Opinion Life and death in a banana civilization
Gabriel García Márquez would surely have something to say about a Florida jury’s decision last month against banana behemoth Chiquita Brands International for financing the paramilitary group United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, which sowed terror in the banana-growing regions of Urabá and Magdalena.
Latin America’s literary master not only hails from Aracataca, a village in the center of Colombia’s banana domains. He was born just a year before the most bloody event in the nation’s attempt at banana-fueled development: the 1928 massacre by the Colombian army of maybe thousands of workers at the behest of Chiquita’s corporate forebear, United Fruit Co.
United Fruit is a critical protagonist in García Márquez’s masterpiece, “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Known in the region as “El Pulpo” — “The Octopus” — it is there to represent civilization and modernity, coming to pull Latin America into the future. The violence that the banana goliath’s civilizing mission unleashes upon the Colombian landscape and its people is not a bug. It is a feature.
The jury’s decision in Florida is, in this sense, a measure of progress. The litigation might have taken 17 years. But Chiquita was ultimately brought to account for human rights abuses carried out on its dime. United Fruit and its executives, by contrast, faced no consequences for the banana massacre 100 years ago.
And yet Chiquita’s employment of death squads to protect its interests into the 2000s raises an uncomfortable question for the protagonists of 21st-century globalization, hunting around the Global South in pursuit of natural resources or other opportunities to exploit. Is abuse, corruption and violence still inherent in multinational capitalism?
Chiquita’s is not an isolated incident. A palm oil company financed by the World Bank in Honduras allegedly used force to displace local farmers. Mining companies in Peru have been accused of a variety of human rights violations. And ExxonMobil settled a case with villagers that sued it for human rights abuses allegedly perpetrated by its hired security forces.
Abuses persist despite loud pledges of corporate responsibilities. One study of 273 instances of human rights violations in developing countries from 2002 to 2017 found that 90 percent of the 160 multinational corporations involved had corporate social responsibility or sustainability committees and were signatories to the United Nations Global Compact.
“How are we still here?” asks Marissa Vahlsing, director of transnational legal strategy at EarthRights International, which is coordinating the legal case against Chiquita. One would hope that global capitalism would have overcome its murderous instincts by now.
Modernity arrives in García Márquez’s Colombian landscape of Macondo via one Mr. Herbert, an American “of topaz eyes and fine rooster skin,” who bit into a banana in the house of Aureliano Segundo Buendía, a descendant of the town’s founder, José Arcadio, the fourth generation of a family that forms the backbone of the novel. Mr. Herbert immediately tasted profit.
Within a week, the town pulsed with surveyors, hydrologists, topographers and, yes, lawyers. “Endowed with means that had been reserved for Divine Providence in former times, they changed the pattern of the rains, accelerated the cycle of harvest, and moved the river from where it had always been and put it, with its white stones and its icy currents, on the other end of town, behind the cemetery.”
Nicaraguan author (and former vice president) Sergio Ramírez put it thus in an epilogue to the 50th anniversary edition of García Márquez’s masterwork: “The connection of the rural world with modernity is consummated with the arrival of the banana company, which transformed Macondo into something unfamiliar to its own inhabitants.”
This is a merciless world. Besides the experts, the company also brought “dictatorial foreigners” and “hired assassins with machetes” to run the town. When the banana company leaves, Macondo is “in ruins.” Most everybody is dead, slain in the town square under a hail of bullets fired by soldiers summoned by El Pulpo to break a strike. José Arcadio Segundo, Aureliano Segundo’s brother and one of only two survivors of the massacre, is left for dead, waking up in a train car atop countless bodies to be disposed of secretly somewhere far away. The bodies “had the same temperature of plaster in the autumn, and the consistency of petrified foam.”
Then, everything was forgotten. Macondo succumbed to amnesia. Even primary school textbooks showed no trace that the banana company had ever existed.
This is probably not too far off from how it happened. From the late 19th century through a big chunk of the 20th, El Pulpo exerted its power over the governments of Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras and Panama, everywhere bending the state to its will. In 1954, United Fruit even got the Eisenhower administration to organize a coup in Guatemala against the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz, who threatened the company with agrarian reform.
Colombia was transformed by the banana massacre. But the banana company got away scot-free. Gen. Carlos Cortés Vargas, who gave the order to shoot, admitted only to there being 47 deaths in the banana massacre of 1928. A young liberal congressman, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, put the number at 2,000 — many of whose bodies he claimed were dumped into the sea.
It’s hard to build prosperity on bananas. Indeed, a recent report by the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development pointed out that the dependence on commodities by countries in the Global South “has hindered these nations’ growth and undermined their people’s well-being.”
Natural resource economies have a hard time raising productivity. Raw materials are generally exported raw, offering countries few opportunities to move up the value chain. What’s more, rents generated by extractive industries usually bring about corruption. And violence often comes along too.
Researchers commissioned by the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights recorded 1,300 allegations of corporate human rights abuses in Latin America between 2000 and 2014 alone. The top two industries were the extractive industry and agriculture, accounting for over half of the cases.
It would be unreasonable for the commodity-rich Global South to turn its back on its natural resource wealth. Still, hopefully the rules governing international investment can be shaped around a paradigm that not only protects the human rights of local communities but also helps enrich them.
Until then, imported modernity will continue to fail in reality, as it did in García Márquez’s fiction. “Rather than occupying reality, modernity occupies the place of illusion,” Ramírez notes in his epilogue. “The rural world is reality and urban modernity is the political dream that offers itself in a future that is always postponed.”