Following the US military attack that overthrew Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on January 3, 2026, the Trump administration has emphasized its desire for unrestricted access to Venezuelan oil over conventional foreign policy goals, such as combating drug trafficking or strengthening democracy and regional stability.
During his first press conference after the operation, President Donald Trump stated that oil companies would play an important role and that oil revenues would help finance any future intervention in Venezuela.
Shortly after, the hosts of “Fox & Friends” asked Trump about this prediction.
“We have the biggest oil companies in the world,” Trump responded, “the biggest, the biggest, and we’re going to be very involved in it.”
As a historian of US-Latin American relations, I am not surprised that oil, or any other commodity, influences US policy toward the region. What has surprised me, however, is the Trump administration’s candor about how much oil drives its policies toward Venezuela.
As I detailed in my 2026 book, “Caribbean Blood Pacts: Guatemala and the Struggle for Freedom during the Cold War,” US military intervention in Latin America has been largely covert. And when the United States orchestrated the coup d’état that overthrew Guatemala’s democratically elected president in 1954, it obscured the role of economic considerations in that operation.
A powerful “octopus”
By the early 1950s, Guatemala had become a major source of bananas for American consumption, and remains so today.
The United Fruit Company owned more than 220,000 hectares of Guatemalan land, largely thanks to its agreements with previous dictatorships. These properties required the intense labor of impoverished agricultural workers, who were often forced to abandon their traditional lands. Their salary was rarely stable and they faced periodic layoffs and pay cuts.
Headquartered in Boston, the international corporation connected with dictators and local officials in Central America, many Caribbean islands, and parts of South America to acquire immense properties for railroads and banana plantations.
Locals called it the “octopus” because the company apparently influenced shaping the politics, economy, and daily life of the region. The Colombian government brutally repressed a strike by United Fruit workers in 1928, killing hundreds of people.
That bloody chapter in Colombian history served as the factual basis for a subplot in “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” an epic novel by Gabriel García Márquez, winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature.
The company’s seemingly limitless influence in the countries where it operated gave rise to the stereotype of Central American nations as “banana republics.”
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The democratic revolution of Guatemala
In Guatemala, a country historically marked by extreme inequality, a broad coalition was formed in 1944 to overthrow the repressive dictatorship through a popular uprising. Inspired by the anti-fascist ideals of World War II, the coalition sought a more democratic nation and a more just economy.
After decades of repression, the country’s new leaders offered many Guatemalans their first democratic experience. Under the government of Juan José Arévalo, who was democratically elected and held office between 1945 and 1951, the government established new social benefits and a labor code that legalized the formation and membership of unions, and established eight-hour work days.
He was succeeded in 1951 by Jacobo Árbenz, another democratically elected president.
Under Árbenz’s government, Guatemala implemented a land reform program in 1952 that gave landless agricultural workers their own undeveloped plots. The Guatemalan government claimed that these policies would build a more equitable society for Guatemala’s indigenous and impoverished majority. United Fruit denounced the Guatemalan reforms as the result of a global conspiracy. He alleged that most Guatemalan unions were controlled by Mexican and Soviet communists and presented agrarian reform as a ploy to destroy capitalism.
Pressuring Congress to Intervene
In Guatemala, United Fruit sought to involve the US government in its fight against the policies of the elected government. While its executives complained that Guatemalan reforms hurt their financial investments and labor costs, they also presented any interference in their operations as part of a broader communist conspiracy.
He did so through an advertising campaign in the United States and taking advantage of the anti-communist paranoia prevailing at that time.
United Fruit executives began meeting with Truman administration officials as early as 1945. Despite support from like-minded ambassadors, the U.S. government apparently did not intervene directly in Guatemalan affairs.
The company appealed to Congress.
He hired lobbyists Thomas Corcoran and Robert La Follette Jr., a former senator, because of their political connections.
Corcoran and La Follette immediately lobbied Republicans and Democrats in both chambers against Guatemala’s policies, not as threats to United Fruit’s business interests, but as part of a communist plot to destroy capitalism and the United States.
The banana company’s efforts bore fruit in February 1949, when several members of Congress denounced Guatemala’s labor reforms as communist.
Senator Claude Pepper called the labor code “obviously intentionally discriminatory against this American company” and “a machine gun aimed at the head of this American company.”
Two days later, Rep. John McCormack echoed that statement, using the exact same words to denounce the reforms.
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., Senator Lister Hill, and Representative Mike Mansfield also made public statements, repeating the talking points outlined in the United Fruit memos.
No legislator said a word about the banana.
Lobbying and propaganda campaigns
This communist lobbying and discourse culminated five years later, when the US government organized a coup d’état that overthrew Árbenz in a covert operation.
This operation began in 1953, when the Eisenhower government authorized the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to unleash a psychological warfare campaign that manipulated the Guatemalan military itself to overthrow its democratically elected government.
CIA agents bribed members of the Guatemalan army. Anti-communist radio broadcasts and religious pronouncements about communist plans to destroy the Catholic Church spread throughout the country.
Meanwhile, the United States armed anti-government organizations within Guatemala and in neighboring countries to further undermine the morale of the Árbenz government.
United Fruit hired public relations pioneer Edward Bernays to spread propaganda, not in Guatemala, but in the United States. Bernays provided American journalists with reports and texts that portrayed the Central American nation as a Soviet puppet.
These materials, including a film titled “Why the Kremlin Hates Bananas,” were circulated by sympathetic media outlets and members of Congress.
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Destroying the revolution
Ultimately, records show, CIA efforts led military officials to overthrow their elected leaders and install a more pro-American regime led by Carlos Castillo Armas.
Guatemalans who opposed the reforms massacred union leaders, politicians, and others who had supported Árbenz and Arévalo. At least four dozen people died immediately afterwards, according to official reports. Local accounts acknowledged hundreds more deaths.
Military regimes ruled Guatemala for decades after this coup.
One dictator after another brutally repressed his opponents and fostered a climate of fear. These conditions contributed to waves of emigration, including countless refugees, as well as some members of transnational gangs.
Counterattack for bananas
To bolster its claims that what happened in Guatemala had nothing to do with bananas, as the company’s propaganda insisted, the Eisenhower government authorized an antitrust lawsuit against United Fruit, which had been temporarily suspended during the operation so as not to draw more attention to the company.
This would be the first in a series of setbacks that would disintegrate United Fruit in the mid-1980s. After a series of mergers, acquisitions and spinoffs, the only constant would be the ubiquitous Miss Chiquita logo plastered on the bananas the company sells.
And, according to many foreign policy experts, Guatemala has never recovered from the destruction of its democratic experiment due to corporate pressure.
*Aaron Coy Moulton is an associate professor of Latin American History at Stephen F. Austin State University.
This text was originally published in The Conversation
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