Preface to For the Record

Preface to
For the Record: The United Fruit Company's Sixty-six Years in Guatemala

By Diane K. Stanley
About the author

Few American companies operating in Latin America have been more consistently criticized than the United Fruit Company. Incorporated in New Jersey in 1899, the Boston-based banana company at one time owned or leased approximately 3.5 million acres in Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Panama, Cuba, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Colombia and Ecuador. In its peak years, during the 1930s, United Fruit employed upwards of 100,000 persons, more than 90 percent of whom were Latin Americans. Nowhere has the Company been more castigated than in Guatemala, where it began its operations in 1906, and sold its last holdings to the Del Monte Corporation in 1972. Historians, economists, journalists, politicians, lawyers and others -- both American and Guatemalan -- have written extensively about the United Fruit Company, usually in disparaging terms. In the 1950s, even Miguel Angel Asturias, Guatemala's Nobel Prize-winning novelist, wrote a bitter trilogy censuring the Company.

Most of the literature, particularly books and articles written by Guatemalans who participated in the revolutionary "ten years of spring" which the country experienced between 1944 and 1954, was published thirty to forty years ago. In the interim, the unremitting violence that has afflicted Guatemala for the last three decades -- some of which has been directed at scholars, regardless of their ideological persuasions -- has made Guatemalan historians extremely reluctant to analyze the ten years of the Arévalo/Arbenz administrations or that of succeeding governments. There is, therefore, a notable dearth of books by Guatemalan scholars who might have written more objectively about this convoluted period of their country's history.

Nearly all recent histories of Guatemala by North American scholars, however, continue to exploit the establishment's prevailing views of the United Fruit Company (today's Chiquita Brands International). These historians repeat the same negative assertions -- many of which are untrue or have been distorted. As a result, a "black legend" has evolved that holds UFCO responsible for a long list of nefarious practices, chief of which are a constant, reprehensible interference in the nation's politics, the ruthless exploitation of its workers, and the extraction of millions of dollars in profits, while contributing virtually nothing to Guatemala's development.

Having been born at a United Fruit Company hospital on Guatemala's north coast and lived for several years in the division headquarters for its south coast plantations, I have always found it curious that so many scholars have consistently repeated the same accusations about UFCO's Guatemala operations. It is even more intriguing that virtually no historians have sought to verify whether most of the oft-repeated charges are, in fact, valid. This book, which does not pretend to be an academic treatise, puts on the record essentially all of the criticisms that have been published about the United Fruit Company's tenure in Guatemala. While some of the allegations are certainly valid, it is also apparent that many others are completely erroneous -- as only a few authors have thus far pointed out. Not surprisingly, U.S. scholars have largely dismissed these writers as "apologists."

Most accounts about the banana company have also failed to describe the significant contribution that United Fruit made to Guatemala's human and economic development. In addition to providing employment to tens of thousands of workers and paying them the nation's best rural wages, the Company also offered its employees excellent medical care, rent-free housing, and six years of free schooling for countless children. By clearing and draining thousands of acres of jungle that are today among the country's most productive farm lands, United Fruit converted Guatemala into a major banana producer, thereby ending the country's unhealthy dependence on its exports of coffee. The Company's pioneering work in eliminating malaria and other tropical diseases early in the twentieth century also demonstrated that Guatemala's sparsely inhabited coastal areas offered rich, previously unexploited agricultural zones. Ultimately, the taxes and salaries that the United Fruit Company paid, and the millions of dollars of foreign exchange earnings that it annually generated, impacted in an important way on Guatemala's economy.

The book also examines the frequently repeated charge that the United States engineered the 1954 coup against the government of President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in order to regain the land Guatemala had expropriated from the United Fruit Company. Although UFCO was certainly instrumental in orchestrating an effective media campaign against the Arbenz government, it is clear that the Eisenhower administration was intent on ousting what it considered to be a Communist beachhead that threatened U.S. national security. Spurred on by John Foster Dulles, his vehemently anti-Communist secretary of state, President Eisenhower would have moved to depose Arbenz even if the United Fruit Company had never operated in Guatemala.

Finally, the book provides little-known information about the enormous effort that was required to establish immense banana plantations in the midst of isolated jungles, where health concerns and the oppressive heat were constant, debilitating factors. While United Fruit's complex and efficient division of labor was undoubtedly instrumental in transforming huge wilderness areas into productive farm lands, it was the employees -- Guatemalan, North American and European -- whose hard work made possible the conquest of Guatemala's disease-ridden coastal areas. In doing so, those rugged individuals and their families were forced to cope with the extreme isolation and overwhelming tedium that characterized life on a banana plantation. That they were able to do this, particularly early in the twentieth century, is a remarkable feat that has been little understood or recognized.