Amanda Doyle

Who were they?

Well, let's just say if you made a list of the founding fathers, the folks who were instrumental in galvanizing colonists to revolt, that list would have a lot of overlap with the list of folks who had invested large sums in companies planning to develop lands to the west of the Appalachians.

George Washington was one of the largest land speculators in colonial America, owning and investing in tens of thousands of acres in the land that the Royal Proclamation now said was off limits.

Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Benjamin Franklin, George Mason, Richard Henry Lee, and many more were likewise heavily invested in Western land speculation and promotion.

And as soon as the U.S.

won independence, the new government quickly moved to open Western lands through the Northwest Ordinance and also started a series of military actions to forcibly remove Indigenous peoples from those lands for settlement and profit.

All of that to say covert or military force regime change has been part of America since before America was even America.

Today, we're diving in to see how America has, since its formation, deployed CIA covert actions to replace regimes and how it has used the military to oust and replace foreign leaders.

And we're looking at how these regime changes always have an ideological fervor and rationale, most notably the promotion of democracy, even though we have often ousted democratically elected officials and replaced them with authoritarians.

And when you peel back the layers, every regime change has a client, a client with a profit interest that is served by the particular policy or political order being installed.

This is complicated, crazy stuff.

So in order to start peeling back, we are starting with a banana.

In 1899, an American railroad builder living in Costa Rica named Miner C. Keith and a Boston fruit importer named Andrew Preston, both with shipping networks and banana trade businesses across Central America, merged to form the United Fruit Company.

They operated a vertically integrated empire, owning and controlling every stage of the banana trade from Central America and the Caribbean to the U.S., including banana plantations, railroads, ports, shipping fleets, and distribution networks.

United Fruit Company was the largest land owner and employer in many of the countries in which they operated.

It was the largest landowner in Guatemala.

UFC owned 550,000 acres, including the country's most fertile agricultural land.

It also controlled the railroads that moved goods to ports, the ports themselves, and much of the country's communications infrastructure.

In practical terms, it functioned almost like a state within a state.

In order to maintain its monopoly and soaring profits, UFC maintained tight control of political forces in Central America and the Caribbean by lobbying government officials and paying bribes over decades.