Why We Shop at "Banana Republic?"

This is one of the best interviews you will ever hear about our economic situation. I recommend that you devote the 45 minutes to it. It may be the best 45 minutes you've invested in decades. After listening, read what I've documented about the U.S.'s military takeover of Guatemala directed by and for the benefit of the United Fruit Company. It's history - and shocking still to read.

Guns and Butter - The New Junk Economics: From Democracy to Neoliberal Oligarchy - February 10, 2010 at 1:00pm Click to listen (or download)

The following information is from Raj Patel's nonfiction book, Stuffed & Starved, published in 2007 (which I am currently reading), and it's not a hair out of date. I recommend this also. Find it at your local library. "The United Fruit Company" (UFC) "founded in 1899, was the world's largest banana merchant."

At its peak, the company controlled the trade not only in bananas, but also in freight, mail and money across an archipelago of Central American countries. It guarded its power jealously, and little stood in its way. When locally elected governments tried to curb the company's power, or when residents of the country organized to alleviate their exploitation, it struck back.

Most famously, the United Fruit Company used its connections in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations - especially through the Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, whose law firm had represented the company - to argue that Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, the democratically elected President of Guatemala, was about to become a Communist. The reason? Arbenz Guzmán had in mind to buy unused land from the UFC to give to landless peasants, at the artificially low price at which the UFC had declared the land's value on its tax returns. In response, the President (Eisenhower) authorized in 1954 a CIA-backed invasion of Guatemala, Operation PBSUCCESS. The resulting war claimed 200,000 lives, over 40 years. The land, however, remained in the UFC's hands. Hence, 'success.'

. . . The complicity of the UFC in Central American poverty has rarely been acknowledged in the US. It is a history that has been erased. Indeed, the shorthand phrase through which most people come to know of banana-exporting countries in Central America and the Caribbean reflects not a history of rapacity and violence but the comically inept regimes installed by the export corporations. Such countries are known not as victims of Empire, but as 'Banana Republics.' It's a taint which sullies the reputations of these countries' citizens, rather than reflecting back on the cause of their impoverishment. It is, in short, a textbook case of blaming the victim.

Today, the UFC has been rebranded as the warmer, fuzzier 'Chiquita Brands.' As a result of public relations exercises and 'fair trade' schemes, the company has worked hard to earn a slightly more favourable taste in our mouths. Not that it deserves it. The company recently paid a US $25 million fine as part of a guilty plea in its funding of paramilitary death squads in Colombia. But beyond the tribulations of this particular corporation, the trajectory of the UFC presents, in microcosm, the story of today's agribusiness conglomerates. It's a story of colonialism, control over channels of production, distribution, marketing and finance, mobilization of national interest, and a racialized repainting of the Third World (pg. 102).

And you thought the Iraq venture was a shot in the dark? Very dark, indeed. And you've always enjoyed shopping at "Banana Republic?" I remember when I went into the first one I had seen and immediately thought "Do these people know what a banana republic is?" For lovers of empire I guess it's all good. Keep in mind the perceived opinion of the "installed governments" of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the rest of the American-run/owned countries in that part of the world. Kind of puts a new twist on the machinations going on in ex-Soviet Georgia, doesn't it? Nuff said? Suzan ________________