Original subtitles

In 1951 the United States CIA head had invested in a fruit company in Guatemala.

But then the government did something that hurt their profits so he started a thirty six year

civil war that ended in genocide.

The rise of the banana republic is a story as old as agriculture itself.

It’s as old as the first moment that those farming communities realized that it was now

more valuable to enslave rather than simply to kill.

It’s as old as all those ancient empires that those shackled masses raised up like

Atlas from the earth.

As hard as it is to swallow it’s a cornerstone of why humans developed civilization at all.

It’s the dual hope of finding someone else to give our toil to while protecting ourselves

from those who would force theirs upon us.

And moral or not, it underpins all post-agricultural society.

It’s the temptation buried in our fields.

And the only thing that ever truly seems to change is who gets to be the us.

And in turn that hard truth will hang over our species until our very last breath because

this was the trade we made for agriculture.

However, for the purposes of keeping this episode under nine hours long, I’m going

to start today’s story in 1892.

Because the allegory I’m exploring today is the destruction of Guatemala, and in 1892

the military presidente of that then forty year republic was making a decision that would

all but guarantee it.

He was trying to sell some coffee.

Which is to say that he was going to build a port city, name it after himself, and then

build a railroad halfway across the country to the steps of his farm and those of his

personal version of us.

And because he had the power, he wasn’t going to pay a dime.

Not that he was going to do any of the actual farming himself, of course.

Mr. Presidente was Criollo.

Which, sort of goes without saying.

He kind of had to be.

This was a society split into racially-based classes.

If you weren’t a full-blooded European you weren’t allowed into politics in Guatemala

in the 19th century.

You could never be a general, let alone a presidente.

And what’s more he was a peninsulare, a Spaniard.

He was on top of the top.

Not just in a socially nuanced sense, either, but in the actual practicable law of the country.

And yet, every society needs workers.

We can’t all be presidente.

So, Guatemala, being a colony, did what colonies are built to do.

It conquered people, lumped them together under a single race, voted itself their land,

and then either enslaved them or offered it back to them as sharecroppers.

It gave itself a virtual guaranteed national labour force.

And what's more it was one that you could spot with the naked eye.

They even went so far as to invent clothing styles to designate individual groups within the indigenous.

Many still wear those clothes today.

Yet the races themselves only made sense within the system that was imposing them.

They were a truly Guatemalan form of identity.

Because neither Maya nor Criollo would have truly felt united in their original forms.

Back home in Spain, an Italian was seen as a them, not an us, and the same went for the

various groups that were formed into Maya.

A thousand years before their ancestors would have seen each other as distinctly as any

Europeans, and they would have fought their own wars of enslavement to get workers for

the farms of their own kings.

They too felt the temptations in their fields, just as much as any other.

But those days were dead.

They’d been conquered.

And to the Spanish eye that built their new identity, even the Maya kings were just another fieldhand.

In 1892 the best this bottom rung of Guatemalan society could even hope for was a tiny plot

on someone else’s farm in exchange for a harvest’s worth of work.

Just enough to feed their families.

The less lucky among them had to settle for a day wage that couldn’t possibly meet their bills.

These were known as the mozos, which directly translates to servants, but on a more colloquial

level just means the indigenous.

Kings and all.

On paper the mozo had the freedom of movement but in practice most lived a life of near-abject

servitude, forced to exist within a system where their labour was never enough to pay

off the debt that their employers constantly kept them under.

It was slavery with a good PR firm, I suppose.

Yet the harder they worked the more natural it seemed to everyone else that they always

should be the ones to do it.

For the middle class Ladinos, the mixed-race merchants and artesans who populated the cities,

their own survival meant playing along just as much as those above them.

In fact, more.

They knew the struggle to stay out of the fields far more than any Criollo ever could,

and they’d fight just as viciously to keep their place exactly as it was.

And so year after year, generation after generation, things settled into what was effectively considered

the natural state of things.

And by 1892 it's simply how it was.

Es o es, as they say.

But to call it settled would be a vast overstatement.

Because as it was with all societies, especially slave societies, just because the government

said that was the system doesn’t mean it was in everybody’s hearts.

You might call people a race and then deem them united but that doesn’t mean they see actually

themselves that way.

Especially when they're on top.

In the halls of power there is no us.

And for all the resistance against this military rule, it wasn’t the opposition who removed

el presidente from power, but his own people.

His us.

His railroad had driven that economy into ruin, and what’s worse he hadn’t even

been able to finish it.

Their farms couldn't get to port.

And for the landowners who kept him in power, that was a fate worse than death.

So they killed him.

With his corpse still hot in the ground the Criollo threw up a new presidente to manage

their bankruptcy.

To try to salvage the country from the ruin that it had self-dealt.

But there was no turning it around.

Unless they got a massive, country-size bailout they were going to default on their loans.

And for a new country surrounded by enemies this wasn’t just an economic problem.

The republic already lost land to British Belize.

What’s to say that the bank wouldn’t take more?

What's to say that the country would survive at all?

So in that desperation and presumably with a lot of bribes that new presidente did what

so many of his neighbours had done before him and made a decision that even then

he knew would one day destroy him.

He opened their doors to el Pulpo: the Railroad tycoon Minor Cooper Keith and his famously

abusive United Fruit Company.

And even though it was still twenty four years before they would famously massacre their

striking workers in Colombia, in 1904 the government of Guatemala would have been fully

aware of what this decision meant.

Not just for them, not just for the mozo but for everyone they wrote the laws for.

In countries all around the Caribbean United Fruit had built a banana empire on the land

that governments had handed over completely when they defaulted on Minor’s railroads,

and once he'd set up shop in those lands, he’d turn around and use that empire to

corrupt their lawmakers.

To gain more land.

All of it with the tacit understanding that American power would come to his aid if attacked.

After all, he’d bribe them too.

In him was a tiny taste of the colonization that they’d inflicted on those before them.

In him was that ancient temptation from those fields.

He was the new conquistador and at the turn of the 20th century he controlled the Caribbean

with an absolute iron fist.

So obviously, letting him in was no small thing.

It was like letting in the mob.

It was like letting in Cortes himself.

One foot on their land and he’d take the whole thing.

They knew it.

But that presidente signed the paper anyway.

He gave them exactly what they wanted, right down to the penny.

By the time the new president’s term ended the United Fruit Company had taken near total

control of the country’s infrastructure.

Puerto Barrios and the railway that cost them their freedom was handed over in it’s entirety.

They controlled the port and the transport to it, not to mention over half the country’s farmland.

If they thought something was valuable, they made sure that the government voted to give

it to them.

Mostly for free.

After all, who was going to stop them?

The Criollo?

Twenty years after that assassination United Fruit dominated that country so thoroughly

that they even ran the post office.

This was the time of the gringo.

Their control would span generations, it would influence the lives of millions of mozos,

ladinos, and criollos – now all simply Guatemalan in the eyes of this new American other.

But in 1920 a new leader came to power and he disagreed.

It wasn’t even that he was trying to protect the workers, that wasn’t the issue.

Not really, anyway.

The issue was that they weren’t even using the land they’d been given.

They just wanted to hold it so that nobody else could.

So that by not using it they could have no reason to pay tax.

That by not using it they could increase the labour market's desperation to the point that

they would literally work on it for food.

And to the new presidente this wasn’t just an attack on the Mozo, but the nation itself.

And he was entirely right, as well, I think it should be stated.

That country survived, like all countries thanks to taxes, and other than a couple bribes

paid to the right people United Fruit had done a very good job of avoiding paying those.

The only real investment they were putting back into the country was what it took away to farm.

So really, the company was a drain, a vampire.

And of course it was.

It was built to do that.

Just as the colony was built to do that before it.

They were stealing resources and using local labour for the benefit of a foreign power.

The only difference was what they meant when they said us.

Which rattled Guatemala, as you might expect.

Because they'd always felt that they should be on top.

And race and economics are twins.

So for many in the halls of power, the worst thing that was happening, the worst thing

of all of it, despite all of what they stole from the country was that this new paradigm

shift had shattered their historic racial control that they’d originally brought el pulpo in to protect.

Even if only by coincidence.

Rather than propping up what the Criollo saw as their rightful place at the top of the

pile, by bringing in United Fruit they’d been forced to see themselves as just another middle.

The us in the reflection of the American them said Guatemalan, not European.

And just like the Spanish with the Maya before them, these gringos showed absolutely no respect

for their kings.

The new power came from abroad.

So in 1920 when that new president decided to take back the unused land from the company

his clock started ticking.

Four months later and that octopus reached in with its little tentacle and plucked him

back out.

Flicked him off to exile in France.

A kindness that they didn't kill him.

The new presidente didn’t hesitate to sign over everything that the company demanded.

Because the Criollo understood now.

Times had changed.

But it wasn't just Guatemala where they'd changed.

In America things had also started to take a turn.

And they had a new fear, a fear that was growing like a cancer.

The company started to take a harder line with its workers.

It started to take more interest in the crackdowns of the government.

They replaced their dictator with a man who made him look like a mouse in comparison.

A man who was finally brutal enough to please both company and the CIA alongside them.

A man who would go so far as to call himself the Hitler of Guatemala.

His name was General Jorge Ubico, and he ran the country like a prison.

He declared war on the mozo, naturally believing them all to be communists because why wouldn't

they be given what they were doing to them.

His world was a reflection of his own fears, and the fears of the Americans who controlled

his fate.

Anyone caught espousing anti-imperialism was called a terrorist, and killed for actions

against the state.

Which wasn’t really wrong because the state existed for imperialism.

That was the system.

So those who disagreed he shot on sight.

Anyone who questioned the rights of the Criollo as the natural rulers of the country, or the

rights of the company to the nation’s land, would quickly find themselves in a shallow grave.

He was everything the CIA wanted and more.

It’s just that he wouldn’t stop calling himself Hitler.

And this was the 1940’s, you can’t really be an American ally and say that fascism is

the future during the war.

Well, I suppose you can, but only if you keep the country under control.

And by 1944 General Ubico was having a bit more trouble with that than what he wanted to admit.

Labour power after the war was at a generational high and so even the ladinos had started to

demand their say in government.

Unrest was everywhere in the country.

So with the US media turning its great Sauronic eye towards the oppressions of this openly

fascist ally against the CIA decided his time was up.

But it wasn’t like they wanted any actual change.

This was their goal.

Hell, this was their guy.

Fascism is fine as long as it doesn’t call itself that in public to the media.

And so with him out the door they just scooted his number two.

He was supposed to do the exact same thing.

Another general, another generation of stagnation.

Only, this time the people of Guatemala had had enough.

A coalition set up to depose a foreign colonizer, created in the reflection of what they've

been told they were.

They united not around the idea of being Ladino, or Criollo, or Mozo but Guatemalan.

They saw these workers as their countrymen.

These servants as citizens no different than them.

And what’s more, they saw the stranglehold that that monopolization had placed on their

economy for generations.

In 1944 Guatemala cast out that puppet government and demanded free elections.

Free elections that they would get.

And with nearly the entire country united against him, there was nothing that new Hitler

could do but allow it.

However, his bosses in the United Fruit Company disagreed.

They wouldn’t be so forgiving.

They didn't care what it took.

They and the CIA would make sure that that country felt the weight of their decision

to try democracy.

So the incoming president would survive 25 coup attempts in six years, and even that

was a low number.

His survival was mostly just because he never took the company head on.

He danced around what all the people demanded of him.

But his successor wouldn’t be so lucky.

He couldn't escape it.

And he’d attempt what they’d tried all those years ago in 1920.

He was going to take back the unused land from the company and redistribute it to Guatemalans

who’d farm it.

It wouldn't technically be stealing, because he was going to pay them.

He was just going to pay them exactly what they’d been claiming the land was worth

on their tax returns.

So naturally, there was no way they’d let him live.

The CEO did what any incredibly corrupt international businessman does and he called in a favour

with a powerful friends.

He spoke to a man with a serious investment in his fruit company.

A stockholder, a shareholder, a man who had already spent years tinkering with Guatemala's

democracy at his request.

A man with a great deal to lose if United Fruit collapsed.

A man named Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA.

And in response to that conversation, surely, at some point Allen would have driven over

to the White House and had a chat with his brother, who just so happened to be the secretary

of state for president Eisenhower.

A man whose law firm would coincidentally somehow find themselves with a massive new

client in United Fruit.

And they would have come to an agreement, surely planned a meeting, and then together

they would have told president an evil little bogeyman story.

A story about the communist revolution of Guatemala.

How an evil dictator-in-waiting was thinking of stealing American property and redistributing

it to the peasants.

Apparently the Soviets were involved.

And what happens when they pull back the cover mister president?

What happens when they agree to let Russian missiles in?

It was simply a risk that they just couldn’t take.

When it comes to the halls of power, there is no us.

Dulles pushed the paper forward and Eisenhower signed it.

A death notice for an entire nation.

In 1954, Allen Dulles, head of the CIA, with the full backing of the United States government,

deliberately killed democracy in Guatemala.

And just like that, a new Hitler in power.

Under a new name in a new man, he committed all the same horrors that had come before.

A genocide against the mozo coming back stronger than ever.

Unshackled by the great temptation in those fields.

Democracy was once again replaced by the terror at the hands of a general that ruled their society.

Police returned to the untouchable murderers that they’d once been.

But it was all crueler somehow.

The CIA’s best plan for keeping the country in line was violence, and the more it slipped

away the more violence they inflicted to keep it in line.

But identity is a funny thing.

And it tends to grow with pressure.

In the end the crackdown only served to create the very problem it pretended to be fighting.

The government they deposed wasn’t communist, they were simply left of centre if that.

But by twinning anti-imperialist thoughts as no different than communist thoughts, they

convinced those peasants who hadn’t even so much as heard a word of Marx to believe him.

By 1960, guerilla bands had formed in the countryside and were striking back against

the government with violence.

Although they barely killed one for every hundred they lost they effectively shut the

country down for business.

It's hard to grow bananas in a country in ruin.

So for all their years of terror and enslavement the company had no real response to a complete

social collapse.

All they knew how to do what they'd always done.

And so in response to this unprecedented threat to their power, the puppet government took

off whatever velvet they pretended to still have left on those gloves and sent death squads

roaming through the Mayan villages, breaking in doors and killing anyone they deemed a threat.

It didn’t matter if the people they killed were communist or just had happened to own

some land that a local rich guy wanted to steal, their obituary always said terrorist.

The civil war that followed would be the longest in the history of the Americas.

It would last for the next thirty six years, only truly ending in 1996.

Although calling it a civil war implies that the country was divided, fighting itself,

and for the most part that simply wasn’t true.

This was the violence of imperialism being brought by a puppet government against its

own people.

America’s us.

But when the beatings didn’t increase morale the system started to falter.

The dictatorship might have been stronger than ever with its new American freedom from

consequence but the country beneath it was in ruins.

Armed bands roaming the jungles, death squads killing workers in lieu of pay.

It didn’t matter that they’d won back their slaves, a civil war is a hard place

to make money.

It would be wrong to say that Guatemala alone collapsed the United Fruit Company, but it

certainly didn’t help.

And as the country fell into chaos, their stock fell alongside.

In debt, and unable to keep control over the lands they’d stolen, United Fruit fell on

its sword.

Their name was so tarnished in the public eye that they had little choice but be broken

up and redistributed under new brands.

But beyond that, little really changed except who got to be the us.

Today, United Fruit exists under the name Chiquita.

They still sell bananas, and they still grow them in Guatemala.

I personally buy them all the time.

But the mozos are all still there, they're working as they ever did, it's just at least

the death squads have stopped.

Since 1996, Guatemala has returned to a fledgling form of democracy, it's just with the quiet

understanding that things can only go so far before they’re going to get toppled.

Because things here never got returned to the peasants.

This country is still a banana republic.

The United States is still an empire.

We just stopped using those terms.

Even the most imperialistic fight against slavery will always be a civil war.

A war internal to ourselves, to every society we ever create.

And in turn it will be with us to our dying breath, because this is the trade we made for agriculture.

This is the temptation in our fields.

So, what’s a banana worth?

Serious question.

I'm not asking you to solve Guatemala's problems at the grocery store.

I don't expect you to change the behaviour of the CIA.

But even if just for yourself just for the thought the next time you're in that fruit aisle,

ask yourself: what’s a banana worth?

This is Rare Earth.