In the Quran, the banana is presented as a fruit of paradise. But anyone who’s ever set foot on a banana plantation knows that such a place is nothing of the kind. For thousands of banana workers — whose conditions are entwined with health-hazardous pesticides, venomous snakes, mosquitoes carrying diseases, life-drenching humidity, and lethally poor wages — the plantation is the dead end of wider global ills.

On June 27, 1954, banana capitalism captured global attention when the United Fruit Company (later Chiquita), the CIA, and the Guatemalan military succeeded in overthrowing the democratically elected president Jacobo Árbenz. It was the result of a tight-knit conspiracy known as Operation PBSuccess, launched by US president Dwight D. Eisenhower in August 1953 and conducted by Carlos Castillo Armas, a right-wing military commander who ousted Árbenz with funds from the CIA and the United Fruit Company. This latter controlled more than 40 percent of Guatemala’s land and was exempted from paying taxes and import duties.

The turmoil in the Guatemalan capital occurred due to an earlier social earthquake in which the political focus was finally turned toward the vast majority of the population. The latter had long been victims of what Piero Gleijeses, a prominent US foreign policy professor, calls a “skewed land tenure system that rotted the Guatemalan countryside.”