The Banana Massacre
—Chrissie
Listen here: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/hwts-251-the-banana-massacre--61059581
The history of Latin America and the Caribbean is fraught with abuse of labor and corporate manipulation of governments. One of the most chilling examples of this is the Banana Massacre, in which the government of Colombia assisted the United Fruit Company in violently ending a strike.
The United Fruit Company was formed in 1899 by the manager of the Boston Fruit Company and the Tropical Trading and Transport Company; the latter was run by Minor C. Keith. He had already been working in the Caribbean on a railroad project connecting San José, Costa Rica, to the port of Limón. When Costa Rica could no longer pay for the project, Keith borrowed to continue the project, expecting to recoup the money easily once the railroad was running. Two years later, the Costa Rican government granted Keith a 99-year lease on the train route and 800,000 acres of land along it. Income from the railroad was insufficient, but he found that the banana plantations he’d established on that free land could be very lucrative. Bananas, originally grown by Keith as a source of cheap food for his workers, were becoming an expensive delicacy in the United States.
In 1899, after a mutual broker went bankrupt, Keith’s Tropical Trading and Transport merged with the Boston Fruit Company to become the United Fruit Company. Once established, they set about creating a near-monopoly for themselves by either buying them outright or purchasing a controlling stock. Within just a few years, they were responsible for about 80% of bananas in the United States. They also, quite ingeniously, added Caribbean travel to their repertoire, by building ships that carried both the banana cargo and a small number (around 100) of passengers. Their Great White Fleet, so called because the boats were painted white to reflect the hot Caribbean sun, arguably invented the Caribbean Cruise industry.
They branched into other fields as well: between 1901 and 1954, the company managed the Guatemalan postal service. They also got involved in telecommunications in 1933 with the Tropical Radio and Telegraph Company. Between this, the bananas, and other ventures, by 1933 they were the largest employer in Central America. They were also so deeply enmeshed in these countries’ economies that they had an inordinate influence on their governments, thereby creating the first instance of a banana republic. Because of the power held by United Fruit, these governments often would side with the company over their own citizens. This was made blatantly clear in Colombia in November and December 1928 when a labor action was ended with military force.
Working conditions in the United Fruit Plantations were brutal: seven-day workweeks, poor sanitation, dangerous conditions, no accounting for illness or injury, meager wages that were often paid in company scrip rather than real money, and immediate suppression of any attempts by labor to organize. In the years after the Russian Revolution (1917), the company was able to paint any labor action as one encouraging communism and/or led by communists who sought to undermine the government. This prompted support from the United States, who was all-in to prevent the expansion of communism, even it was done violently.
In October 1928, the United Fruit workers presented a list of nine demands, ranging from improving sanitation in worker housing to a six-day workweek, to being paid in real money. These were ignored, prompting a strike to begin on 12 November. Over the next few weeks, it spread through Colombia, across United Fruit and expanded into other companies as well. By the first week of December, approximately 25,000 people were on strike. United Fruit needed only to invoke the specter of communism to encourage support from the Colombian government and military. Within this context, three hundred soldiers under the leadership of General Cortés Vargas were brought to Magdelana, where a large group of the strikers had gathered.
On 5 December 1928, a group of the strikers and their families attended Sunday Mass in Ciénaga, then gathered in the nearby square to hear a speech they were told would soon be coming from the governor. As the area filled, soldiers with machine guns were deployed on the rooftops around them. The people were given a warning that anyone still in the square in five minutes’ time would be shot; then, as a few thousand people tried to leave, they found the streets blocked. There is no definite answer as to how many people were killed: the official report is 47, while contemporaries and historians have said as many as two thousand. There is not even a record of where the bodies were buried. The strike ended a few weeks later, without having addressed the workers’ demands.
Two years later, a party change in the government of Colombia brought workers’ rights and union support. They forced United Fruit to treat their workers better, though it was not powerful enough to force massive change on the company. United Fruit continued to exploit their workers throughout the twentieth century, unabashedly using local and US government influence to maintain their control over both the bananas and the people. In June 2024, the company, now known as Chiquita, was fined for their use of paramilitary groups against their employees throughout Central America in the last few decades of the twentieth century.