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Re:The Miracle of the Modern Banana by bogomipz on Thursday August 11, 2016 @01:34AM (#12266437)
And most of the bananas success is is due to the United Fruit Company(nee Chiquita) an American company. In fact the term "banana republic" comes from United Fruits conspiring and helping to overthrow governments in both Honduras and Guatemala that were unfriendly to its exploitive and questionable practices.

In a stroke of PR genius The United Fruit then appropriated a mascot - The Señorita Chiquita Banana based on Carmen Miranda's "The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat", from the Hollywood movie "The Gangs All here." Youtube it if you want some entertainment. This largely put an innocuous public image on their immoral business practices.

"The Banana Company" in Gabriel Garcia's "Hundred Years of Solitude" is also an allusion to the United Fruit Company.

I can recommend this read on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/Bananas-United-Fruit-Company-Shaped/d...

Re:The Miracle of the Modern Banana by acqq on Thursday August 11, 2016 @04:36AM (#12266891)
Thanks, a nice introduction to the topic. Some details in the following article:

"In June of 1954, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower approved a coup, led by the Central Intelligence Agency, to drive Árbenz out of power. It was subtle and designed to be secret: Almost $3 million was allotted for the operation, and the largest expenditure was for "psychological warfare and political action” designed to limit detection of American fingerprints. CIA director Allen Dulles wrote in a memo to President Eisenhower that, “The entire effort is…more dependent upon psychological impact rather than actual military strength.”

The gambit worked, and when the coup ended, the CIA installed a new president sympathetic to American interests. Árbenz was taken to the airport, stripped to his underwear, paraded before cameras, and exiled to Mexico. The fight with the United States that had cost him his dignity was over taxes, land, and wages. But at its core, it was about bananas.

Árbenz spent the next few decades wandering around Mexico, Switzerland and France. Meanwhile, Guatemala, stripped of its leader, its dignity, and its national ambition, descended into civil war. The conflict lasted 36 years."

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/people-and-culture/food/th...

And in Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A...

Re:The Miracle of the Modern Banana by HalfwayToDice on Thursday August 11, 2016 @05:09AM (#12266967)
The idea that a banana company got the CIA to overthrow a country suits a kinda leftwing hackernews narrative, but it's largely nonsense of course.
Re:The Miracle of the Modern Banana by bogomipz on Thursday August 11, 2016 @06:45AM (#12267206)
You should do some reading on the subject before offering your uninformed opinion as fact.

Nobody said a banana company overthrew a government but rather they colluded with folks who could. And it was an obvious choice a they were hugely influential and well connected as the country's largest employer. They also controlled some of the only infrastructure in the country in the form of railways.

The CIA was involved because because it had a vested interest in keeping leftist governments out of the Americas. The CIAs involvement as well as the US interventionist policies in Central America are fact. They are both well very well known and documented. They also largely continued right up through the 1980s(See the Sandinistas, The Iran Contra Affair.) Hello?

Here is a nice time line outlining different affairs:

https://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/us-interventions-in-lati...

and the the Guatemalan incident being referred to above is documented on the CIAs own website:

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...

Your own comment is largely nonsense of course.

Re:The Miracle of the Modern Banana by TorKlingberg on Thursday August 11, 2016 @06:27AM (#12267153)
Are you going to argue a point or just act condescending?