Throughout the mid-twentieth century, the overweening role of US banana companies in Central America provoked the region's major reformist and revolutionary currents. The United Fruit Company (UFCO) and its chief competitor, Standard Fruit, brazenly flaunted national sovereignty, monopolized land, and brutally repressed workers to achieve their ends. Over the companies' scandalous historical record, 1954 stands out as particularly significant: in that year UFCO, through the US Central Intelligence Agency, engineered the removal of Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz, who had redistributed the company's unused land to workers and peasants. Next door, in Honduras, UFCO also found itself on the defensive, albeit with a remarkably different outcome. There, workers initiated a strike that quickly spread throughout the company's estates and then to dockworkers, Standard Fruit farms, and, via sympathy strikes, workplaces throughout the country. As a result, UFCO was forced for the first time to negotiate a union contract with its workers....
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