"When bananas ruled the world"

[bananas]

:)

http://freddevan.com/wordpress/2008/04/25/when-bananas-ruled-the-world/

When bananas ruled the world

Books

Intrigue. Power. Corruption. Death. Sex. The history of oil has nothing on that of the yellow fruit.

By Katharine Mieszkowski

On a trip to Honduras, journalist Dan Koeppel caught the banana bug. Researching an article for Popular Science about attempts to breed a disease-resistant banana, the American journalist wandered the grounds of the old Chiquita compound, amid the fading colonial mansions and golf course, where he stumbled upon the cheery yellow fruit’s unsavory past.

“I went out for drinks at the old country club, and this old-timer turns to me and goes, ‘In this room, governments were overthrown.’ It was like something out of a movie,” Koeppel says.

Flipping through an old Chiquita guest book, Koeppel saw the scrawled names of United States senators, scientists, CIA agents and Honduran presidents. “Everybody was in there,” he says. Browsing through the research facility’s library, the journalist paged through a chipper recipe book featuring the Chiquita banana girl, who was shown topless, as she always was, giving instructions on how to prepare such delicacies as “banana coconut rolls.” “I found these strange Chiquita cookbooks a hundred yards away from where massacres were planned,” he says.

<snip>

[dipsydoodle]

1. You can thank the Dulles Brothers

for the issues in Guatemala :

In 1954, a CIA-orchestrated coup ended what Guatemalans call the "Ten Years of Spring," which began with the bloodless overthrow of military dictator Jorge Ubico in 1944. During this period, two democratically-elected civilian presidents governed Guatemala, trying to provide opportunities and raise the standard of living. Jacobo Arbenz, elected in 1950, began to push agrarian reforms more seriously than his predecessor. The United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) (UFCo) protested when unused portions of its vast holdings were expropriated and distributed to land-less peasants. The Guatemalan government paid the US company the tax-declared value of the land, but UFCo protested to the highest levels of the US government. Two UFCo stockholders at the time were the Dulles brothers, Secretary of State and head of the CIA in the Eisenhower administration. © 1998, Piet van Lear, A War Called Peace

http://www.geocities.com/~virtualtruth/chiquita.htm

5,4,3,2,1 - next post from Judi ? :hi: