Corporate Banana Republics: United Fruit Company's Central American Conquest

The term "e;Banana Republic"e; is often used today as a casual political insult, but its origins lie in a terrifyingly literal reality. At the dawn of the twentieth century, a single American agricultural corporation amassed enough wealth and power to completely subjugate sovereign nations for the sake of cheap fruit. The United Fruit Company did not just export bananas; it exported total corpor...