[culi]

Unfortunately this is an all too common pattern in the history of pesticides. In 1979 DBCP was banned in the US after factory workers became sterile. Dow Chemical happily shipped tons of it to be sprayed directly on banana workers in banana republics[0] by Dole/Chiquita/Del Monte. To this day Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, Panama, and Nicaragua have some of the highest rates of infertility, birth defects, and chronic illnesses in the world

This was just after the Gros Michel had gone basically extinct because of monocropping. The banana companies hired scientists to figure out what to do that almost universally recommended diversifying the crop. But they calculated that it'd actually be cheaper to just double down on pesticide application and start again with another monocrop.

There's an incredible documentary about the banana industry history (and practices that continue to this day like banana companies paying gangs to assassinate local labor leaders) called Bananaland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoRmtQht8-E

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic

[7moritz7]

I'd be more scared of publicly criticizing Chiquita than the CIA at this point

[culi]

All but 2 countries in South America have had the experience of democratically electing a leader only to have them overthrown in a US-backed coup. The US/CIA started with this obsession with the 1954 Guatemalan Coup specifically to maintain Guatemala as a banana republic. Chiquita owned most land in Guatemala and left is uncultivated to stifle competition. Jacobo Árbenz wanted to (slightly) tax this land to reduce poverty. Chiquita hired Edward Bernays (yes, that guy. The father of modern public relations, nephew of Freud, etc) for an influence campaign and eventually got CIA to launch Operation PBSuccess in 1953. The CIA/Chiquita gave very extensive lists of political opponents to murder during the coup.

So what's really the difference?

[pjc50]

One way to view current US politics is that the broader banana republic tendency ran out of South American governments to overthrow and moved back to the domestic government, which has now taken on all the corruption and extractive politics of South American CIA-backed dictatorships. The violence levels are not comparable .. yet. But having an explicitly political paramilitary force that's shot a few citizens in the street is not a good sign.

[culi]

There's a well-known sociological concept called "imperial boomerang" that describes this. It's also seen in surveillance technologies used against oppressed people. As far back as the surveillance apparatus Britain built in Ireland which eventually came to roost on the British people themselves

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_boomerang

[dylan604]

You can't spell Chiquita without CIA

[pnw]

Not just South America: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_CIA_involvement_in_the...

[culi]

Of course not.[0][1][2] But nowhere as extensively as South America.[3][4]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_19...

[3] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/11/26/a-timeline-of-cia-...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

[phatskat]

I’ll never miss an opportunity to plug a very relevant Behind the Bastards - at this point it feels like an Xkcd for Very Bad Things, but I digress - [Part One: The Deadliest School in History](https://open.spotify.com/episode/2N77mwUI0pDOBOP6gIknkU) does a pretty good job of covering the School of the Americas

They also have a few on Bernays because of course they do

[stinkbeetle]

It's not pesticides, it's everything. Everything from slavery laws to workers rights, environmental regulations, health and safety regulations. The ruling class has conspired to evade those regulations and crush local competition for 100+ years, by offshoring and globalizing their abuses and exploitation.

[pipeline_peak]

What else would they have produced with banana crops that people would’ve wanted?

[culi]

More banana varieties. The reason Panama Disease was so successful is because of the practice of cloning. Every single crop is the same genetics. Researchers warned that starting over with the Cavendish would result in the exact same thing again and the clear solution was to stop cloning the exact same plant and grow more types of bananas (there are more than 1,000 species of banana and tens of thousands of varieties around the world).

Now we're dealing with TR4 because of the Cavendish being grown in the exact same way but with an even heavier reliance on pesticides, slavery, and violent control over local power.

[phatskat]

That was a fun bit of trivia I learned from Balatro - the Gros Michel has a one in six chance of being destroyed after a round. However, if it is destroyed (the game displays Extinct! when it perishes), then the Cavendish can appear randomly in the shop and has a one in one-thousand chance of being destroyed.

[account42]

And they aren't even cloning anything even close to the tastiest bananas, just the ones best suited for transport/storage.

[kakacik]

I don't eat bananas I can buy in Europe, not after doing some travels. They are extremely bland, doesn't matter where I buy them. Now when traveling in exotic countries, what a beautiful experience to taste one!

[culi]

"Exotic countries" lol. There's at least a few species in the banana genus that grow in almost every single country in the global south