The Dark Story of the Empire Behind Chiquita and Dole

In June 2024, a jury in West Palm Beach ordered the Chiquita banana company to pay $38.3 million to the families of eight Colombian men, murdered by a paramilitary death squad the company admitted to financing. The killings had happened in Magdalena, on the same stretch of Colombian coast where, almost a century earlier, soldiers had fired machine guns into a crowd of striking workers on the plantations of the company that would one day become Chiquita. The fruit was the same. The ground was the same. Only the name on the box had changed. This is the story of the two American fruit companies sold today in every grocery store as Chiquita and Dole, and of the empire they built across Central America. It is the story of a railroad laid over a road of bones in Costa Rica; of the company the people who lived under it called el pulpo, the octopus, for the way it came to own the land, the ports, the ships, the railroads, and the men who cut the fruit; of a fugitive American writer who coined the phrase "banana republic" while hiding from the law in Honduras; of an immigrant who bought a country with a secondhand warship; and of the 1954 coup in Guatemala, engineered in Washington by men with quiet ties to the company, that toppled an elected government and set the country on the road to a thirty-six-year civil war in which some 200,000 people were killed or disappeared, most of them at the hands of the state, according to the United Nations-backed truth commission that later counted the dead. It also traces what the empire left behind once the empires themselves were gone: the pesticide that sterilized tens of thousands of plantation workers, the years of company payments to a Colombian death squad, the $25 million federal fine, and the verdict in Florida that, after seventeen years in the courts, brought the whole story back to the very ground where it began. Empire of Acres examines the dark history of American power built on land, money, and place — the dynasties, company towns, and fortunes that rose and came undone. New documentaries regularly. #history #documentary #UnitedFruit #Chiquita #Guatemala Copyright & Fair Use Notice This video is a non-commercial, educational history documentary produced for research and for purposes of commentary, critique, and analysis. Certain archival photographs and video clips appear here under the Fair Use doctrine (Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act), including use for commentary and criticism, news reporting, instruction, scholarship, and research.