Did you know? Before Venezuelan oil, the US once went after Guatemalan ‘bananas’

When US President Donald Trump spoke openly about oil interests after the January 3, 2026, military operation that led to the arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, his candour stood out. Oil companies, Trump said, would play a key role in the future of Venezuela.

During a White House press appearance, Trump declared that oil revenues would help finance further intervention. Soon after, on Fox & Friends, he was asked about those plans.

“We have the world’s largest oil companies,” Trump replied, “ the biggest, the best, and we’re going to be very heavily involved in them .”

Also read: Trump suggested invading Venezuela in 2017, says former Colombian president

For historians of US-Latin American relations, the link between American foreign policy and resource interests is nothing new. What is new, however, is the openness with which economic motives are now acknowledged. In earlier decades, such interventions were carried out covertly, and commercial interests were carefully concealed behind ideological justifications. That was the case in Guatemala in the 1950s.

The Banana Empire

By the early 1950s, Guatemala had become a major supplier of bananas to the United States. The United Fruit Company owned more than 220,000 hectares of land in the country, much of it acquired through deals with past dictatorships. Its plantations depended on the labour of poor farmworkers, many displaced from ancestral lands, facing unstable wages and frequent layoffs.

Based in Boston, United Fruit forged close ties with dictators and local elites across Central America, the Caribbean and South America. Its reach was so vast that locals called it “pulpo”, the octopus, for its grip on political, economic and daily life. In Colombia, a 1928 strike by United Fruit workers ended in a brutal government crackdown that killed hundreds, later inspiring a scene in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

The company’s dominance gave rise to the term “banana republics”, nations shaped by foreign corporate power.

Guatemala’s democratic turn

In 1944, a popular uprising in Guatemala overthrew a long-standing dictatorship. Inspired by anti-fascist ideals after World War II, a broad coalition promised democracy and economic reform.

President Juan José Arévalo (1945–1951) introduced social protections, legalised unions, and established an eight-hour workday. His successor, Jacobo Arbenz, elected in 1951, launched an ambitious agrarian reform in 1952, redistributing uncultivated land to landless farmers. The government stated that its goal was to build a more equitable society for Guatemala’s poor and Indigenous majority.

United Fruit saw something else. The company denounced the reforms as communist-driven and claimed unions were controlled by foreign radicals. Agrarian reform, it argued, was designed to destroy capitalism.

Lobbying Washington

United Fruit turned to Washington. Executives met Truman administration officials as early as 1945, complaining that Guatemalan reforms hurt profits and raised labour costs. When direct intervention did not materialise, the company shifted focus to Congress.

Lobbyists Thomas Corcoran and Robert La Follette Jr. mobilised lawmakers, not by speaking of bananas, but by framing Guatemala as a communist threat.

Their message found traction. In 1949, Senator Claude Pepper called Guatemala’s labour code “manifestly and intentionally discriminatory against this American company” and “a machine gun pointed at the head” of the United Fruit Company.

Representative John McCormack repeated the statement verbatim days later. Other lawmakers echoed United Fruit’s internal talking points. Not one publicly mentioned bananas.

Propaganda and a Coup

By 1953, under President Eisenhower, the CIA launched a covert operation to topple Arbenz. Psychological warfare targeted Guatemala’s army. Bribes were paid. Anti-communist radio broadcasts warned of a plot to destroy the Catholic Church. Armed anti-government groups were supported by neighbouring countries.

United Fruit hired public relations pioneer Edward Bernays to shape American opinion. Journalists received company-prepared material portraying Guatemala as a Soviet puppet. A film titled “ Why the Kremlin Hates Bananas” circulated through sympathetic media and lawmakers.

The result was decisive. Army officers overthrew the democratic government and installed a regime led by Carlos Castillo Armas, aligned with US interests.

Aftermath

Supporters of Arbenz and Arevalo, union leaders, politicians and reform advocates, were massacred. Official reports recorded at least 48 deaths; local accounts suggest hundreds more. Guatemala soon fell under successive military regimes that ruled through repression and fear, driving waves of migration and long-term instability.

To reinforce the claim that the coup had nothing to do with bananas, the Eisenhower administration later authorised an antitrust case against United Fruit, a proceeding paused during the operation to avoid scrutiny. The company eventually collapsed in the 1980s. All that remains today is the Miss Chiquita logo on supermarket bananas.