Today in Labor History October 19, 1944: A coup was launched against dictator Juan Federico Ponce Vaides, beginning the ten-year Guatemalan Revolution, which led to the rise of democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz, and the only years that representative democracy existed in Guatemala from 1930 until the end of the civil war in 1996. Arbenz won the presidency in 1950, promising to transform the nation from a feudal economy into a modern, capitalist state. He led the implementation of social, political and agrarian reforms that were influential across Latin America. However, the reform that most angered the wealthy elite, and the leaders of United Fruit, were his agrarian reform policies, including the immediate transfer of all uncultivated land from large landowners to their poverty-stricken laborers.
United Fruit was the largest corporation operating in Guatemala. They controlled vast territories and transportation networks throughout Central America, Colombia, and the West Indies, and maintained a virtual monopoly in the so-called banana republics of Costa Rica, Honduras, and Guatemala. At the bequest of United Fruit, CIA-director Allan Dulles, who was also a board member of United Fruit, orchestrated a coup that overthrew Arbenz in 1954, leading to decades of genocide against the Indigenous Peoples of Guatemala, as well as the torture and murder of thousands of Communists, Socialists, labor leaders, clergy and activists. In the 1980s, United Fruit officially became Chiquita. Their violence and corruption were described in the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Thomas Pynchon, O. Henry, and Pablo Neruda.
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