Bananas and Bsiness: The United Fruit Company in Colombia, 1899-2000.

• Author: Sabino, Carlos
• Position: Book Review

Bananas and Business: The United Fruit Company in Colombia, 1899-2000 By Marcelo Buchcli New York: New York University Press, 2005. Pp. xi, 239. $45.00 cloth.

For more than one hundred years, the United Fruit Company (UFCO) has been for many politicians, activists, and historians the clearest paradigm of an overwhelmingly powerful corporation, a true symbol of "American imperialism." It has been portrayed a ruthless exploiter politically involved in the fate of several Central American and Caribbean countries. For example, an extensive literature blames it for the overthrow of the Guatemalan government in 1954, after President Jacobo Arbenz expropriated a huge chunk of land that the company had acquired several years earlier through questionable means.

Several works based on more complete information have challenged the standard portrayal of UFCO, however, revealing a more balanced and complex history. Marcelo Bucheli's well-documented and complete book, Bananas and Business, belongs in this category. Exploring the little-known case of Colombia in the first book on the subject, the author uses "several primary sources that have not been used by any other scholar to date" (p. 6), which gives the book solid and valuable support and allows him to present a thorough account of UFCO's operations in Colombia.

Bucheli begins by giving a general history of the banana business from the last years of the nineteenth century to the present: the change of banana consumption from "a luxury good to [a] basic staple" (pp. 24-31), the interruptions experienced in the first half of the twentieth century because of the world wars and the Great Depression, and the recent changes in the international food market. His use of substantial numerical data provides the reader with an accurate description of those important changes. In chapter 3, Bucheli discusses UFCO's changing business strategy, giving the reader an understanding of the company's adaptive responses to a business and political environment that presented different challenges during the twentieth century. He explains the ideas and practices that allowed the creation of a great company in backward countries with no representative governments; the technical reasons that drove land acquisitions and vertical integration (p. 49); the challenge posed by growing nationalism beginning in the 1930s; and the long-range readjustment program that UFCO began in 1960 (pp. 64-75). Bucheli reveals the internal logic...