The CIA overthrew Guatemala’s democracy to protect United Fruit’s monopoly

Evidence

In 1954, the CIA used a banana plantation on Honduras’s particularly impoverished north coast to train a U.S.-backed rebel army that went on to overthrow the democratically elected government of Guatemala. The Guatemalan government had been guilty of threatening the near-monopoly powers of the United Fruit Company, which had bought out Sam Zemurray’s firm and made him its top official. The Honduran plantation where the rebels trained was also owned by United Fruit—known today to banana consumers as Chiquita. — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 281

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: The famous 1954 Guatemalan coup figures in many Cold War histories; this ties it specifically to Chiquita.

Related

• The 1954 Guatemalan coup was staged from a United Fruit plantation in Honduras (similarity 0.94)
• The CIA trained Guatemalan rebels on a United Fruit plantation in Honduras in 1954. (similarity 0.92)
• The CIA overthrew elected governments to protect corporate and ideological interests. (similarity 0.81)