Blog 2020 Week 51: Bananarama
By: The Trick Is To Keep Blogging
Tags: Latin America, Corporations, Blog, Capitalism, Banana

At the moment most of my time is spent doing my “job” — editing and proofreading academic scripts for a Scrooge’s wage — and trying to write a few essays as part of my applications for masters courses. So the only interesting things happening in my personal life are me finding out horrific things about past international relations, and me finding out things through reading random students’ academic essays, which are also, in their own way, horrific.

But anyway, bananas. Latin America, where they have never spoken latin, is known for its “banana republics”: nations which effectively exist to produce bananas for the wealthy and powerful. You might not think of a banana as a luxury product, but the fact that they are so cheap and so abundant is because it has been engineered that way. The pioneer and main culprit here is United Fruit Company, which has the good fortune to be abbreviated as UFC.

At the embers of the nineteenth century, with imperialism in full swing, two businessmen of middling success teamed up and realised that they might make a fortune if they stopped trying to operate in America, where people were (mostly) treated like people, and started to operate in Latin America. Exotic fruit had always grown well in the lush, temperate groves of Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, what became Panama, and northern Colombia, then Gran Colombia. But the UFC turned banana manufacturing into a true industry.

You’ll be unsurprised to know that they roped in hundreds of thousands of locals to work in dangerous, hot, sticky conditions on exceptionally low pay, often paying in financial substitutes rather than actual money. You may be slightly surprised to know that UFC owned its own armada of ships known as the “Great White Fleet”, and with over 100 ships it was the largest private fleet in the world. You’ll likely be surprised to learn that UFC expanded, buying Guatemala’s postal service outright and creating their own media/propoganda station, the Tropical Radio and Telegraph Company. In the US, they ran educational programs in schools and had a Home Economics Department, teaching the housewives of tomorrow how to make delicious banana pancakes. You’ll be very surprised to realise that for a period of some fifty years, UFC was to all intents and purposes its own country, owning vast swathes of land throughout latin America and operating entirely uninhibited by either the local governments or the uninterested USA.

Every time you read more into the UFC, the story gets a little more … well, bananas. Once the UFC had established their own country, they didn’t exactly take well to revolt. In 1928, Colombian workers went on strike to protest at their abysmal working conditions. With US warships on the horizon, threatening to invade, General Cortes Vargas decided that if anyone was going to massacre the workers, it was going to be him, so he gave the order for his men to open fire on the crowd.

They massacred their own workforce.

Because the workers were poor people, and therefore unimportant, no one knows how many died. Estimates range from 47 to over 3,000. It’s difficult to ascertain deaths when most people are uncertified, but reports of truckloads of bodies being dumped into the ocean at UFC-controlled port towns have been substantiated from multiple eyewitnesses.

This wasn’t the first time the UFC had gone military. Banana company leaders orchestrated a coup d’etat in Honduras after the nation got a little too self-serving in 1910.

Not to be held down in piddling massacres or regime change, UFC also had an involvement in the near destruction of life on earth. In 1961 they lent their famous Great White Fleet to the Americans to help in the infamous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Instead of overthrowing Fidel Castro, the Cuban armies had a decisive victory over the US forces, solidifying Castro as a national hero and solidifying anti-American sentiment. Hence the strengthened ties with Russia, hence the willingness to harbour Russian nuclear missiles 100 miles from Florida, hence the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which one submarine, experiencing communications failure, assumed it was because nuclear war had already begun and came within a hair’s breadth of launching its missiles. But that’s another story.

In the later decades of the twentieth century, it was banana disease which did the most to reduce the impact of UFC on the Americas. One CEO famously threw himself out of his 45th storey office window after leading the company towards financial ruin. But the banana companies never entirely went away. UFC rebranded to Chiquita, which still persists today, both in manufacturing bananas and being a reminder of the vilest impulses of capitalism. In 2007 Chiquita pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting a terrorist group who plotted to overthrow the Colombian ruling parties, in a boon for the banana business. Plus ca change.

Make no mistake, the prospects for the poorer nations of Central America are bleak so long as multinational corporations remain major players, and free from regulation. The only nations in the region which are currently prospering are Panama, because it’s essentially owned by America and they literally carved it in half, and Costa Rica.

I love the story of Costa Rica. It was mostly ignored by colonial forces because it was naturally a muggy, mosquito-infested swampland: it was harder to exploit than the rest of Latin America. After it gained independence in 1847, it controlled its own interests, established true democracy a century later, and benefitted from high education, tourist revenues, and not having a standing army since 1948. It’s currently the 12th happiest country of the world. Not banana-related, but I felt the need to end on a happier note.

Merry Christmas.