WHEN BANANA’S RULED!

The Banana Company lands in Macondo – Gabriel Garcia Marquez's forest township in his "One Hundred Years of Solitude", gets along with it earliest trendiness and then catastrophe. Garcia writes that the enterprise 'changed the pattern of rains, accelerated the cycle of harvests and moved the river from where it had always been.' To run the township it imported "dictatorial foreigners" and employed slayers with machetes. When Macondo signified Latin America, it is apt that 'the Banana Company' has a major role in the progression and regression. United Fruit – The American Banana Company controlled parts of nearly dozen countries in the West. It tightly entangles with the economies and owned huge swaths of Central America and was known as 'the Octopus'.

Take a look at Guatemala – when it was United Fruit's utmost valued tenure. It was preferred by the company for its initial development because during the time when the company landed in Central America, Guatemala had maximum corruption while being the state with weakest government and was most malleable. While clearing the forest for banana estates the company discovered the Mayan ruins and paid the archaeologists to restore it, welcoming differences between the long lost great civilizations of Mayans and the new one which the company was building in the forest. The citizens thought that the company was getting back the era of the Mayans, returning Central America from the savages back to its splendid days of empire. But the company knew how to use such tactics to crawl themselves into the minds of ordinary people.

In 1950's Jacobo Arbenz – a left-wing democratic president attempted to indulge the company's dominance- United Fruit took it as an offence and asked the United States government to help by engineering a coup. Arbenz distributed United Fruit's unused land in Guatemala to the poor for agricultural purposes, but this taking did not sit well with the Banana Company. It oppressed the local workers, in exchange of land for plantations the company built railroads.

Blushed with its victory in Iran (CIA covertly expelled the democratically elected prime minister of Iran – Mohammed Mossadegh, swapping him with cruel and vicious regime of the Shah of Iran) the CIA under Allen Dulles continued with the regime-change in Guatemala. They replaced Arbenz by a cruel non-elected pro-US military general who returned United Fruit's land to the enterprise. In 1954 when Arbenz was over thrown – Latin America left the path of reason – that day was a turning point, the end of a hopeful age of reform and the start of a bloody age of revolt. Hundreds of thousands of citizens – 200,000 in Guatemala itself, were slayed in guerilla attacks, civil wars and government shutdowns across Latin America.

A caption which a citizen of Garcia's Macondo gives "Look at the mess we've got ourselves into just because we invited a gringo to eat some bananas.'

Sanjana Medipally,

20153006