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Chiquita

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A friendly face and a blood-soaked history.
“”I have the honor to report that the Bogota representative of the United Fruit Company told me yesterday that the total number of strikers killed by the Colombian military exceeded 1,000.
—Jefferson Caffery, United States ambassador to Colombia, 1928.[1][2]
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Chiquita Brands International S.à.r.l. is an American fruit company (currently domiciled in Switzerland) which specializes in the cultivation and distribution of bananas, the world's most widely-eaten fruit.[3] Sounds harmless, right? Well, just you wait.

Chiquita used to be known as the United Fruit Company, the name it used until 1990. From its founding in 1899, the company used land acquisition, railroad construction grants, legal tomfoolery, and other underhanded methods to seize vast tracts of land in Latin America, all for the sake of growing more bananas. The company wielded its influence over countries like Honduras and Guatemala, undermining their governments and turning these nations into so-called "banana republics." The company became known as El Pulpo, or "the octopus",[note 1] because its power was pervasive on every level of society in the banana republics.[4] Politicians in the banana republics who attempted to oppose the company's interests on behalf of their constituents were deposed, humiliated, and often worse. In 1928, when local workers in Cienaga, Colombia went on strike over poor conditions, the United Fruit Company claimed the strikers were communists, thus convincing Colombia's conservative government to send its army to massacre an estimated 1,000 striking workers.[2]

The company's ruthlessness did not lessen after the massacre. In 1954, it successfully lobbied the Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow the government of Guatemala for threatening its control,[5] which set the stage for the brutal Guatemalan Civil War, in which 200,000 people died.[6] It later participated in the Bay of Pigs invasion, an attempt by the United States to overthrow Fidel Castro, by loaning company-owned ships.[7]

While the 1990 rebranding changed its appearance, the company's practices didn't improve. During a period of civil conflict in Colombia during the 1990s and early 2000s, Chiquita had contacts with the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia), a notoriously brutal right-wing paramilitary group which the US State Department designated as a terrorist organization in 2001.[8] Chiquita supplied the terrorists with shipments of arms and ammunition as well as more than $1.7 million over the course of seven years, even after the State Department's 2001 designation.[9]

In the last case, some measure of justice was finally achieved, as a US federal jury in Florida held Chiquita liable for enabling the actions of the AUC and awarded $38.3 million in damages to the families of eight men who had been killed.[10] This is the first time a major US corporation had been held accountable by a federal jury for injustices committed against foreign nationals.

The United Fruit Company[edit]

Loading bananas onto a train in Honduras, 1926.

Land acquisition[edit]

Since bananas are extremely perishable, and technology wasn't so great in the early 1900s, a clock immediately began ticking the moment a worker pulled a fruit from a tree. Because of this, Chiquita decided to build a business in which they controlled every aspect of transportation and distribution, all optimized to be as fast as possible. The bananas would be picked from plantations Chiquita owned in Latin America, then packaged onto trains on Chiquita-owned railroads, then placed onto refrigerated company ships, unloaded in New Orleans, Louisiana, and finally distributed across the US' railroad network.[2] All of this needed to be done within two weeks, but the company mandated a seven-day time limit in order to ensure the product had seven days to be sold in markets.

This system could only work on a large scale if United Fruit owned massive tracts of land in a country as well as most of its infrastructure. To that end, the company set out on aggressive acquisitions, enabled by the power-vacuum left after Spain's interests had been ejected from the region following the 1898 Spanish-American War. By purchasing railroad and telegraph companies, United Fruit pitched itself to Latin American countries as a partner for development and modernization, which convinced those countries to sell off big chunks of territory.[11] United Fruit also ended up with ownership of critical infrastructure like ports and even hospitals. By the 1930s, the company owned 3.5 million acres (14,000 km2) across Latin America and had become the largest landowner in Guatemala.[12]

Banana republics[edit]

Harvesting bananas on a United Fruit plantation in Honduras, 1920.

Honduras was the first country to be described as a "banana republic". Samuel Zemurray and his Cuyamel Fruit Company, initially competitors to United Fruit, used similar predatory business practices to take over Honduras, and in 1911 Cuyamel sponsored a coup against Honduras' elected government in order to bring in a more Cuyamel-friendly dictatorship.[13] United Fruit eventually bought out Cuyamel, but Zemurray went on to head United Fruit as a fabulously wealthy man.

After the 1911 coup and the merger with Cuyamel, United Fruit effectively owned the nation of Honduras. In exchange for generous payments, Honduran dictator Manuel Bonilla sold his country out from under himself. Almost everyone in Honduras in some way worked for United Fruit, and the company controlled all of the nation's infrastructure. The economy of Honduras stagnated as the country was mired in foreign debt and had no control over its own resources.[14]

A United Fruit worker carries a load of bananas in Panama, 1913.

In 1901, Guatemala contracted the corporation to manage its national postal service, and the company used this inroad to effectively take over the country by the 1930s.[15] Historian William Blum wrote that United Fruit functioned as a "state within a state" in Guatemala, dictating financial policies, ensuring exclusive legal rights to itself, and using the shadow of US power to make sure it always had its way.[16] United Fruit also supported the rise of dictator Jorge Ubico in 1931, who imposed regressive policies allowing landowners to execute workers and stipulating that landless men had to perform 100 days of indentured servitude per year.[17]

To meet growing demand, the company expanded into Costa Rica as well, coming to own 9% of the country's landmass.[18]

Working conditions and racism[edit]

See the main article on this topic: Racism

Working conditions were usually quite wretched, with long hours and low pay. Pressure on workers was intense due to high demand for bananas and the strict time limit to get the perishable fruits to market. Manual laborers would frequently work 14-hour days, and during rushes, they could work as many as 24 hours without any breaks.[2] The labor itself was backbreaking, as workers were expected to carry a hundred pounds or more of bananas on their backs.[2] Bananas also grow in tropical environments where it's frequently raining and muddy, and to top it off, workers would also frequently encounter deadly venomous snakes. As a result, life expectancy in Latin America sharply decreased, a fact which United Fruit was aware of and unbothered by.[2]

In order to prevent worker dissatisfaction from affecting productivity, United Fruit decided to use a divide-and-conquer strategy to keep workers angrier with each other than they were against the company. To that end, the company awarded the most prestigious and well-paying jobs to white Americans, while Hispanics were lower status workers and West Indians were simply menial laborers.[19] Workers were organized into and strictly kept within their racial group, and when one group was rewarded, the company managers would say it was because they had worked harder than the other racial groups. When one group was punished, managers would say it was because another racial group had underperformed.[19]

The 1928 massacre[edit]

Leaders of the strike. The photo was recovered from the the United Fruit archive in Panama.

In Magdalena, Colombia, on 5 October, 1928 United Fruit workers gathered and decided to go on a general strike in response to deteriorating work conditions. Among their demands was a six-day workweek, compensation for workplace injuries, and payment in actual money instead of vouchers for United Fruit products.[4] All reasonable asks, but the United Fruit Company only saw a threat to its bottom line.

The company's retaliation was immediate. Company-influenced newspapers across Colombia immediately denounced the strikers as "communists", and company lobbyists began stirring panic in the US government. On 6 December, the United States threatened to invade Colombia if the nation didn't take action to put down the strike.[4]

The Colombian government, itself worried about losing out on the cash from exporting bananas to the US, decided to comply. The governor of Magdalena summoned the workers to the town square of Ciénaga on the basis that he would hear their demands and help them negotiate with the company.[20] Meanwhile, General Carlos Cortés Vargas led a military force and set up machine gun positions. Vargas' people opened fire on the strikers, killing an unknown but large number of people, and the US ambassador reported to Washington that 1,000 people had been killed.[2] The military deliberately left nine corpses to rot in the city square, each representing one of the strikers' nine demands.[20] The surviving workers fled into the mountains of Colombia and began fighting back by destroying United Fruit warehouses and dormitories in a period of violence that lasted for years after.

The 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état[edit]

See the main article on this topic: Coup d'état
A satirical mural by Diego RiveraWikipedia depicting the Guatemalan coup. Armas and Dulles are shown shaking hands in the center, surrounded by dead children and bananas.

In the post-World War II era, local pushback against United Fruit escalated. In Guatemala, the decades of banana republic governance had created a situation where actual Guatemalan citizens who wanted to farm only owned a tiny fraction of the nation's land. In 1951, Guatemalans elected the left-wing military officer Jacobo Árbenz after a decade of fighting for representative elections.[21] Árbenz had run on a platform of land redistribution, and he was determined to make good on that promise with a clever maneuver.

As a massive landowner, United Fruit had cheated on its taxes by claiming that the Guatemalan land it owned was worth far less than it was in reality. So Árbenz decided to confiscate the company's land and offer the precise amount United Fruit had always claimed as the land's value: $1,185,000.[11] As you can imagine, United Fruit flipped a shit, decided to be honest that its land was worth $19,355,000, and demanded the new amount.[11] When Árbenz refused to accept that, the company decided to go cry to Daddy.

"Daddy", in this case, was John Foster Dulles, the US Secretary of State under President Dwight Eisenhower. Dulles had close ties to United Fruit, having worked as a company lawyer for a long time.[22] His brother, Allen Dulles, was the head of the CIA and also had financial ties to the company. The company used a public relations firm to spread the false narrative that Árbenz was a communist aligned with the Soviet Union, a story that caused Washington to shit a brick.[23]

In 1954, the CIA sponsored a rightist general, Carlos Castillo Armas, to invade Guatemala City and take control of the country's government.[23] Although the coup failed militarily, the threat of US intervention convinced the Guatemalan government to back down. Armas became the country's new dictator, and he quickly set about massacring Árbenz's remaining supporters, leading to the Guatemalan genocide. In 1960, uprisings against the Armas regime led to the Guatemalan Civil War, which lasted until 1996 and cost the lives of 200,000 people.[6]

Chiquita[edit]

Chiquita bananas on sale, 2015.

In 1970, United Fruit merged with other corporations to form the United Brands Company, and in 1990, the conglomerate was renamed to Chiquita.[24] The renaming didn't do much to change its business practices.

Paying terrorists in Colombia[edit]

See the main article on this topic: Terrorism

During the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC) waged a campaign of rightist terror throughout Colombia. The AUC was responsible for killing or disappearing more than 100,000 civilians, and they committed more than 10,000 acts of torture.[9] In 2001, US Secretary of State Colin Powell designated the group as a terrorist organization,[8] although this didn't stop Chiquita from paying over $1.7 million to the AUC. In 2007, the US Justice Department sued the company, and the company's attorney Eric Holder (who would go on to head the Justice Department under President Obama) argued that the payments were protection money.[25] However, the company received no services for the payments, and it had furthermore supplied the AUC with weapons.[9] The company ultimately agreed to pay a $25 million fine.[25]

In 2013 and 2014, Chiquita attracted harsh criticism for spending about $780,000 to furiously lobby against the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), a bill intended to make it easier for the victims of 9/11 to sue organizations which had financially supported al-Qaeda and related terrorist groups.[26] Chiquita was, of course, primarily motivated by the ongoing legal battles over its financing of the AUC. JASTA eventually passed Congress with little opposition.

Chiquita then faced a class-action lawsuit in which attorneys for the plaintiffs (the families of AUC victims) selected the nine strongest complaints in order to make a case against the company.[27] Following arguments, a federal jury in June 2024 found Chiquita liable in the deaths and ordered it to pay $38.3 million in damages to the families of the victims.[27] In a statement, Chiquita said it would appeal the decision and then decided to mention that "our thoughts remain with them and their families."[27] Yeah, okay guys.

See also[edit]

Notes[edit]

  1. ↑ El pulpo probably reminds Spanish speakers of la pulpa ("the pulp" [of the banana]).

References[edit]

  1. ↑ 95 Years Since Massacre of Colombian Banana Strikers. International Socialist Alternative.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 There Will Be Bananas. NPR.
  3. ↑ Bananas: The World’s Favorite Fruit. Mana Medical Associates.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 The Dark Side of Bananas: Imperialism, Non-State Actors, and Power. Harvard Business Review.
  5. ↑ Schlesinger, Stephen; Kinzer, Stephen (1999). Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. pp. 90–97. ISBN 978-0-674-01930-0. 
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Timeline: Guatemala’s Brutal Civil War. PBS .
  7. ↑ Bananas, quarantines, and the octopus: United Fruit Company’s PR stunt in Central America. The Historic New Orleans Collection. Emily Perkins, curatorial cataloger.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Designation of the AUC As a Foreign Terrorist Organization. Secretary Colin L. Powell.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 Crimes Against Humanity and Chiquita Banana. Partners in Justice International.
  10. ↑ A jury says Chiquita should pay millions over paramilitary killings in Colombia. NPR.
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 When the United Fruit Company Tried to Buy Guatemala. The Nation.
  12. ↑ Livingstone, Grace (4 April 2013). America's Backyard: The United States and Latin America from the Monroe Doctrine to the War on Terror. Zed Books Ltd.. ISBN 9781848136113. 
  13. ↑ Where We Got the Term “Banana Republic”. Smithsonian Magazine.
  14. ↑ W.S. Valentine (November 1916). "Need for Capital in Latin America: Honduras". Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications) 68: 185–87. doiWikipedia:10.1177/000271621606800125. JSTOR 1013083. 
  15. ↑ What Is a Banana Republic? The Collector.
  16. ↑ Blum, William (2003). Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II. London: Zed Books. ISBN 978-1-84277-369-7.  p. 75.
  17. ↑ Gleijeses, Piero (1991). Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-02556-8.  p. 13.
  18. ↑ The History and Impact of the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica. Grow Jungles.
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 Blood For Bananas: United Fruit’s Central American Empire. Lindsey Morey. Washington State University.
  20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 A Photograph We Were Not Supposed to See. Visualizing the Americas.
  21. ↑ Peeling Back the Truth on Guatemalan Bananas. CETRI.
  22. ↑ Schlesinger, Stephen; Kinzer, Stephen (1999). Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-01930-0.  p. 72-77
  23. ↑ 23.0 23.1 Mario Vargas Llosa explores 1954 Guatemalan coup in new novel. NPR.
  24. ↑ United Fruit Company. Britannica.
  25. ↑ 25.0 25.1 The bloody history behind the $38 million Chiquita verdict. CNN.
  26. ↑ Exclusive: Chiquita Is Blocking a 9/11 Victims’ Bill. The Daily Beast.
  27. ↑ 27.0 27.1 27.2 Banana giant held liable for funding paramilitaries. BBC News.
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