respect because of the reform’s success.[34]

Indeed, Arbenz had Communists as his closest advisors, though he was by no means a Communist himself, nor did he ever intend to lead a Communist government. Rather, according to historian Ronald Schneider, who was no fan of Arbenz, the liberal reformist President were impressed by the hard work, honesty, and trustworthiness of the Communists in his staff, who “sought advantage not for themselves, but for their cause” and they, “alone among the government’s supporters…had a programme that was specific.”[35] The U.S. State Department’s primary concern was that there were Communists in high positions of government in Arbenz and Arévalo’s administrations, indicating a dangerous growth of Communisty influence.[36]

To a certain extent, the State Department’s worries were well-founded. Arbenz was indeed sympathetic to the Communist cause; he, like his Salvadorean wife, Maria Vilanova, cared about social justice and made the agrarian land reform his primary cause. More importantly, by allowing Communists to be his closest advisors, and carrying through on Communist-devised plans in the Guatemalan countryside, the C.I.A. warned that Arbenz was “[affording] the Communists an opportunity to extend their influence by organizing the peasants as they have organized other workers.”[37]  In fact, Communist José Manuel Fortuny, one of Arbenz’s closest advisors and speechwriters, also believed that “by administering Decree 900 through local committees, it would be laying ‘the groundwork for the eventual radicalization of the peasantry…’ and sow ‘the seeds of a more collective society.”[38] The U.S. State Department worried that the Communist influence in rural Guatemala would spread to Honduras and El Salvador. Caught up in the paradigms of the Cold War, President Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers in the CIA could not conceive of Arbenz except as a dangerous Communist sympathizer, equivalent in their minds to a puppet of the Soviet Union.

Historian Richard Immerman wrote that the State Department mistook Arbenz’s nationalism for communism, that they acted on Cold War prerogatives and that there was no “Unifruco conspiracy,” that regardless of whether or not Arbenz expropriated land from the United Fruit Company, the State Department was going to try to topple Arbenz’s presidency because he was seen as a Soviet sympathizer.[39]  However, even Immerman conceded that the United Fruit Company helped persuade the State department that Arbenz was a Communist. In fact, Thomas Corcoran and Edward L. Bernays, two Fruit Company public relations agents, “bragged openly that they had promoted news stories about the Communist threat in Guatemala in order to convince the U.S. government to remove Arbenz.”[40] Though Immerman tried to draw a line between Communist threat and economic grievances, he acknowledged that United Fruit agents, “understanding that the Communist threat overshadowed the expropriation controversy…emphasized the supposed international conspiracy, not particular economic grievances” in their reports to Dulles and Eisenhower, and in this way, they played a significant role in the State Department and C.I.A.’s perceptions of Guatemalan politics.  Furthermore, Immerman wrote that “the most widely cited indications of Communist penetration were the hardships encountered by the United Fruit Company.” [41] Williard Barber, Truman’s deput assistant secretary of state for American republic affairs said in 1949, “Communist influences were those ‘alien to American ideals and which have affected Guatemala as a place for investment of capital.’”[42] The most prominent case by far of harm to American capital investment was the appropriation of United Fruit Company land; therefore, the line that Immerman tried to draw between the State Department’s understanding of Communist threat and UFCO land appropriation is a rather thin one.

John Coatsworth wrote in his introduction to the 2005 edition of Bitter Fruit, “the evidence of the era makes it difficult to believe that U.S. policymakers could have been worried about an imminent ‘Communist takeover,’ as they professed themselves to be.”[43] Instead, Coatsworth argued that UFCO’s connections to key decision makers in the U.S. government, and the fact that “every policy making official involved in the decision to overthrow the Guatemalan government, except for President Eisenhower himself, had a family or business connection to UFCO,”[44] was a more significant factor in the State Department’s decision-making process. Coatsworth quoted the Times Literary Supplement reviewer Greg Grandin: “the Cold War [was] more a pretext than a serious cause.”[45]

Historian Nick Cullather, who was first given access to the CIA’s files during its “openness” initiative, emphasized that it was the CIA rather than the UFCO that convinced the State Department to create a coup in Guatemala.[46] In Secret History, Cullather emphasized that the United Fruit Company did not profit from victory, that immediately after the Operation PBSUCCESS coup concluded, the Eisenhower administration broke down UFCO’s monopoly with an antitrust suit and forced UFCO to pay higher wages. However, even Cullather acknowledged the powerful role that UFCO played in choosing the next leader to replace Arbenz. Historian Paul Dosal wrote that John Foster Dulles supported the 1954 antitrust suit “on the grounds that the formal disassociation of the government from United Fruit would have a positive impact on U.S. relations with Latin America,” revealing that the anti-trust suit was primarily a State Department public relations effort. This only goes to show that the State Department considered it imperative to distract Americans from seeing what may very well be a real and reprehensible relationship between the State, the C.I.A., and the UFCO Octopus. [47]
Conclusion

From 1900 through 1954, the United Fruit Company had monopolistic and extractive power over the Guatemalan economy, and it established this power by way of bribery and corrupt crony relationships with Guatemalan dictators on one end, and compliant American governance, all too eager to engage in covert operations to dismantle a perceived enemy, on the other end. The Guatemalan Civil War, which took place after the collapse of the democratically-elected Arbenz adminstration, resulted in the army-led massacre of 50,000 to 75,000 Guatemalans, who were mostly unarmed indigenous farmers. The army also destroyed at least 400 towns and villages, and drove 20,000 people out of their homes.[48]The United Nations Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH) reported in 1999 that “continuous support [was] provided by the C.I.A. to the Guatemalan Armed Forces, even in periods when U.S. officials were receiving confidential reports of massacres and other human rights violations on a massive scale.”[49]  By contextualizing Guatemalan economic conditions during the Arbenz presidency and showing the rationale and efficacy of his reforms, and by showing UFCO’s efforts to manipulate U.S. Cold War fears of Communsim in order to garner support for its own economic interests, this essay demonstrates that there are three parties responsible for the human costs of the Guatemalan Civil War: first, the United Fruit Company; second, compliant U.S. State and Intelligence officers who defend the un-democratic and imperialist relationship between UFCO and Guatemala in the name of war; and last but not least, corrupt Guatemalan dictators, such as Cabrera and Ubico, who betrayed their country’s interests in favor of their own private gain, and who allowed excessive concessions to UFCO, thereby setting the Guatemalan economy up for path dependency with an arrogant foreign monopoly that exploited the country’s labor and natural resources. All three parties are responsible for the cycle of inequality, poverty, corruption, and violence that plagues Guatemalan politics to this day.

 

Bibliography

 

Bulmer-Thomas, Victor. The Political Economy of Central American since 1920. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Coatsworth, John. “Introduction to the 2005 Harvard Edition.” Bitter Fruit: The Story of the

American Coup in Guatemala. Schlesinger, Stephen, and Stephen Kinzer, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. Pp. x-xix.

Cullather, Nick. Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of its Operations in Guatemala,

1952-1954. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Dosal, P. J. Doing Business with the Dictators: A Political History of United Fruit in Guatemala,

1899-1944. Wilmington: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1993.

Gleijeses, Piero. “The Agrarian Reform of Jacobo Arbenz.” Journal of Latin American Studies

21:3. (October 1989).

Gleijeses, Piero. Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944-1954.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Immerman, Richard H. “Guatemala as Cold War History.” Political Science Quarterly, 95:4.

(Winter 1980-1981).

Immerman, Richard H. The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention. Austin:

University of Texas Press, 1982.

Lindo-Fuentes, Hector. “Was there a colonial legacy that blocked growth,” Economic History of

Latin America. Columbia University, September 17, 2007.

McCreery, David J. “An Odious Fedalism: Mandamiento Labor and Commercial Agriculture in

Guatemala, 1858-1920.” Latin American Perspectives, 13:1 (Winter, 1896). Pp. 99-117.

Neruda, Pablo. “La United Fruit Co.” The Essential Pablo Neruda: Selected Poems. Hass,

Robert and Mark Eisner, ed. San Fancisco: City Lights Books, 2004.

Schlesinger, Stephen and Stephen Kinzer. Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in

Guatemala. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Schneider, Robert. Communism in Guatemala: 1944-1954. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Inc.,

1959.

Streeter, Stephen M. “Interpreting the 1954 U.S. Intervention in Guatemala: Realist, Revisionist,

and Postrevisionist Perspectives.” The History Teacher, 34:1. (November, 2000).

Tuman, John P. and Craig F. Emmert. “The Political Economy of U.S. Foreign Direct

Investment in Latin America: A Reappraisal.” Latin American Research Review, 39:3 (October, 2004). Pp. 9-28.

Appendix

La United Fruit Co.

Cuando sonó la trompeta, estuvo
todo preparado en la tierra,
y Jehova repartió el mundo
a Coca-Cola Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors, y otras entidades:
la Compañía Frutera Inc.
se reservó lo más jugoso,
la costa central de mi tierra,
la dulce cintura de América.

Bautizó de nuevo sus tierras
como “Repúblicas Bananas,”
y sobre los muertos dormidos,
sobre los héroes inquietos
que conquistaron la grandeza,
la libertad y las banderas,
estableció la ópera bufa:

enajenó los albedríos
regaló coronas de César,
desenvainó la envidia, atrajo
la dictadura de las moscas,
moscas Trujillos, moscas Tachos,
moscas Carías, moscas Martínez,
moscas Ubico, moscas húmedas
de sangre humilde y mermelada,
moscas borrachas que zumban
sobre las tumbas populares,
moscas de circo, sabias moscas
entendidas en tiranía.

Entre las moscas sanguinarias
la Frutera desembarca,
arrasando el café y las frutas,
en sus barcos que deslizaron
como bandejas el tesoro
de nuestras tierras sumergidas.

Mientras tanto, por los abismos
azucarados de los puertos,
caían indios sepultados
en el vapor de la mañana:
un cuerpo rueda, una cosa
sin nombre, un número caído,
un racimo de fruta muerta
derramada en el pudridero.

Por Pablo NerudaThe United Fruit Co.

When the trumpet blared everything
on earth was prepared
and Jehovah distributed to the world
to Coca-Cola Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors and other entities:
The United Fruit Inc.
reserved for itself the juiciest,
the central seaboard of my land,
America’s sweet waist.

It rebaptized its lands
the “Banana Republics”
and upon de slumbering corpes,
upon de restless heroes
who conquered renown,
fredom and flags,
it established the comic opera:

it alienated self-destiny
regaled Caesar’s crowns,
unsheathed envy, drew
the dictatorship of the flies:
Trujillos flies, Tacho flies,
Carias flies, Martinez flies,
Ubico flies, flies soaked
in humble blood and jam,
drunk flies that drone
the common graves
circus flies, clever flies
versed in tyrrany.

Among the bloodthirsty flies
The Fruit Co. disembarks,
ravaging coffe and fruits
for its ships that spirit away
like serving trays
our submerged land’s treasures

Meanwhile, in the seaports
sugary abysses,
Indians collapsed, buried
in the morning mist:
a body rolls down, a nameless
thing, a fallen number
a bunch of lifeless fruit
dumped in the rubbish heap.

Translated by Jack Schmitt

---