Word: guatemala
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Democratic Blowdowns. The war years changed the political climate. Democratic gusts blew down the Ubico dictatorship in Guatemala, today whistle ominously through the pinetops of Carías' Honduras. In the roaring times when it was never clear which went first, the U.S. flag or the U.S. dollar, to old banana hands such winds would have signaled hurricane warnings. For politically minded United Fruit was deeply involved in Dictators Ubico's and Carías' rise to power. But wily Sam Zemurray, United's big boss, radar-keen in detecting a gale, had fore-handedly trimmed...
...mountains of Guatemala and along the rivers of Honduras the long trains rolled again. Bananas were coming back. The green fruit, lovingly bedded on banana leaves, was headed for the hatches of United Fruit ships, and ultimately for U.S. breakfast tables. Last week some 100,000,000 bananas arrived...
...Tiquisate, on Guatemala's Pacific coast, United Fruit grows bananas the new way. On what were 25,000 acres of malarial wasteland in 1934, the company has kept 7,000 laborers busy at the sort of work that makes modern banana growing a feat of agricultural engineering. Example: from tall, movable towers giant sprinklers play over 3⅓ acres of banana trees in a swoop, supplying the equivalent of two inches of rainfall a week. A second complicated set of pumps and pipes squirts the bright blue Bordeaux mixture that keeps off the sigatoka disease...
...Guatemala's Arévalo government also recently introduced a steep profits tax, despite a concession wangled from Ubico forbidding new taxation on United Fruit till 1981. Bargaining is tough. With huge new plantations in the Dominican Republic ready to sprout bananas by 1947, United Fruit can threaten to shut down in Guatemala, as it did in Colombia when disease and the government moved...
Early next summer a double-handful of Iowa State graduate students and undergraduate specialists will move into a spacious colonial mansion in Antigua. The Guatemalans have offered free use of the necessary land. If the planned cross-breeding experiments work out, both Iowa and Guatemala may soon have better, if not bigger corn...