United Fruit left the families on its Costa Rican land better off than their neighbors.
Two economists who grew up in Costa Rica set out to measure the damage done by the company Latin America called the Octopus. The economists found that it had built schools and hospitals to keep workers from leaving for the coffee harvest. In 1973, households inside its old land were 26 percent less likely to be poor than those just outside, and by 2011 only 63 percent of that gap had closed.
United Fruit on Brandseum