In 1954, a multinational corporation based in New Orleans suborned the US government to overthrow the democratically elected leader of Guatemala. The United Fruit Company — the progenitor of today’s Chiquita Brands International — had many friends in Washington’s high places, including Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, CIA Director Allen Dulles. It also had some enemies, such as President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán of Guatemala, whose policies of land reform were rather inconvenient for the fruit company that owned much of Guatemala’s land.

Fearful of Árbenz’s alleged “communism” (and of his impact on company profits), the executives of the United Fruit Company lobbied the US government to intervene. Their efforts came to fruition in Operation PBSUCCESS, a CIA-led coup that sent Árbenz into exile and installed the right-wing dictator Carlos Castillo Armas.

The 1954 coup d’état was just the start of an imperialistic horror show in Guatemala. Over the next four decades, a series of US-backed dictators unleashed a campaign of repression and atrocity in a gruesome civil war. It was so bad that in 1999, President Bill Clinton formally apologized for US complicity in the thirty-six-year-long bloodbath. Curiously, US complicity was not mentioned in the 2013 trial and conviction of General Efraín Ríos Montt for genocide of Maya civilians.