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 a machinery of terror so refined that, decades later, the world would see the same techniques used by US soldiers on the other side of the world.
This isn’t a story about fruit.
It’s about who is allowed to have a future and who is not.
SOURCES