Short answers, pulled from the story.
The United Fruit Company was an American multinational corporation, formed in 1899, that traded in tropical fruit, primarily bananas, grown on Latin American plantations and sold in the United States and Europe. It controlled vast territories, transportation networks, and communications infrastructure across Central America, the Caribbean coast of Colombia, and the West Indies.
The United Fruit Company was formed in 1899 through the merger of the Boston Fruit Company, founded by Lorenzo Dow Baker and Andrew W. Preston, with the banana enterprises of Minor C. Keith. Keith had built railroads and banana plantations in Central America; Preston brought plantations in the West Indies and a fleet of steamships. The combined company was capitalized at $11.23 million and based in Boston.
The Banana Massacre occurred on the 6th of December 1928 in Ciénaga, Colombia, when Colombian Army troops under General Cortés Vargas opened fire on United Fruit workers who had been on strike since the 12th of November. Estimates of the dead range from 47 to more than 1,000. Congressman Jorge Eliécer Gaitán accused the army of acting under United Fruit Company instructions, and the scandal contributed to Colombia's Conservative Party losing the 1930 elections.
United Fruit Company lobbied both the Truman and Eisenhower administrations and ran a misinformation campaign portraying Guatemala's elected president Jacobo Árbenz as a communist after his government began expropriating 40% of the company's unused Guatemalan land in 1952. In 1954, the CIA armed, funded, and trained forces that overthrew Árbenz in Operation PBSuccess. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, CIA Director Allen Dulles, and several other senior U.S. officials had direct ties to United Fruit.
Bananagate was a bribery scheme exposed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in 1975 in which United Brands paid Honduran president Oswaldo López Arellano $1.25 million, with a promise of another $1.25 million, in exchange for reducing certain export taxes. Trading in United Brands stock was halted, and López was ousted in a military coup. The scandal came to light the same year that United Brands CEO Eli M. Black died by suicide on the 3rd of February 1975.
After Eli M. Black's death in 1975, billionaire Carl Lindner Jr., through his Cincinnati-based American Financial Group, bought into United Brands. In August 1984, Lindner took control and renamed the company Chiquita Brands International, moving its headquarters to Cincinnati in 1985. In 2019, the company relocated its main offices from the United States to Switzerland.