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Bananas and Business: The United Fruit Company in Colombia, 1899-2000. By Marcelo Bucheli. (New York: New York University Press, 2005. xii, 241 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-81479934-5.)
In this superb monograph, Marcelo Bucheli combines business and political history to craft a comprehensive account of the operations of the United Fruit Company (UFCO) in twentieth-century Colombia. Bucheli acknowledges that other scholars have thoroughly explored the acrimonious relationships of the UFCO with its Colombian workers in the 1920s that culminated in the bloody strike of 1928, but he argues that their studies have four shortcomings. First, they fail to analyze the company as a business enterprise; second, they underestimate the dramatic transformation Colombia underwent after the 1930s, which necessarily affected the government's relationship with the company; third, they overlook how the consumer market...