Doing Business with the Dictators: A Political History of United Fruit in Guatemala, 1899-1944: A Political History of United Fruit in Guatemala, 18991944

by Paul J. Dosal

The United Fruit Company (UFCO) developed an unprecedented relationship with Guatemala in the first half of this century. By 1944, UFCO owned 566,000 acres, employed 20,000 people, and operated 96% of Guatemala's 719 miles of railroad, making the multinational corporation Guatemala's largest private landowner and biggest employer. In Doing Business with the Dictators, Paul J. Dosal shows how UFCO built up a profitable corporation in a country whose political system was known to be corrupt. His work is based largely on research of company documents recently acquired from the Justice Department under the Freedom of Information Act-no other historian researching this topic has looked at these sources. As a result, Dr. Dosal is able to offer the first documentary evidence of how UFCO acquired, defended, and exploited its Guatemalan properties by collaborating with successive authoritarian regimes.

270 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1993

Reviews

[Eric Secoy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book, and it has some great info about United Fruit and its effects on Guatemalan politics, but the author is an academic and ultimately failed to make the history come alive. Where's Barbara Tuchman when you need her? Anyway, Dosal's main point is well taken, that UFC needed a willing partner (i.e. the Guatemalan dictators in power during most of their period of grandiose overinfluence in the country) in order to exploit their workers and the country as they did the first half of the last century. But it's a bit of a dull read...