Yet, as Guatemala wakes up to the seventieth anniversary of the US-backed military coup that ousted Árbenz, the tide might be turning against the prominent banana producer. In June 2024, a civil case jury in the Southern District of Florida deemed Chiquita Brands liable for financing the notorious far-right paramilitary group Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), responsible for various human rights crimes during Colombia’s half-century-long civil war, and with proven ties to its US-armed and trained army.
“Chiquita knowingly provided substantial assistance to the AUC to a degree sufficient to create a foreseeable risk of harm to others,” the jury stated. Chiquita Brands has been ordered to pay $38.3 million to the families of eight victims of the now-disbanded paramilitary group, “blacklisted” as a terrorist organization in the United States and the European Union.
As previously reported by Jacobin, the verdict is likely to “impact the many other pending cases that have attempted to demonstrate the links between Colombia’s Western-backed ruling class and paramilitary groups, often going unresolved due to witness tampering.” Former president Álvaro Uribe is one of Colombia’s potentates who built a political career out of the half-century-long armed conflict and good relations with US capital (among them Chiquita Brands), and who is currently being charged for alleged ties to AUC paramilitaries, whose operations Uribe is said to have “helped expand” to prevent any social change that ran the risk of disrupting the status quo, the poverty, and unjust land concentration that lay the foundation to the Colombian civil war in the 1960s.
Much as in Guatemala, the roots of the United Fruit Company’s banana capitalism run deep into Colombia’s soil. In December 1928, three thousand banana workers attached to the newly formed Magdalena Workers’ Union (USTM) took to the streets in the Caribbean coastal town of Ciénaga. In accordance with the United Fruit Company’s — and US — contemporary political discourse, and in tandem with the Monroe Doctrine, the strikers were branded “Communists,” the mere forerunners of a political plot that sought to overrun the Colombian government and nationalize the banana industry.
The US government, led by President Calvin Coolidge, had turned its Latin American “backyard” into a patchwork of sites for finding cheap goods and prosperous investment opportunities. Various sovereign nations — besides Cuba, also the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Venezuela — were under the direct military control of the US Marine Corps. With this geopolitical chessboard in place, Coolidge wasn’t particularly eager to experience a wind of change in Colombia.