Research Title The American investments in Central America Countries (1899-1954)

Abstract

The Central American countries is with fragile and weak regimes due to social inequality and class difference and the elite’s control of the government, and their care for their interests at the expense of the national interest was an encouraging factor for the rising American economic power in investment and exploitation of the region and the American penetration economically, commercially, politically and militarily.

The United Fruit Company of America, the most powerful investment company, worked as a major exporter in the fruit trade (mainly bananas) from Central American plantations to the United States of America and Europe since 1899. The company contributed significantly to the expansion of American investment in Central American countries, With the help of the US government through the policy of dumping the countries of the region with debts, in order to put pressure on military intervention in order to grant investment privileges to US companies in various sectors, and this gave way for the company to control areas and networks of transport in Central America and the Caribbean coast, which is a strategic, security and economic extension of the United States of America. The company has gained influence over the governments of those countries to ensure that they remain in power, and it is credited with the American penetration in the region, and the returns on investments have achieved economic returns for the United States of America during the company’s prosperity during the first half of the twentieth century. However, the company has been subjected to internal fluctuations since 1954, and the movement of labor strikes against it has affected its influence, as it was affected by the international situation that imposed the bipolar conflict, capitalist and socialist, an American strategy commensurate with the requirements of the stage after World War II of different policies from the previous stage, that affected the support of the US government to the company's center in Central America and the matter appeared significantly in the fifties of the twentieth century.