The United Fruit Company (UFC) was once so powerful that the US government destroyed democracy in a country for it.
It started in 1931 when Jorge Ubico became Guatemala’s president. By then, UFC had a monopoly on the country’s coffee and banana trade. It also owned Guatemala’s docks, railroads, and communications, so Ubico exempted them from taxes, gave them 200,000 hectares of land, and let them execute bothersome workers.
He was ousted in the October Revolution of 1944, which installed Prof. Juan José Arévalo Bermejo as Guatemala’s first democratically-elected president. Arévalo established minimum wage, built hospitals and schools, set up health and safety standards, and began cracking down on the labor practices of big companies.
To the US government, that made him a communist.