The above image was made using stable diffusion with the prompt 'banana republic.'
Anyone who has eaten Chiquita bananas has eaten bananas of genocide. The United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) motivated a coup in Guatemalan in 1954. This coup was orchestrated by the CIA and over 200,000 people were killed. Today, millions of schoolchildren across the US are served Chiquita bananas as part of their lunches. They are rarely told that these fruits are products of American human rights violations.
In 2011, Guatemala moved to "restore the legacy" of President Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically elected leader who was deposed in 1954. The country promised to "name a main highway and a museum wing after the ousted president, prepare a biography of him, publish his widows memoir and mount an exhibition about him and his legacy in the National History Museum."
In 1999, Bill Clinton informally apologized to Guatemala for the US human rights abuses there. This apology, however sincere it may have been, probably didn't make up for destroying democracy and starting a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands. Officially, the US has apologized for intentionally infecting Guatemalans with sexually transmitted diseases in the 1940s. I feel like that apology doesn't count for much, either.
It's not clear what would count for more. Harm done 70 years ago can't be easily repaired. Even if financial reparations were offered, it might not be possible to distribute them fairly to the victims. And the negative impact of US action on Guatemalan democracy is impossible to calculate.
Guatemala is just one of several countries whose governments were toppled by the US during the Cold War. And the US has always interfered with the politics of other nations, overtly and covertly. Al Qaeda and ISIS are both blowback from that sort of thing. Arguably so too is the decline in US influence as global governance becomes increasingly multi-polar.
The thing I always wonder about is where to go from here. If the US government suddenly decided to make up for their past wrongs and move forward in an ethical way, what would that look like? The whole idea is exceedingly unlikely, but it's nonetheless meaningful to contemplate. Imagine healing on a geopolitical level in the modern era.
In more practical terms, maybe the best we can hope for is that the schoolchildren being served Chiquita bananas be taught the true history of their snacks. I definitely was not taught about the 1954 coup while I was in grade school. And I somewhat doubt the subject is being taught widely today.
The US is still in the business of supporting coups, with predictably bad results. The US-backed 2014 revolution in Ukraine is a case in point. You'd think America would have learned its lesson after 70 years of coups. But no.
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