Before Venezuelan oil, there were Guatemalan bananas

Just as oil is one of the great motivations for US intervention in Venezuela, bananas were the focus of the coup d’état that overthrew the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954.

Following the US military attack that deposed Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on January 3, 2026, the Trump administration emphasized its desire to achieve more than conventional foreign policy objectives, such as combating drug trafficking or strengthening democracy and regional stability.

During his first press conference after the operation, President Donald Trump stated that oil companies would play an important role and that oil revenues would help finance any future intervention in Venezuela.

Soon after, the hosts of the program “Fox & Friends” questioned Trump about this prediction.

“We have the biggest oil companies in the world“, Trump responded, “the biggest, the best, and we’re going to be very involved in that.”

For Aaron Coy Moulton, a historian of US-Latin American relations, it is not surprising that oil, or any other commodity, is playing a role in US policy towards the region. What was surprising, however, was the outspokenness of the Trump administration about how much oil is influencing their policies towards Venezuela.

As he detailed in his 2026 book, “Caribbean Blood Pacts: Guatemala and the Struggle for Freedom in the Cold War”, US military intervention in Latin America was largely secret. And when the US orchestrated the coup that deposed the democratically elected president of Guatemala in 1954, it covered up the role that economic considerations played in this operation.

A powerful “octopus”

By the early 1950s, Guatemala had become one of the main banana sources consumed by Americans, a position it maintains to this day.

The United Fruit Company owned more than 550,000 acres of Guatemalan land, largely thanks to its agreements with previous dictatorships. These properties required the hard work of impoverished rural workers, who were often forced to abandon their traditional lands. Yours wages were rarely stable and faced periodic layoffs and pay cuts.

Based in Boston, the international corporation established contacts with dictators and local authorities in Central America, many Caribbean islands and parts of South America to acquire immense properties for railways and banana plantations.

Locals called it “pulpo” (octopus in Spanish), as the company apparently had influence on politics, the economy and daily life in the region. The Colombian government brutally repressed a strike by United Fruit workers in 1928, killing hundreds of people.

This bloody chapter in Colombian history served as the factual basis for a subplot in “One Hundred Years of Solitude“, an epic novel by Gabriel García Márquez, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.

The company’s seemingly limitless influence in the countries where it operated gave rise to the stereotype of Central American nations as “banana republics“.

Guatemala’s democratic revolution

In Guatemala, a country historically marked by extreme inequality, a broad coalition in 1944 to overthrow the dictatorship repression through a popular uprising. Inspired by the anti-fascist ideals of the Second World War, the coalition sought to make the nation more democratic and its economy fairer.

After decades of repression, the country’s new leaders offered many Guatemalans their first contact with democracy. Under the leadership of Juan José Arévalo, democratically elected and who governed from 1945 to 1951, the government established new social benefits and a labor code which legalized the formation and membership of unions, in addition to establishing eight-hour working hours.

He was succeeded in 1951 by Jacobo Arbenzanother democratically elected president.

Under Árbenz’s leadership, Guatemala implemented a agrarian reform program in 1952 that granted uncultivated plots of land to landless rural workers. The Guatemalan government claimed that these policies would build a more equitable society for the country’s indigenous and impoverished majority.

United Fruit denounced Guatemala’s reforms as result of a global conspiracy. It claimed that most Guatemalan unions were controlled by Mexican communists and Soviets and portrayed land reform as a ploy to destroy capitalism.

Pressure Congress to intervene

In Guatemala, United Fruit sought support from the US government in its fight against the elected government’s policies. Although its executives complained that Guatemala’s reforms harmed their financial investments and labor costs, they also viewed any interference with their operations as part of a communist conspiracy wider.

This was done through an advertising campaign in the USA and taking advantage of the anti-communist paranoia that prevailed at the time.

United Fruit executives began meeting with Truman administration officials as early as 1945. Despite support from sympathetic ambassadors, the U.S. government apparently did not intervene directly in Guatemalan affairs. The company appealed to Congress.

He hired lobbyists Thomas Corcoran and Robert La Follette Jr., a former senator, for their political connections.

Immediately, Corcoran and La Follette lobbied Republicans and Democrats in both legislative chambers against Guatemala’s policies – not as threats to United Fruit’s business interests, but rather as a communist conspiracy to destroy capitalism and the United States.

The banana company’s efforts came to fruition in February 1949, when several members of Congress denounced Guatemala’s labor reforms as communist.

Senator Claude Pepper called the labor code “obviously and intentionally discriminatory against this American company” and “a machine gun pointed at the head of this American company.”

Two days later, Representative John McCormack echoed this statement, using exactly the same words to denounce the reforms.

Senators Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. and Lister Hill, and Representative Mike Mansfield also spoke out publicly, repeating the main points outlined in the United Fruit memos.

No parliamentarian mentioned bananas.

Lobbying and propaganda campaigns

This communist lobbying and speeches culminated five years later when the U.S. government orchestrated a coup that deposed Árbenz in a covert operation.

This operation began in 1953, when the Eisenhower administration authorized the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to launch a psychological warfare campaign that manipulated Guatemala’s own armed forces to overthrow its democratically elected government.

CIA agents bribed members of the armed forces from Guatemala. Anti-communist radio broadcasts and religious pronouncements about communist plans to destroy the country’s Catholic Church spread throughout the territory.

However, the US armed anti-government organizations within Guatemala and neighboring countries to further undermine the morale of the Árbenz government.

E a United Fruit hired public relations pioneer Edward Bernays to spread advertising, not in Guatemala, but in the United States. Bernays provided American journalists with reports and texts that portrayed the Central American nation as a Soviet puppet.

These materials, including a film titled “Why the Kremlin Hates Bananas”, circulated thanks to friendly media outlets and members of Congress.

Destroy the revolution

Ultimately, the record shows that CIA efforts led military officials to depose their elected leaders and install a more pro-U.S. regime led by Carlos Castillo Armas.

Guatemalans who opposed the reforms massacred union leaders, politicians and others who had supported Árbenz and Arévalo. At least four dozen people died immediately after the coup, according to official reports. Local reports point to hundreds more deaths.

Military regimes ruled Guatemala for decades after this coup.

One dictator after another brutally repressed his opponents and fostered a climate of fear. These conditions have contributed to waves of emigration, including numerous refugees as well as some transnational gang members.

Negative consequences for bananas

To reinforce the claim that what happened in Guatemala had nothing to do with bananas, exactly as the company’s propaganda insisted, the Eisenhower government authorized an antitrust lawsuit against United Fruitwhich had been temporarily suspended during the operation so as not to attract more attention to the company.

This would be the first in a series of setbacks that would lead to the break-up of United Fruit in the mid-1980s. After a series of mergers, acquisitions and spin-offs, the only constant would be the ubiquitous Miss Chiquita logo emblazoned on bananas sold by the company.

And, according to many foreign policy experts, the Guatemala never recovered of the destruction of their democratic experience due to corporate pressure.