"Why should I buy your country if, in the end, it already belongs to me?" Why are we a rich continent with poor people? The Scars of the Wind attempts to explain the origins of Latin America's underdevelopment through a vigorous novelized narrative that reveals the birth, evolution, and diplomatic, military, political, and social behavior of the United Fruit Company--the Octopus, the largest banana corporation in the world--in Central America, the Caribbean, and the Antilles. The U.S.-based United Fruit created wealth and economic transformation, but it also destabilized governments, bought off congresses, bribed the press--and even purchased it outright--exploited workers, and orchestrated military interventions with the support of the Marines, the White House's armed wing sent to defend foreign interests in defenseless countries ruled by corrupt tyrants. In many cases, the company rose to become an authority greater than the presidents themselves, often installed or removed by United Fruit, giving rise--among other consequences--to the emergence of dictatorships such as those of Batista, Somoza, and Trujillo, and to the coup d'état against President Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala. Do absolute faults exist? Where, then, does that of the United States end and that of the nations of the southern hemisphere begin?
In this revealing work--rich in human portraits, colors, emotions, bursts of passion and unbridled desires, in which, as in war, everything is permitted so long as it satisfies a fleeting sensual whim--the ambitions of men ravenous for power are laid bare without the slightest shame: men endowed with immense economic capacity, useful for seducing, threatening, and killing. As Robert Keith, president of United Fruit, would say when the thousands of campesinos in his service asked him for a raise: "Go ask the Virgin for that--you're the ones who believe in her so much...".
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