United Fruit Company
The United Fruit Company was an American corporation. It dealt with tropical fruits, especially bananas. These fruits were grown on Central and South American plantations. They were sold in the United States and Europe. The company was created in 1899 from Minor C. Keith's banana-trading concerns with Andrew W. Preston's Boston Fruit Company. It grew in the early and mid-20th century. It controlled vast territories and transportation networks in Central America, the Caribbean coast of Colombia, Ecuador, and the West Indies. It competed with the Standard Fruit Company in the international banana trade.
It maintained a monopoly in certain regions that came to be called banana republics.[1]
It had a deep and long-lasting impact on the economy and politics of many Latin American countries. Critics often accused it of neocolonialism. They described it as the example of the influence of a multinational corporation on the internal politics of countries. After a period of financial decline, United Fruit merged with Eli M. Black's AMK in 1970 to become the United Brands Company. In 1984, Carl Lindner, Jr. transformed United Brands into the present-day Chiquita Brands International.
United Fruit Company Media
Banana company staff in Jamaica as part of United Fruit Company campaign to promote tourism
An illustration from The Golden Caribbean
When President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán attempted a redistribution of land, he was overthrown in the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état
Main railroad station in La Ceiba, Honduras, in 1920
1929 map of the town of Tela
Early 20th-century Honduras agricultural brochure
1916 advertisement for the United Fruit Company steamship service
Routes of United Fruit Company steamship service (1924)
Dinner menu, T.E.S. Chiriqui, 1935
References
- ↑ Frederick Douglass Opie, Black Labor Migration in Caribbean Guatemala, 1882-1923, Florida Work in the Americas Series (University of Florida Press, July 2009)
