![]() ![]() To address the country’s rampant inequalities, including its feudal labor system, Árbenz passed an agrarian reform law to convert unused private land into smaller plots for peasants. Not only had the company been exempt for decades-it had also secured a guarantee that it would never have to pay its employees more than fifty cents a day. He was trying to get United Fruit to pay taxes on its vast holdings. They formed, in his words, “an invisible government” with “true ruling power” over the U.S., to say nothing of the countries under American sway.īy 1952, the President of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz, was fighting a battle he couldn’t win. ![]() Running United Fruit’s publicity department, in New York, was a legendary adman who claimed to have a list of twenty-five thousand journalists, editors, and public figures at his beck and call. State Department officials had siblings in the upper ranks of the company. It was Guatemala’s largest employer and landowner, and it controlled the country’s only Atlantic port, almost every mile of the railroads, and the nation’s sole telephone and telegraph facilities. The other, an American corporation called the United Fruit Company, was known inside the country as the Octopus, because it had tentacles everywhere. There were two powers running Guatemala after the Second World War, and only one of them was the government. ![]()
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