Dan Koeppel's Blog

Marcelo Bucheli – of the University of Illinois at Urbana and Champaign College of Business – published a fascinating paper on the relationship between the United Fruit company (Chiquita) and Latin American dictatorships. Here’s the abstract:
“The US multinational United Fruit Company has been considered the quintessential representative of American imperialism in Central America. Not only [...]

For decades, there have been calls for justice on the industrial plantations – and in the nations that support them – for banana workers. Progress has been spotty, at best, mostly because of a disconnect between those laborers and consumers of the world’s most popular fruit. The Banana Land Campaign is a new effort to [...]

The following is the original English text of an article I wrote for Dagens Nyheter, the largest daily newspaper in Sweden. The story is about Dole’s attempt to stop the distribution of “BANANAS!*”, a documentary made by Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten that the banana company believes to be untrue. The film is about lawsuits filed [...]

The Democracy Now radio program interviewed Nicholas Kozloff, who argued that there’s a Chiquita connection in the current Honduran political crisis, which saw President Manuel Zelaya deposed in either a coup or a constitutional emergency, or both, depending on which side you’re on, in June. The banana industry once made Honduras its largest exporting nation; [...]