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Banana Republic Legacy Thrives in Today’s Latin America
The term “banana republic” has become a cliche to describe economic imperialism throughout history, but the legacy of colonialism persists in Latin America today. The tradition of predatory capitalism echoed in the recent death of Miguel Angel González Ramírez, a member of the Izabal banana workers’ union SITRABI in Guatemala.
According to the International Trade Union Confederation, the unionist was “shot several times whilst carrying his young child in his arms.” This seems to be another casualty in a labor battle between labor and corporateers who would rather see workers shed blood than be paid fair wages.
The ITUC has demanded an official investigation, noting that in the past year several unionists have been killed or targeted with threats. Last October, SITRABI member Pablino Yaque Cervantes was shot by an unidentified attacker, according to U.S. Labor Education in the Americas Project (US LEAP).
Manuela Chávez of the ITUC's Department of Human and Trade Union Rights told In these Times, "Freedom of association and the right to organize and bargain collectively have been endangered by a very high anti-union repression for years," adding that the threats to unionists are aggravated by government inaction.
But it’s not just the cruelty of the killing--nor the connection to the infamous banana crop--that evokes a history of enslavement and dehumanization of indigenous, African and migrant peoples. The company in question, BANDEGUA, is a Del Monte subsidiary that has come under fire for refusing to comply with the Guatemalan government’s minimum wage standards.
The incident reflects business as usual in the banana industry, well known for oppressive working conditions. Labor advocates have long protested unfair wages and other violations in Latin American agriculture, especially under international giants like Dole.
The crisis has reached a boiling point under the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), a NAFTA-style trade regime that expanded multinationals’ power over the region’s industrial and agricultural sectors. Evidence of systemic abuses prompted SITRABI and other Guatemalan unions, along with the AFL-CIO, to initiate a worker rights complaint in 2008. As documented by US LEAP, the campaign cites violations of union rights as well as outright brutality, “including the 2007 murder of the brother of the General Secretary of the union.”
It remains to be seen whether there will be any consequences for the latest killing, but if past is prologue, Del Monte will likely remain comfortably insulated from labor troubles in the recesses of its global empire. After all, that's what trade systems like CAFTA have been designed to do, with their notoriously flimsy labor provisions. SITRABI’s activists are veterans of this war of attrition, having led global efforts to raise awareness of the rampant human rights abuses in the industry, from terrorizing violence to illegal firings to lack of collective bargaining protections.
Noting that the CAFTA complaint still drags on as the body count ticks up, Lupita Aguila Arteaga, executive director of the advocacy group STITCH, told In These Times:
This prolonged process shows how ineffective CAFTA is at protecting the rights of workers. The U.S. needs to continue to pressure the Guatemalan government to obey its own labor laws and uphold its labor rights obligations as mandated in the Central America Free Trade Agreement.
STITCH points out that labor violations in the banana industry are deeply entwined in global trade networks that send cheap fruit to hungry U.S. consumer markets. Since even so-called “fair trade certified” bananas may come from nonunion plantations, Arteaga says, American appetites are driving a hemispheric race to the bottom:
The banana industry in Latin America is facing a decline in unionization rates and wages. Companies like Wal-Mart are now buying directly from Latin American producers where unions do not exist and therefore labor and prices are cheaper. Banana companies are trying to stay afloat of this game by moving their production to other areas that can allow them to make a bigger profit by paying workers less and not providing any benefits.
Perhaps the best hope challenging Latin America's labor injustices won’t come from government or consumer campaigns, but from within--a surge in progressive unionism led by women. In a report on women banana workers (informed by a documentary project on feminist labor struggles), Arteaga describes how the fight for gender equity has become a wellspring of self-empowerment:
Bananeras, as they are dearly called, have achieved victories we can only dream of in the U.S., including clauses in their union contract that allows them to take a paid day off for a mammogram and/or a pap smear, union-wide campaigns with workshops against domestic violence, as well as union-led campaigns against HIV/AIDS with a focus on reproductive justice and accessibility to healthcare for all women in their communities. Not to mention the fact that ALL local banana unions have a women’s committee.
Today's banana republic is still rife with neocolonial horrors, but if you unpeel the layers of bitter struggle surrounding these communities, you might find some surprisingly sweet triumphs.
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Show AllSome background:
An excerpt from an excellent investigative report by the Interhemispheric Resource Center:
Banana Pickers Fight to Survive
In the 1990s the U.S.-owned Del Monte Fresh Fruit and Produce and its Guatemalan Subsidiary, BANDEGUA, began restructuring their banana production operations. Instead of directly controlling production, as it had for the past 50 years, they began to outsource production to independent producers who rent the companies' land, plantations, and facilities. Such was the case in a number of plantations in Guatemala's Izabal Province, where Del Monte/BANDEGUA now subcontracts land and banana production to multiple small, local subcontractors.
According to Annie Bird, codirector of Rights Action, a development and human rights organization, "this makes production a lot cheaper, because it makes union organizing virtually impossible."
For more than 50 years the Sindicato de Trabajadores Bananeros de Izabal (SITRABI), the only successful agricultural union in Guatemala, has bargained for banana workers' rights. One of the union's successes was a contract that won banana workers on Del Monte/BANDEGUA plantations decent wages, some benefits, and the right to live on small plots of company-owned land and cultivate staple food crops there for their own consumption.
Then, in 1998, Hurricane Mitch hit. According to worker advocates, what was a disaster for the families in Izabal province was an opportunity for Del Monte. "In the specific case of Del Monte in Guatemala, they used Hurricane Mitch as an excuse, and had workers break dykes to flood and kill banana plantations," Bird says. "They then claimed that losses from natural disasters forced them to lay off workers. Almost all the fired workers were then hired by the independent producers--with much lower wages and lesser benefits."
Soon after the hurricane, over 900 workers were fired from four of the Del Monte/BANDEGUA's eleven Izabal plantations, and packaging and production facilities were then leased to several local producers who currently hold production contracts with the multinational company.
With the SITRABI union crippled, most of the fired workers were forced to take jobs with the smaller, independent producers at far lower wages. Banana workers who had previously earned an average of $5 a day with modest benefits now earn about $3.25 daily for a 10-to-12-hour shift.
However, approximately 400 former Del Monte/BANDEGUA workers are asserting their rights to live on land on the Lanquin II plantation--around 200 hundred are actually physically occupying plots on the site, citing the SITRABI's contract with Del Monte/BANDEGUA that previously let them do so, says Rights Action.
In October last year Del Monte/BANDEGUA filed charges in Guatemalan courts against the land activists at Lanquin II for the criminal offense of land usurpation, and asked for their eviction. A court decision is expected in the coming weeks.
The Guatemalan government's commission responsible for negotiating land conflicts, CONTIERRA, held meetings with Lanquin II land activists, delegates of the Campesino Unity Committee, which advocates on behalf of the former workers, and BANDEGUA management in September. But efforts to resolve the dispute were thwarted when BANDEGUA officials broke off the talks. Since then Del Monte/BANDEGUA has sold most of the disputed plantation lands to neighboring cattle ranchers. Activists say these ranchers, sometimes with the collusion of the police, are subjecting the former workers and their families to violent intimidation.
"[BANDEGUA] is attempting a simple legal escape from their responsibility in the numerous land conflicts, human rights abuses (including assassinations), and the constant state of tension between BANDEGUA-hired gunmen who now claim to be simple cattle ranchers in Izabal," wrote Rights Action in an October 2002 report on the situation.
http://www.progress.org/fpif27.htm
Thanks for this excellent post, Rangoon78. While it may seem that few readers are attracted to issues of Central America and other places that are marginalized in US media, there are those who are avid followers of this kind of news. This reader is one of them, and is grateful for the additional insights.
This caught my eye: "Banana workers who had previously earned an average of $5 a day with modest benefits now earn about $3.25 daily for a 10-to-12-hour shift." It is evident that no wage is so small that large corporate owners will not scheme to make it lower.
The land rights issues are common. throughout the globe. The manner in which Del Monte/BANDEGUA sold off contested land to ranchers who have no compunction about using violence is an all to common story in these affairs as well.
Of course the use of a hurricane to further an oppressive agenda is familiar news to readers of this forum.
Power to the Campesino Unity Committee!
"recent death of Miguel Angel González Ramírez" When you mean murder, say 'murder,' not 'death.' Let's not pull verbal punches. Doing so undermines the point of this essay.
some background:
"A banana republic is a politically unstable country that depends heavily on exports of a limited resource (e.g. fruits or minerals), typically having a heavily impoverished lower class ruled by a much smaller wealthy elite. In political science it is more precisely defined as being dependent upon limited primary productions, and being ruled by a plutocracy that exploits the country by means of a politico-economic oligarchy.[1]
The term banana republic originally denoted the fictional “Republic of Anchuria”, a “servile dictatorship” that abetted (or supported for kickbacks) the exploitation of large-scale plantation agriculture, especially banana cultivation.[1] In U.S. politics, the term banana republic was a political descriptor first used by the American writer O. Henry in Cabbages and Kings (1904), a book of thematically related short stories derived from his 1896–97 residence in Honduras, where he was hiding from U.S. law for bank embezzlement.[2] It is generally considered pejorative."
"Honduras
The long history of political discontent and insurrection in Honduras derives from commercial and political competition between banana exporters, e.g. the United Fruit Company and the Cuyamel Banana Company, for control of Honduran agricultural land and workers. In 1911 Sam Zemurray, owner of the Cuyamel Company hired mercenaries, led by “General” Lee Christmas, to effect a coup d’état to depose the liberal President Miguel R. Dávila (1907–11), [10] with whom the United Fruit Company was colluding for a banana monopoly in exchange for brokering U.S. Government loans for Dávila's government;[7] the Cuyamel Banana Company deposed President Dávila and installed President Gen. Manuel Bonilla (1912–13) in his stead"
"Guatemala
Guatemala suffers the regional socio-economic legacy of the banana republic: inequitably distributed agricultural land and natural wealth, uneven economic development, and an economy dependent upon a few export crops, usually bananas, coffee, sugar cane. The inequitable land distribution is the principal cause of national poverty and the low quality of Guatemalan life, and the concomitant socio-political discontent and insurrection"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic
"The United Fruit Company was an American corporation that traded in tropical fruit (primarily bananas) grown on Third World plantations and sold in the United States and Europe. The company was formed in 1899 from the merger of Minor C. Keith's banana-trading concerns with Andrew W. Preston's Boston Fruit Company. It flourished in the early and mid-20th century and came to control vast territories and transportation networks in Central America, the Caribbean coast of Colombia, Ecuador, and the West Indies. Though it competed with the Standard Fruit Company for dominance in the international banana trade, it maintained a virtual monopoly in certain regions, some of which came to be called banana republics.[1]
It had a deep and long-lasting impact on the economic and political development of several Latin American countries. Critics often accused it of exploitative neocolonialism and described it as the archetypal example of the influence of a multinational corporation on the internal politics of the banana republics (a term coined by O. Henry). After a period of financial decline, United Fruit was merged with Eli M. Black's AMK in 1970 to become the United Brands Company. In 1984, Carl Lindner, Jr. transformed United Brands into the present-day Chiquita Brands International."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company
today we have a different way of describing the destruction of another country for monetary gain: we call it spreading freedom and democracy
union busiting is a favorite activity in amerika as well these day - we call it "right to work"
"A "right-to-work" law is a statute that prohibits union security agreements, or agreements between labor unions and employers that govern the extent to which an established union can require employees membership, payment of union dues, or fees as a condition of employment, either before or after hiring. Right-to-work laws exist in twenty-three U.S. states, mostly in the southern and western United States. Such laws are allowed under the 1947 federal Taft–Hartley Act."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law
if amerika isn't a banana republic now considering its downward spiral then i don't know what it is
corrupt politicians, corrupt legal system, psychotic oligarchs and and illiterate homeless underpopulation
check
check and check
or shoud i say - checkmate...
Thanks for this excellent summary, medmedude. Although most readers here are probably familiar with the US role in the Guatemalan coup of 1954, there is a long history that goes far beyond that infamous event, or the Nicaraguan contras of the Reagan years. Many, if not most, USAns are unaware of the extent of their nation's repeated power plays and oppression in Central America.
Readers may also be interested in investigating the role of railroads in the expansion of the banana trade in Honduras (large capital investments were required, supplied of course by US corporations). From the wiki entry "Banana Production in Honduras":
"Following their first concessions in 1912, U. S. based concerns would achieve more or less complete control of the productive alluvial plains of Honduras' Atlantic coast. The area around Puerto Cortés was dominated by the Cuyamel Fruit Company, the La Ceiba region by Standard Fruit, and Tela and Trujillo were controlled by United Fruit's subsidiaries, the Tela Railroad Company and the Trujillo Railroad Company.[10] By 1929, the United Fruit Company operated in over 650,000 acres (2,600 km2) of the country as well as controlling the major ports.[11]"
And there is the recent fine that Chiquita had to pay because it was paying protection money to both left- and right-wing paramilitary groups in Colombia. http://money.cnn.com/2007/03/14/news/companies/chiquita/index.htm
Don't forget the war on drugs, which kills thousands of people in Central America and Mexico every year, many more than die in Iraq and Afghanistan. The same brutes who kill banana union members also kill people for the narcotraficantes.
Guatamala's new president, Otto Perez Molina, said he would legalize drugs to stop the violence and he would focus on hunger, because he viewed it as a security problem.
“Hunger is also violence, and is also a security problem,’’ he said.
The outside world “has only focused on the fact that I am a retired general and participated in the domestic armed conflict,’’ he said, referring to Guatemala’s 1960-1996 civil war, in which an estimated 200,000 people were killed.
Guatemala needs “to find alternate ways of fighting drug trafficking. In the last 30 years with a traditional combat with arms and deaths, it can’t be done, and we have to be open to viable alternatives.’’
On Monday, Perez said he will try to win regional support for drug legalization at an upcoming summit of Central American leaders next month.
tomcarberry
I would urge a note of caution regarding Guatemala's newly-elected President, Otto Pérez Molina, and his recent bold assertion that the inability of the U.S. to cut illegal drug consumption leaves Guatemala with no option but to consider legalizing the use and transport of drugs, and this in conjunction with his sudden progressive-sounding focus on the importance of dealing with hunger in his country.
Pérez’s supporters and critics alike have remarked that his sudden shift of emphasis from hardliner to humanitarian represents an amazing turnaround for this ex-general who represented the right-wing Patriotic Party and was elected to office on a platform of crushing orgnaized crime, including drug traffickers, with an iron fist. Plus, Pérez beat another hardliner from a right-wing nationalist party in the recent election, so it’s not as if the voters of Guatemala really had much of a choice between the candidates.
Pérez complains that “the outside world” has only focused on the fact that he is a retired general and “participated in the domestic armed conflict” – the long civil war which resulted in an estimated 200,000 people killed between 1960 and 1996 – but not without good reason given his background and place in the historical record.
Pérez is a graduate of the infamous School of the Americas at Fort Benning, GA -- aka School of the Assassins -- and the Inter-American Defense College (IADC) in Washington, D.C. which sounds like School of the Americas with a friendly face. The IADC is a military college that provides a graduate-level course of study for senior military and government officials with a multidisciplinary, comprehensive understanding of governmental systems and an opportunity to study broad based security issues affecting the Hemisphere and the world. (h/t Wiki)
Anita Isaacs, a Guatemala expert and professor of political science at Haverford College, expressed skepticism, stating that the sudden turnaround in Perez’s stance on drugs could be “political gamesmanship” aimed at pushing the U.S. to move quicker on sending military help that has been prohibited by the U.S. congress since 1978 because of well-documented human rights abuses in that country during the civil war. She notes, “This is kind of like a shot across the bow, saying if you don’t help us, this is what we can do.” Not quite a threat, but only just.
Close advisers say that Pérez supports meeting the conditions set by various U.S. congressional appropriations acts for restoring the previously prohibited military aid to Guatemala, including making improvements on human rights and the reform of that country's weak justice system. I just hope that he's serious about changing the failed strategy in dealing with drug traffic in the region with a fresh approach that doesn't rely so heavily on military force and violence.
I agree that legalizing drugs in the U.S. and throughout Latin America is a brilliant proposition, especially when coupled with defunding the failed and costly War on Drugs and diverting the billions of dollars wasted on military intervention to the very real problems of hunger and poverty and health care and education – the same problems facing millions of Americans today who have fallen through the gaping holes in what passes for a social safety net.
I’m just not sure that President Otto Pérez Molina is the man to introduce such bold and serious and necessary reforms in Guatemala or that he has the credibility to influence his Central American neighbors to do likewise. But I will be the first to give him a standing ovation if he can pull it off.
Perhaps leopards can change their spots, but talk is cheap and I would need to see the evidence based not on words but on actions – verify first and over time the trust may follow.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Central America, including Mexico, needs a "spring" revolution. They need to look south, not north, for their liberation.
Workers fought and died for labor rights in the US. Everyone knows what a bloody battle is was to get unions and bargaining, minimum wage, outlaw child labor, 40 hour week, safety on the job. But it's all slipping away thanks to the competition from cheap/crack labor from over the border.
The Republicans want to re-institute child labor and bust unions, and get rid of any kind of bargaining and are winning, retarding workers rights back to the 30's and 40's. All that we died for is for nothing cause we are going back to square 1. They are using cheap/crack labor as a leverage to break the backs of American workers.
We could use 10,000,000 jobs right about NOW.