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EdgyIndividualistBuffoon wrote

Fascinating subject.

On United Fruit Company's Board of Trustees was Allen Dulles. He was also recently appointed head of the CIA. His brother, John Foster Dulles, also invested in UFCO, was the US Secretary of State. It should be noted that these companies often purposefully undervalued their property for tax reasons. Arbenz may have taken away their property, but he compensated them based on their own declared value.

25% of UFCO's Banana production was in Guatemala, so they weren't just a menace to one country; they were pulling this shit all over Latin America.

Check out this memo by the US Ambassador to Colombia communicating their exploits in Colombia: http://i.imgur.com/0cFFVnS.jpg

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company#History_in_Central_America

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars

The UFCO (now Chiquita) isn't/wasn't the only one with blood on their hands though.

For example there's also the ITT Corporation, who owned the telecommunications of Brasil. ITT feared the democratically elected João Goulart would bring about nationalization of this vital industry as a part of his land reform program - so the President of ITT Corporation, Harold Geneen, got his good buddy John McCone (director of CIA) to interfere.

This would eventually lead to the 1964 Coup in Brasil and the installation of the military dictatorship of Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco. Fun Fact: John McCone would later work for ITT Corporation afterwards. ITT Corporation would then go on to finance opponents of the democratically elected (seeing a trend here?) socialist Allende government in the 1973 Chilean Coup, installing Pinochet.

And of course everyone already knows about the death squads in Nicaragua, which was very much a response to agrarian reforms. Same story with Cuba.

As you can see this is nothing peculiar, this is essentially the history of the US relationship with Latin America (and the west's relationship with much of "third world" in general). American companies owned (and still own) large areas of arable land, the product of which is/was being created to be exported and exchanged...

This creates an obvious problem - you can't feed a people if the land that would otherwise be used to produce food to be consumed is being used to produce food/goods in order to export and exchange them (the resulting profit also being exported). So when citizens of Latin American countries finally were allowed to vote for their leaders, naturally they voted for those who promised agrarian reform, hence why so many socialists are/were elected.

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