In 1952, the United Fruit Company made the elected government of Guatemala a simple offer: If y’all want democratic self-government so badly, you can have it—for a small fee. It’ll cost you about $19,355,000.
If you’re just joining us, this is the second installment of “How Much Could a Banana Republic Cost?” The previous post introduced the goal of the series, which is to identify the rulers of the world. Are our lives run by Big Guns (armies and mafias), Big Green (multinational corporations and investors), or by Big Graphs (technocrats and tech companies)? The central question of the series suggests one way of finding out: by figuring out how much it actually costs to be the boss. The story that answers this question might also help explain why a sitting, elected national government was in the position of having to buy its own country.
Before we dive into comparing the Big Green, Big Guns, and Big Graphs theories, we should take a second to appreciate why we’d bother with any of them. All are ways of sidestepping the elephant in the room: the formal power structures of our elected governments. Many people assume that the formal “government”—those people with official titles in the state’s institutions—are also the true holders of power in society. Yet none of our three theories necessarily focus on elected officials. In 1952, Guatemala had its fair share: an elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, as well as an elected national Congress. The story of the United Fruit Company helps clue us in on what we’d be missing if we thought you could figure out who was in power just by looking at who was in office. We will need this larger kind of story, and the shadowy characters it involves, to find out who is really in charge of the world and how much a banana republic actually costs.
The history of banana republics gives us examples of the kind of thing that this approach might be missing. In the 20th century, you didn’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to suspect that official government positions didn’t name the actual shot callers—at least, not all of them. Long before it marked a preppy clothing brand, the term “banana republic” was widely used to refer to the authoritarian regimes propped up by US companies like the United Fruit Company (known today as Chiquita).