even before coming into office, some of Eisenhower’s closest advisors were looking to bring down one of Latin America’s remaining democracies, that in Guatemala. Urging them on was the United Fruit Company of Boston. Over the previous half-century, United Fruit had turned vast tracts of Guatemala into essentially a privately owned plantation, one worked by landless peasants. The company orchestrated a bitter political and legal counterattack when President Árbenz initiated agrarian reform in 1951, largely spearheaded by their onetime legal counsel in New York, John Foster Dulles.
