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The United Fruit Company (UFCO) developed an unprecedented relationship with Guatemala in the first half of this century. By 1944, UFCO owned 566,000 acres, employed 20,000 people, and operated 96% of Guatemala's 719 miles of railroad, making the multinational corporation Guatemala's largest private landowner and biggest employer. In Doing Business with the Dictators, Paul J. Dosal shows how UFCO built up a profitable corporation in a country whose political system was known to be corrupt. His work is based largely on research of company documents recently acquired from the Justice Department under the Freedom of Information Act-no other historian researching this topic has looked at these sources. As a result, Dr. Dosal is able to offer the first documentary evidence of how UFCO acquired, defended, and exploited its Guatemalan properties by collaborating with successive authoritarian regimes.

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CHOICE Review

Dosal's book is a history of the United Fruit Company in Guatemala, from 1899 to 1944. Indeed, Guatemala has been unable to escape a history dominated by dictators. "Between 1899 and 1929, as president of Cuyamel Fruit Company, United's most successful competitor, [Sam Zemurrary] sponsored rebellions, hired mercenaries, bribed politicians, defied Guatemalan, Honduran, and American laws, and almost singlehandedly provoked a war between Honduras and Guatemala." Writing of United's ouster of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954, Dosal states: "To eliminate an inconvenient president, UFCO collaborated with the counterrevolutionary movement organized by the Central Intelligent Agency." The author methodically tells how United acquired 1,500 miles of railroad and cultivated 85% of the nation's tropical land suitable for bananas. United co-opted or manipulated a long stream of dictators. Dosal makes clear that the UFCO could always rely on US intervention to support its interests in Guatemala. The book is an absolute must for those interested in the region. It has solid footnotes, a good bibliography, and a workable index. General readers, advanced undergraduates, and above. R. Acu~na; California State University, Northridge

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Paul J. Dosal is assistant professor of Latin American history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.