any comments? just figured it be interesting to shed a bit of light on a person who really isnt even mentioned in history books other then "the cia
director during the eisenhower presidency"
The U.S. State Department and United Fruit embarked on a major public relations campaign to convince the American people and the rest of the U.S. government that Guatemala was a Soviet "satellite".
"It [United Fruit] began with enviable connections to the Eisenhower administration. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his former New York law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, had long represented the company. Allen Dulles, head of the CIA, had served on UFCO's board of trustees. Ed Whitman, the company's top public relations officer, was the husband of Ann Whitman, President Eisenhower's private secretary. (Ed Whitman produced a film, "Why the Kremlin Hates Bananas," that pictured UFCO fighting in the front trenches of the cold war.) The fruit firm's success in linking the taking of its lands to the evil of international communism was later described by one UFCO official as "the Disney version of the episode." But the company's efforts paid off. It picked up the expenses of journalists who traveled to Guatemala to learn United Fruit's side of the crisis, and some of the most respected North American publications - including the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, and New Leader - ran stories that pleased the company. A UFCO public relations official later observed that his firm helped condition North American readers to accept the State Department's version of the Arbenz regime as Communist-controlled and the U.S.-planned invasion as wholly Guatemalan." (Quoted from Inevitable Revolutions - The United States in Central America by Walter La Feber, 2nd ed. 1993, pp. 120-121.
The campaign succeeded and in 1954 the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency orchestrated a coup, code-named "Operation PBSUCCESS". The invading force numbered only 150 men under the command of Castillo Armas but the CIA convinced the Guatemalan public and President Arbenz that a major invasion was underway. The CIA set up a clandestine radio station to carry propaganda, jammed all Guatemalan stations, and hired skilled American pilots to bomb strategic points in Guatemala City. The U.S. replaced the freely elected government of Guatemala with another right-wing dictatorship that would again bend to UFCO's will.
Although the U.S. invasion plan is top-secret, by April Foreign Minister Raul Roa Garcia learns that troops are being trained by the United States in Guatemala to invade Cuba. The Guatemalan government (which had been put into power by the CIA in June 1954, after the CIA overthrew the elected government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, who was a Socialist with a plan to nationalise much of the nation's land, including vast tracks owned by the United Fruit Company) lies about their involvement and severs all diplomatic relations with Cuba. On April 4, Cuba readies a plan to exporpriate all Cuban land held by the United Fruit company, while on the same day a U.S. military aircraft flying from the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo drops napalm bombs in the Oriente province.
The big Boston banks behind United Fruit were determined that Arbenz must go. President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave the order for a CIA-staged invasion that toppled the elected Guatemalan government.
Among the coup's first victims were 45 assassinated leaders of the banana workers on United Fruit's plantations.
Seven years later, United Fruit paid back its debt to the CIA by donating two of its ships to the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.