An American Coup in Guatemala

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Hey everyone, welcome back from Christmas and New Year's break. I was originally going to release a new piece about Pat Robertson today, but some international events have transpired and I think it'll be more relevant to run an episode from Season 3 with a new intro.

According to the United States government, early in the morning on Saturday, January 3, 2026, the US struck sites in Venezuela, including several airports. are that somewhere around 40 people were killed. U.S. forces then captured Venezuelan President Maduro, transported him here, and are holding

him for a possible indictment of narco-terrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine. That's one thread, that this is about drugs. But on December 1st, 2025, just one month earlier, President Trump pardoned the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez.

According to the Department of Justice, Hernandez had been sentenced to 45 years in prison for conspiracy to import cocaine. The same substance Maduro got busted for. Between 2004 and 2022, Hernandez is said to have imported 400 tons of cocaine into the

US. Now, he's the beneficiary of a pardon. So if the events of this weekend are about drugs, why let one guy go and seize the other? Why bust the president of Venezuela and release the president of Honduras?

Venezuela sits on the largest oil deposit in the world. American oil companies found it difficult to do business there thanks to a long process of nationalization that squeezed them out in the early 2000s. They may have renewed access to the crude oil in his country.

This isn't conjecture. In his speech announcing the operation Saturday morning, President Trump was clear about this, saying, we're going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure,

the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country. This is about oil. We are not in new territory for the US. We've overturned countries for a lot less.

In the 1950s, we overthrew Guatemala, sending them into a civil war, costing an untold number of lives. Why? For bananas.

Really, not even. For unused land owned by a banana company. So as a way of providing context for our present moment, I'm going to replay that episode. Because the question of the moment is not why did we do this, but why do we keep

doing this? If you'd like additional reading, I recommend Private Empire, Exxon Mobil in American Power by Steve Cole. God willing, I'll run a new story next week. By the way, in this episode you'll notice that the pitch of my voice is a bit higher. Back when I made this, I was still kind of getting comfortable with the sound of my own voice.

Hopefully it's not too distracting. Here's the show. The most popular fruit in the United States is the banana. In 2017, Americans ate an average of 28.5 pounds per person.

That's a lot of bananas. In the UK, it's said that more than 95% of households buy them every week. That means they pull more money from our wallets

than anything else at the grocery store, except lottery tickets and gasoline. All that to say, we love bananas. Smoothies, ice cream sundaes, or as a quick breakfast.

Despite our adoration, the United States grows only about 0.01% of the world's bananas. That's so close to 0%. Many of the ones we do grow are the tie

or cooking varieties, not the popular kind you see in grocery stores. Those generally come from elsewhere. We import them.

In its heyday, the largest importer of bananas was the United Fruit Company. They controlled as much as 90% of the market. 90%.

That's bananas. We just don't have the climate and open land to grow them here ourselves. We have to look outside our borders.

But where? United Fruit saw an opportunity in Guatemala, the Central American country just south of Mexico. A former executive for the company once said,

and this is an actor reading this. Guatemala was chosen as the site of the company's earliest development activities because at the time we entered Central America,

Guatemala's government was the region's weakest, most corrupt, and most pliable. Okay, so wait, those were the selling points? Listen, I've studied a fair bit

about corporations that behave badly. And if they go looking for that stuff, you know something shady is about to go down. They were a big company that wanted more

than just to play along, to color inside the lines. They wanted autonomy, to be a nation within other nations, their own sovereign, to make the rules because they weren't the most ethical company.

To help tell this story, I've got a special guest. Yeah, my name is Steven Schlesinger. I am the co-author, along with Steve Kinzer, of the book Bitter Fruit about the American Coup in Guatemala in 1954.

It's an excellent book. Anyhow, back to United Fruit. They diverted rivers and mistreated workers. They were paid very little.

There was no health coverage. They could be fired at any time. They were indentured servants in many ways. And so it was a very miserable life

under the auspices of that corporation. A 1928 worker strike in Columbia ended with hundreds, if not thousands of workers dead. United Fruit had a reputation as a bully.

But they had the money, they had connections. So in the 1950s, when a new power threatened their empire in Guatemala, United Fruit decided to employ a tactic that would be very helpful to their cause. They told God-fearing Americans that godless communists were taking over.

You're listening to the show that uses journalistic tools to look inside the Christian Church.