History of Modern Latin America by Teresa A. Meade

Author:Teresa A. Meade
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781118772492
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2015-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

Colombia: Resistance to the United Fruit Company

In Colombia, the boom in coffee exports began in the early years of the century and grew from 1 million bags (60 kilos each) in 1913 to 3 million bags yearly by the end of the 1920s, making coffee the leading export. Other economically expanding sectors were oil production and the cultivation and export of fruit, especially bananas. Labor militancy and protest broke out first among Colombian dockworkers, but the government, anxious to grow the export sector and to build on the new-found prosperity following years of internal conflict (especially the 1899–1902 Thousand Days' War that intermittently paralyzed Colombian productivity), responded by outlawing strikes, invading meetings of labor activists, and closing down nascent organizations. Petroleum workers struck in Barrancabermeja in the mid- and late 1920s, and banana pickers and haulers staged a massive strike and protest in 1928.

The banana workers' strike, and resultant repression, was a major moment in the United Fruit Company's history in Colombia; the “banana massacre” was immortalized for readers around the world in Gabriel García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. The Boston-based United Fruit Company was formed in 1899 as a result of the merger of the Boston Fruit Company and the banana business owned by another Bostonian, Minor Keith. The company's tentacles reached into every corner of the production and export enterprise, earning it the name “El Pulpo,” or “The Octopus.” By the beginning of 1900 it was a major landholder and employer in Colombia. Managers who came to Colombia were largely from the south of the United States and intermingled little with the ordinary, mixed-race workers on their plantations. In an interview, García Márquez described his childhood memories of the “banana fever” that overtook his hometown of Aracataca beginning in 1910 with the arrival of United Fruit. He remembered “the wire fences; the ever-neat green lawns; the swimming pools with outdoor tables and umbrellas; the tall, blond, ruddy-faced men in their explorer outfits; their wives decked out in muslin dresses; and their adolescent daughters, playing tennis or going for casual drives in their convertibles around Aracataca.” This memory of managers from another country, living in isolation from the people who worked for them, was, he remarked, his first impression of “great-power colonialism.” Years later, it would figure in his novel.2

Isolated from ordinary Colombians, North American managers had no compunctions about enforcing harsh working conditions for little pay. In response, workers began to organize for improved living and working conditions, including the right to form a union to represent their interests. When 32,000 banana workers struck United Fruit on October 7, 1928, the company initially relied on its own guards to disrupt the picketers, but when these intimidation methods failed, United Fruit called in government troops to put down the strike in Ciénaga (see Box 8.1). The 1928 massacre of banana strikers was a shocking event in Colombian history, prompting calls for an investigation and retaliation against the American conglomerate and the army. A young lawyer, Jorge

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