The Fifties

by David Halberstam

Guatemala was one of the poorest places in the Western Hemisphere. No wonder American policymakers feared that it was a fertile place for Communism to take hold. A small oligarchy owned most of the land, wages were desperately low (in recent months there had been strikes by workers on United Fruit’s banana plantations seeking wages of $1.50 a day), and United Fruit, with the help of bribes and payoffs, controlled the political process of the country. It also controlled, either directly or indirectly, as Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer note in their book Bitter Fruit, some 40,000 jobs in Guatemala, and its investment there was valued at $60 million. Almost all of Guatemala’s railroad tracks belonged to a subsidiary of United Fruit; and in addition, United Fruit owned the telephone and telegraph facilities and ran the most important Atlantic port. Virtually anything that was modern belonged to La Frutera; what was old and broken-down belonged to the nation. Of La Frutera’s vast acreage of land, a relatively small percentage was kept under cultivation, in order not to flood the market with bananas and bring the price down. By 1950 the company reported an annual profit of $65 million, a figure that represented twice the total revenue of the Guatemalan government. No one important in the Guatemalan government existed without the approval of United Fruit. As such the country was traditionally run by anti-Communist dictators, plucked out of the military, who liked to use t...