This is the story of how an exotic berry in Jamaica built a multinational empire: the United Fruit Company, El Pulpo, The Octopus, a corporation so powerful it could make and break nations.
How a need for cheap bananas led a private company to gain control of land, ports, railways, electricity, dictators… and then call in the world’s most powerful military to destroy a democracy that threatened its profits.
It’s a story of plantations run like prisons, of psychological warfare, of villages burned in the name of “freedom” and of how the model built here was exported across Latin America, creating decades of dictatorships, death squads, and disappearances.
SOURCES