Premium Episode 138 - United Fruit Company, Blood Bananas and the Guatemalan Genocide pt. 5: UFC Ownership and Honduras

[originally published on Patreon February 27, 2024]

I begin with an extended meditation about Arbenz's position in 1951 and the state of the Guatemalan economy. This leads to a discussion of Decree 900, the agrarian reform bill which was passed in 1952. I discuss what it did and did not entail and compare it to Mexico's agrarian reform law as well as the US Alliance for Progress recommendations later. Despite this, United Fruit Company's leadership began to close ranks and draw up battle plans. That leads us to a natural question: who exactly owned UFC, anyway?

I discuss UFC ownership particularly through the various boards of directors both before and after the Zemurray era. Unsurprisingly, it consists of many Boston Brahmins and, for lack of a better term, the Power Elite from the US, the UK, and Germany. At one point, the Swedes try, successfully, to buy in.

I make a major tangent via UFC vice president Arthur Pollan and his feud with Honduran communist Manuel Cálix Herrera, whose story I also share. Then, discussing Zemurray's new guard, I bring up Hillyer Vaughn Rolston and the curious case of the Rolston Letter. The Rolston Letter is like a mini-Dreyfus Affair, which occurred shortly before la gran huelga de 1954, the great strike of 1954 in Honduras.

I analyze various analyses of the Rolston letter which allows us to discuss the Honduran coup of 2009. This, in turn, allows us to discuss the less-known ZEDES, or economic development zones, which are attempting to break up and sell off Honduran sovereignty piece by piece, as in the case of Próspera in Roatán, Honduras.

Finally, I discuss the occulted nature of family trusts and how the blood-soaked stolen wealth of Central America exists in perpetuity in New England sending many a failson and faildaughter to clown colleges or academic sinecures for perpetuity.

note: I wrote the baleada thread after I wrote this episode, and it weaves through much of this history - https://twitter.com/JimmyFalunGong/status/1755993585890054451

Songs:
Wealth Won’t Save Your Soul by Hank Williams Jr.
El Machangay, a song from the Great Strike of 1954
Verde by Manzanita