Premium Episode 139 - United Fruit Company, Blood Bananas and the Guatemalan Genocide pt. 6: PBFORTUNATE SON

Programmed to Chill

[originally published on Patreon March 13, 2024]

I begin the episode with the elephant in the room - the Dulles brothers owning United Fruit Company stock. I explore Sullivan & Cromwell's connections to UFC as well as the Cabot family's ownership of UFC stock, and other government insiders. Depending on your inclinations, you can tell the story of the 1954 coup from the perspective of UFC or the CIA, but as it turns out, UFC and CIA were working symbiotically the whole time and were influencing each other in complicated feedback-loop ways.

I tell the story of Operation PBFORTUNE, the CIA's first attempt to overthrow the Arbenz government. Before that point, UFC hired Edward Bernays to promote the sale of bananas and to manage PR via weaponizing the Red Scare to go from the defensive to the offensive.

I discuss the dire state of US journalism about Guatemala. I go into the CIA's infiltration into the American Federation of Labor's attempts to do labor organizing in Guatemala. Then came the lobbying, with UFC first buying Democrats via Tommy the Cork Corcoran, then Republicans via John Clements. They acquired Castillo Armas, of whom much will be spoken soon.

Along the way, InterArmCo and Howard Hughes show up, and various Latin American countries were bought off. Arbenz outwitted the State Department's arms embargo but lost the war when their covert weapons purchase was revealed in the press. I argue that Arbenz was not the political babe in the woods or naif that he's been made out to be. Finally, I cover Guatemala's increasing isolation on the world stage before the events of June 1954. Songs: Why the Kremlin Hates Bananas Chiquita Bananas Commercial Banana Co by Radiohead