This is my chance to make it big, whatever challenges may come." But on the flip side, he probably thought, "If I build this railroad, then I'll have access to all those riches."

I think what Minor Keith understood was that if you build infrastructure in these places where there is no infrastructure, and you make the right financial deals by hook or by crook, um, honestly or dishonestly, you are gonna get very rich, and you're gonna get very, very powerful.

But Keith remained determined, and desperate for workers, he decided to recruit prisoners.

Hopeless prisoners, people in, in, in jail in New Orleans, people who have no way out.

And he basically calls for volunteers, and he says, "Anybody who volunteers, helps me build my railroad to completion, is gonna get a pardon." 700 prisoners volunteer, but only 25 prisoners survive to get their pardons.

25 out of 700.

There actually weren't a lot of Americans compared to the Guatemalan army, but the Guatemalans had been led to believe that they didn't have a chance, so they pretty much gave up.

This war ends very quickly.

Árbenz falls.

He's led out naked onto the tarmac.

He is flown away and he begins this, um, sort of five-year sojourn trying to get back, um, and eventually dies in a bathtub in Mexico around 1960.

What happens in Guatemala? The democracy is overthrown, and so begins the most oppressive right-wing government in the history of Central America up until that time.

That government extrapolates in this brutal, horrific, genocidal way the idea that if banana workers n- need rights, we must strip all rights from banana workers and possibly kill them.

It needs to be the same length and the same thickness, and it has to turn the same shade of yellow, and it has to do it in the same amount of time.

So bananas were really a one-off thing, super rare, until a Cape Cod ship captain called Lorenzo Dow Baker turned to bananas to try to make a quick buck after a disastrous expedition to Venezuela in search of gold.

Well, they don't find any gold.

And so he limps back.

You know, some of his crew haven't made it.

His boat's in bad shape.

He's feeling pretty bummed about the whole thing.

And, uh, he gets to Jamaica, where he puts in for repairs.

But either way, from the 1890s, the banana companies basically ran the show, backed up with the threat of US military action.