Talk:United Fruit Company

message: Somehow, several sections of the article have been duplicated. Before making any further edits, the article should be cleaned up.   Willmcw 00:02, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Cleanup on Aisle 5

message: This entire article seems rather heavy-handed, favoring a particular political point of view.  As such, it's difficult to take any of it seriously.  A more balanced presentation would help. User:128.95.135.58 03:31, 19 November 2005
:That would be a rather difficult task because United Fruit really did do all this - and more. But hey, feel free to look for and include in an "alternative viewpoint" section the fiction dreamed up by various people, groups & think-tanks that clears United Fruit of any and all wrong doing - LamontCranston 18:00, 07 Dec 2005
::The Shadow knows and I agree.  PedanticallySpeaking 17:09, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Uh...thanks, I guess. LamontCranston 19:04, 07 January 2005 (UTC)

text: If a particular government or a particular leader disagreed with UFCO tactics and refused to give them what they wanted, UFCO usually took steps to have the government undermined, discredited, or removed altogether. As a result, the UFCO became a political force opposing democratic social and political reform whenever and wherever it developed in order to preserve its dominant place in the banana trade
This extremely broad statement used to be supported by the story of the coup that returned Manuel Bonilla to power in Honduras in 1910.  The trouble was that, as discussed at the top of this talk page by others, that coup was sponsored by Sam Zemurray, who then owned Cuyamel, a rival of United Fruit.  It was only 20 years later that United Fruit bought Zemurray's company, and 22 years later that Zemurray staged a hostile takeover of United Fruit.
The other example of UFCO's purported government-changing policy was Operation PBSUCCESS.  I've also done a little editing on that part of the article.  The CIA intervened in Guatemala because they feared Arbenz, an avowed leftist, was also secretly a Communist (one of his hangers-on, for example, was the then obscure young Argentinian doctor Ernesto Guevara).  UFCO might have lobbied to convince the US government that Arbenz was a Communist because they feared land reform, but the classified documents recently released by the CIA suggest that UFCO's role was minor, and that the CIA needed little convincing the Arbenz was secretly pro-Soviet (in the same way that, shortly afterwards, Fidel Castro, unbeknowst to the US government, turned out to have been secretly pro-Soviet). -- Eb.hoop 19:20, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

text: True. The CIA's declassified Freedom of Information Act files on Guatemala, found at http://www.foia.cia.gov/guatemala.asp, indicate that UFC's role must have been quite small. The only documents which I could find of much substance upon searching for "United Fruit Company" indicate that the CIA believed that the Arbenz government was attempting to plant weapons on UFC grounds in order to justify expropriating UFC's property. Appropriate changes should be made in order to highlight the fact that this is not fact, and a more balanced profile of references should be provided. User:Jackson744 07:01, 6 February 2006
*my 2 cents:  Worth of note, re: the CIA and United Fruit.  During the Guatamalia period the principle legal agent for the United fruit Company was John Foster Dulles of the Sullivan and Cromwell Law firm  His brother was Allen Dulles the head of the CIA (ref Breaksfast of Biodiversity).  So though I'm sure FOIA indicates minimal involvement of the UTF with CIA, this personal relationship is telling. Captain Barrett 07:09, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

text: The integrity of John Foster Dulles' "anti-Communist" motives has been discredited, since Dulles and his law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell negotiated the land giveaways to the United Fruit Company in Guatemala and Honduras. John Foster Dulles' brother, Allen Dulles, also did legal work for United Fruit and sat on its board of directors. Allen Dulles was the head of the CIA under Eisenhower. In a flagrant conflict of interest, the Dulles brothers and Sullivan & Cromwell were on the United Fruit payroll for thirty-eight years.
Why the scare quotes around "anti-Communist." Saying someone's integrity has been discredited is not unbiased fact, so needs to be rephrased or sourced. "Since Dulles and his law firm" introduces a non-sequitur; develop your argument of how land giveaways show someone is not an anti-Communist (or, better yet, don't, because this is supposed to be objective truth, not persuasive argument). There is no pretense of objectivity in the phrase "flagrant conflict of interest"; make it clear that the characterization comes from the source or else remove the opinion. --24.129.25.62 (talk) 19:51, 13 November 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Balance? 

message: Chomsky, Neruda, Schlesinger, Che... now all we need is Fidel Castro to make this article complete.  User:65.185.190.240 01:22, 23 February 2006
: The right really doesn't like to talk about a murdurous company they supported. Blue Leopard 04:51, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  There is a problem, however, in that denunciation of UFCo. was at one point a central component of Communist propaganda in Latin America, and some of these references are therefore probably biased.  I am sure someone can find a few mainstream academic studies to include here, by people who were not promoting a particular political cause.  (BTW, the first unsigned comment is not by me). -- Eb.hoop 12:20, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Refs

message: Oppose.  Keith was dealing with the Costa Rica government for almost thirty years before founding UFC.--Wehwalt 20:23, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Merge Keith article into this?

message: According to some sources, Ask or read the history of Costa Rica! The United Fruit Company and the USA invaded Costa Rica and were turned back! Your artical makes it sound like a little walk in the park. The following, copied from -
http://www.mssu.edu/international/mccaleb/CostaRica/abuses.htm   66.183.143.44 21:25, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Remarks by [[User:66.183.143.44|66.183.143.44]] 

message: *discussion before the newest proposal
**I don't support the merger. The UFC was an important actor in the history of Central America. Most readers searching for information regarding this history would expect to see a unique page. Many differences in how the two companies operate. Notmyrealname 17:42, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Oppose

message: Notmyrealname has removed my statement that the Latin American authors cited as critics of UFCo., Fallas, Amaya Amador, Asturias, García Márquez, and Neruda, were communists.  Fallas was a prominent activist in Vanguardia Popular, the Costa Rican communist party.  Neruda served as a senator for the Chilean Communist Party.  Amaya Amador emigrated to Czechoslovakia.  Asturias was a member of the communist Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo , accepted the Lenin Peace Prize in 1966, and his son became the head of the Guatemalan Marxist insurgency.  García Márquez joined the Colombian Communist Party in 1954  and has long been a prominent supporter and close friend of Fidel Castro.  Their work reflects a Leninist understanding of imperialism.  I think that their identification as communist is relevant and objective.
It's true, of course, that communists were not the only critics of UFCo., and the article cites several of them elsewhere.  But I think it should be made clear that part of the reason why UFCo. is so much more notorious than other powerful transnational companies is that it was a leitmotif of Latin American communist discourse for many years.  -- Eb.hoop 19:06, 22 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I have issues with some of the individuals affiliations (is Marquez still a member of the Colombian Communist Party?), but a larger concern I have is that the whole leitmotif assertion (and the general act of singling them out from other critics) is original research. Schlesinger and Kinzer's book Bitter Fruit probably brought the issue to more English-speaking-readers' attention than the others you mention put together. Piero Gleijeses does an even better job in "Shattered Hope." In fact, just about any solid historical book on Guatemala takes a pretty harsh view of the company. I'm sure many communists agreed, but the current (unsourced) argument gives the reader the false impression that the communists made the whole thing up. Notmyrealname 18:52, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Also, I as an uninitiated reader do recognise the communists without that being explicitly mentioned. More so, I even get the impression that if it weren't for the joint actions of banana companies and the U.S.A., some of them wouldn't even have become (that fierce) communists. So it could be a sort of "chicken and egg" question: which came first? If it is above any doubt they were pronounced communists from the beginning, it could therefore be worth mentioning IMHO, but I think this still would require strong arguments. /sv:Beryllium-9 83.253.231.49 05:43, 26 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I must also add that there is assumption that critics of United Fruit have an agenda, while defenders such as Diane Stanley do not have their political agenda questioned.  I think a more legitimate point is that the majority of defenders of the company are Americans, not Hispanics, and that is just as relevant if not more so than political orientation.  The fact that this article gives so much room to United Fruit apologists, who are a minority among those who have written about the effects of United Fruit on the region, is unacceptable. ~~  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.129.156.240 (talk) 02:55, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: It gives undue weight (two whoppping big quotes) to UF/American apologism while mentioning the large hatred of UF and the U.S. in South America virtually in passing. Paul Melville Austin (talk) 16:17, 20 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Communist affiliation of critics 

message: Shouldn't this story be inserted, too #Overthrow of government of Guatemala?
:Austerlitz -- 88.75.69.185 (talk) 23:36, 6 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Insert 

message: A pretty big chunk of text has been deleted, and I can't find an explanation for it here or in the edit history. Here it is:
===Reputation===
The United Fruit Company was frequently accused of bribing government officials in exchange for preferential treatment, exploiting its workers, contributing little by way of taxes to the countries in which it operated, and working ruthlessly to consolidate monopolies. Latin American journalists sometimes referred to the company as el pulpo ("the octopus"), and leftist parties in Central and South America encouraged the Company's workers to strike. Criticism of the United Fruit Company became a staple of the discourse of the communist parties in several Latin American countries, where its activities were often interpreted as illustrating Lenin's theory of capitalist imperialism. Major Latin American writers sympathetic to more independence from foreign governments and corporations, such as Carlos Luis Fallas of Costa Rica, Ramón Amaya Amador of Honduras, Miguel Ángel Asturias of Guatemala, Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia, and Pablo Neruda of Chile, denounced the Company in their literature. 
The business practices of United Fruit were also frequently criticized by journalists, politicians, and artists in the United States.  Little Steven released a song called "Bitter Fruit" about the company's misdeeds. In 1950, Gore Vidal published a novel (Dark Green, Bright Red), in which a thinly fictionalized version of United Fruit supports a military coup in a thinly fictionalized Guatemala. This reputation for malfeasance, however, was somewhat offset among those who worked for it or in the regions it controlled by the Company's later efforts to provide its employees with reasonable salaries, adequate medical care, and free private schooling. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Company and its successor, United Brands, created an Associated Producers Program that sought to transfer some of its land holdings to private growers whose produce it commercialized. As the Company gradually lost its land and transportation monopolies, its status as a capitalist bête noire declined.
Diane K. Stanley, a former U.S. diplomat and the daughter of a Welsh-born employee of the United Fruit Co. in Guatemala, argues in the book For the Record: The United Fruit Company's Sixty-six Years in Guatemala, published in 1994, that the negative perception of the company's influence in Guatemala is largely undeserved, and could be due in part to the unwillingness of left-wing journalists and writers to critically examine the legacy of the administrations of Presidents Arévalo and Arbenz. According to her:
Stanley also argues that while the company did orchestrate "an effective media campaign against the Arbenz government, it is clear that the Eisenhower administration was intent on ousting what it considered to be a Communist beachhead that threatened U.S. national security. Spurred on by John Foster Dulles, his vehemently anti-Communist secretary of state, President Eisenhower would have moved to depose Arbenz even if the United Fruit Company had never operated in Guatemala." See Preface to Stanley, Op. cit.
Is there a reason for this deletion?
Lapsed Pacifist (talk) 20:58, 1 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wholesale blanking 

message: The United Fruit Company was frequently accused of bribing government officials in exchange for preferential treatment, exploiting its workers, contributing little by way of taxes to the countries in which it operated, and working ruthlessly to consolidate monopolies. Latin American journalists sometimes referred to the company as el pulpo ("the octopus"), and leftist parties in Central and South America encouraged the Company's workers to strike. Criticism of the United Fruit Company became a staple of the discourse of the communist parties in several Latin American countries, where its activities were often interpreted as illustrating Lenin's theory of capitalist imperialism. Major Latin American writers sympathetic to more independence from foreign governments and corporations, such as Carlos Luis Fallas of Costa Rica, Ramón Amaya Amador of Honduras, Miguel Ángel Asturias of Guatemala, Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia, and Pablo Neruda of Chile, denounced the Company in their literature. 
The business practices of United Fruit were also frequently criticized by journalists, politicians, and artists in the United States.  Little Steven released a song called "Bitter Fruit" about the company's misdeeds. In 1950, Gore Vidal published a novel (Dark Green, Bright Red), in which a thinly fictionalized version of United Fruit supports a military coup in a thinly fictionalized Guatemala. This reputation for malfeasance, however, was somewhat offset among those who worked for it or in the regions it controlled by the Company's later efforts to provide its employees with reasonable salaries, adequate medical care, and free private schooling. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Company and its successor, United Brands, created an Associated Producers Program that sought to transfer some of its land holdings to private growers whose produce it commercialized. As the Company gradually lost its land and transportation monopolies, its status as a capitalist bête noire declined.
Diane K. Stanley, a former U.S. diplomat and the daughter of a Welsh-born employee of the United Fruit Co. in Guatemala, argues in the book For the Record: The United Fruit Company's Sixty-six Years in Guatemala, published in 1994, that the negative perception of the company's influence in Guatemala is largely undeserved, and could be due in part to the unwillingness of left-wing journalists and writers to critically examine the legacy of the administrations of Presidents Arévalo and Arbenz. According to her:
Stanley also argues that while the company did orchestrate "an effective media campaign against the Arbenz government, it is clear that the Eisenhower administration was intent on ousting what it considered to be a Communist beachhead that threatened U.S. national security. Spurred on by John Foster Dulles, his vehemently anti-Communist secretary of state, President Eisenhower would have moved to depose Arbenz even if the United Fruit Company had never operated in Guatemala." See Preface to Stanley, Op. cit.
Is there a reason for this deletion?
Lapsed Pacifist (talk) 20:58, 1 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Reputation

message: Shouldn't this article be added to the Totalarianism/Oligarchy project?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.171.69.146 (talk) 07:51, 25 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Oligarchy 

message: The latter half of this section gives enormous weight to just one book, and provides no citations. Might it be removed or reduced in size? 188.95.42.176 (talk) 18:54, 4 April 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: History in Central America

message: The quote on "Diane K. Stanley" is too long. It is an one person's view on the subject on United Fruit's reputation. It should be generalized in 2 to 3 sentence.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 123.185.175.53 (talk) 11:58, 11 May 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Diane K. Stanley's article too long? 

message: The 7-paragraph quotation regarding the Stanley book is 1. too long for fair use, 2. uncited (is it from the book, or an abstract, or what? it is unclear), and 3. one-sided. Is the Stanley argument regarded as canonical? Surely if the book is important there will be scholarly reviews of it. Discussing reception of the Stanley book and its arguments through the use of a variety of scholarly and serious reviews would be a good way of applying better NPOV to this article as a whole. In any case though the status quo cannot stand, largely for the first two reasons. It is also unencyclopedic to have extensive quotations from a single book (with the exception of when the article is about said book), on top of everything else. --Mr.98 (talk) 17:57, 11 July 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: The problem was that, without a proper explanation, the full "Reputation" section, which included a briefer quote from Stanley's book, was deleted some time ago.  Then someone added the very long quote again, in a different place in the article.  I've tried to fix this.  - Eb.hoop (talk) 15:14, 2 September 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Overly extensive (and uncritical) quoting 

message: Several of the external links seem to be shut down or broken - I'm sure others have noticed, but should something be done about this?
Dgainty (talk) 21:40, 15 February 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links 

message: I just did some research regarding delivery of bananas to Seattle's "Banana Terminal" during 1953-57. Specifically I was interested in dates immediately preceding the days where it's documented that the Northern Pacific Railway ran a "banana train" north to Sumas, Washington, and thence (via the British Columbia Electric Railway) to Vancouver, British Columbia. My source is archives of the Seattle Times newspaper for those days. The paper had a "Puget Sound Ship Movements" feature with this and other commercial ship information.
From my research, I found two ships named (multiple times) that are currently listed in this article as being sunk by Germany in WW II: Esparta and San Jose. I assume that the source for this information is in error? The only other explanation I can think of is that the names were recycled. Also, two ships are mentioned (multiple times) that do not appear in the article: Heredia and Parismina. All of the pertinent entries list the destination as "Banana Terminal" and the owner as "United Fruit" so I am pretty confident the info is correct.
I am not a historian for United Fruit so I do not plan to update the article. I thought someone else might wish to act on this information. -- Kent Sullivan (talk) 05:40, 26 February 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Great White Fleet 

message: Regarding this:
"After a period of financial decline, United Fruit was merged with Eli M. Black's AMK in 1970..."
As far as I can tell, most of the financial decline happened after the merger/acquisition. McCann certainly thought so, although he's probably biased. Kendall-K1 (talk) 19:12, 9 September 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Financial decline 

message: The "Great White Fleet" of steamships actually seems to justify its own page.  It's easily confused with the U.S. Navy's "Great White Fleet" which appears on the Wikipedia without any disambiguation page. UFC's "Great White Fleet" is quite historically important.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.171.23.59 (talk) 21:58, 20 February 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Search issue with "Great White Fleet" 

message: :Category:Latin American leaders ousted by the United Fruit Company was removed. It contained Jacobo Árbenz, Carlos Herrera. Might be worth adding info to this article if sourced in the bios. – Fayenatic London 17:56, 14 October 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Leaders ousted by UFC 

message: Diane Stanley's book has no scholarly standing whatsoever; searches through academic databases show that it has only a tiny number of citations, the publisher is not an academic one, and she is barely a secondary source, being as she is both an employee of the US government and the daughter of an employee of the company. There are numerous academic sources covering the UFC's role in Guatemala; Greg Grandin, Cindy Forster, Piero Gleijeses, Richard Immerman, Stephen Schlesinger, Stephen Kinzer, the list goes on. Using Stanley's book is unnecessary, and rather undue. Vanamonde93 (talk) 16:33, 3 April 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Diane Stanley 

message: The cables from US Embassy in Bogota to the Secretary of State have broken links. It would be great if someone could find another website with the cited cables and add context to the cable. In its current state, the article suggests that the Embassy seems to have reveled in UFCO's report of protester deaths, which I doubt is the case. Was "I have the honor to report" simply their manner of politely addressing the Secretary of State? --173.66.74.186 (talk) 12:49, 14 July 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Added archived links.  Turns out that the telegrams had been transcribed verbatim.--Nerdoguate (talk) 17:13, 14 July 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you for updating the links, but there's still a problem. In its current form, the article will cause Wikipedia readers to misunderstand what the Ambassador was saying. By saying "I have the honor to report," he was being respectful and formal when addressing the Secretary of State. Instead of reflecting that fact, the article seems to imply that Cafferey was supportive of the news that he was reporting. "I have the honor to report" must be read in context, or it will be misunderstood. If quoting the entire telegram isn't feasible, the "honor" part of the quote should be omitted. --173.66.74.186 (talk) 12:11, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: If you read all of the telegrams, you'll see that Cafferey only used the phrase "I have the honor to report..." in the telegrams about hundreds of strikers being killed. There is no additional context to include. Readers are free to draw whatever conclusions they want from that. It isn't our job to whitewash Cafferey's telegrams. Kaldari (talk) 23:00, 22 December 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  "I have the honor to report..." 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just added archive links to  on United Fruit Company. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add  after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add  to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/20131019113640/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qny7yFbZZS0 to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qny7yFbZZS0
When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true to let others know.
Cheers. —cyberbot IITalk to my owner:Online 07:04, 30 August 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: The sources regarding the Dulles brothers need greater evaluation. I have found no primary sources claiming that Allen Dulles was ever a board member for United Fruit. The sources listed that I could access also either don't mention this or leave the claim unsourced. Also the line:
"The integrity of John Foster Dulles' "anti-Communist" motives has been discredited."
This completely ignores the complex discussion within academic circles and "discredited" seem inappropriate. 
United Fruit did lobby for assistance but at this point the Dulles brothers disliked the company as they saw it as tarnishing the reputation of the United States. 
Nick Cullather, Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of its Operations in Guatemala, 1952-1954, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999)
RZAFALCO (talk) 23:46, 15 April 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dulles Brothers 

message: Why did the United Fruit Co depict a Rifle in their logo which seems weird, especially since it says "Bananas" above. --92.200.172.153 (talk) 17:37, 3 March 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Banana Rifle 

message: Why does it state that the company’s business was welcomed for bringing “western civilization” to Honduras, with no source for the claim or frankly even coherency with the rest of the section. Already flagged for lack of sources but nothing about the contradictory and seemingly subjective and/or leading statements.
Welcomed by whom? Meaning and proof of this civilization and of how a private business brings this about when its goal presumably is pure profit? 
It reads as incongruous with other given information (scarce sources here as well but at least consistent with rest of article). Presents as the mixed personal opinions of multiple writers right now rather than a factual account.
I don’t know enough about this topic to edit myself but hopefully someone else does. 2001:1BA8:1418:D101:E5DA:8712:ABD2:458B (talk) 01:36, 10 December 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Subjective and unverified info about company establishment in Honduras