Welcome to the Saturday edition of The Conversation U.S.’s Daily newsletter.

President Donald Trump is boasting about all the oil he says the United States will get from Venezuela, now that his administration seized the country’s leader. Having learned a lot about Latin America over the two decades I spent either studying, traveling in or reporting on the region, I felt that it was a good time for The Conversation U.S. to convey what happened to Guatemala in 1954.

To recount this important chapter in U.S.-Latin American relations, I turned to Aaron Coy Moulton, a historian who has documented the role that U.S. lawmakers played, at the behest of the United Fruit Co., in making way for the Central American country’s democratically elected president to be ousted in a U.S.-engineered coup.

“The company’s seemingly unlimited clout in the countries where it operated gave rise to the stereotype of Central American nations as ‘banana republics,’” Moulton explains, adding that many foreign policy experts argue the damage done to Guatemala’s democracy had long-lasting effects.

This week we also liked stories about the U.S. and Greenland’s complicated history, how U.S. agriculture has long played a role in foreign policy, and an explainer on the political and social movement known as Christian Reconstructionism.