Early in our century banana enclaves made their appearance in Honduras, Guatemala, and Costa Rica. A few railway lines financed by native capital had been built to take coffee to the ports. U.S. concerns took over these railroads and built others, to carry the products of their own plantations exclusively, while monopolizing electric light, the mails, telegraph and telephone, and--a no less important public
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Service--politics: in Honduras a mule costs more than a deputy, and throughout Central America U.S. ambassadors do more presiding than presidents. The United Fruit Company swallowed up its competitors in the production and sale of bananas and became Central America's top latifundista, while its affiliates cornered rail and sea transport. It took over the ports and set up its own customs and police. The dollar in effect became the national currency of Central America.
THE FILIBUSTERERS COME ABOARD
In the geopolitical concept of imperialism, Central America is no more than a natural appendage of the United States. Not even Abraham Lincoln, who also contemplated annexation, could resist the "manifest destiny" of the great power to dictate to its contiguous areas.
In the middle of the nineteenth century the filibusterer William Walker, operating on behalf of bankers Morgan and Garrison, invaded Central America at the head of a band of assassins. With the obliging support of the U.S.
government, Walker robbed, killed, burned, and in successive expeditions proclaimed himself president of Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras. He restored slavery in the areas that suffered his devastating occupation, thus continuing his country's philanthropic work in the states that had just been seized from Mexico. He was welcomed back to the United States as a national hero. From then on invasions, interventions, bombardments, forced loans, and gunpoint treaties followed one after the other. In 1912 President William H.
Taft declared: "The day is not far distant when three Stars and Stripes at three equidistant points will mark our territory: one at the North Pole, another at the Panama Canal, and the third at the South Pole. The whole hemisphere will be ours in fact as, by virtue of our superiority of race, it already is ours morally."35
Taft said that the correct path of justice in U.S. foreign policy "may well be made to include active intervention to secure for our merchandise and our capitalists opportunity for profitable investment."36 In the same period ex-President Theodore Roosevelt loudly recalled his successful amputation of land from Colombia: "I took the Canal Zone and let Congress debate," said the proud Nobel Peace Prize winner as he related how he had invented Panama.
Colombia soon
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afterward received $25 million in indemnity: it was the price of a country that was born so that the United States could have a route between two oceans.
U.S. concerns took over lands, customs houses, treasuries, and governments; Marines landed here, there, and everywhere to "protect the lives and interests of U.S. citizens"--the same holy-water formula that would be used to deodorize the Dominican Republic crime in 1965. General Smedley D.
Butler, who headed many of the expeditions, indicated the sort of merchandise that was wrapped inside the flag when he wrote in 1935 of his own experience: I spent thirty-three years and four months in active service as a member of our country's most agile military force--the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from a second lieutenant to major-general. And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.... Thus I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. 1 helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank to collect revenues in.... I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916.
1 helped make Honduras "right" for American fruit companies in 1903.37
In the first years of our century the philosopher William James passed the little-known judgment that the country had finally vomited the Declaration of Independence. To cite but one example: the United States occupied Haiti for twenty years and, in that black country that had been the scene of the first victorious slave revolt, introduced racial segregation and forced labor, killed 1,500 workers in one of its repressive operations (according to a U.S. Senate investigation in 1922), and when the local government refused to turn the Banco Nacional into a branch of New York's National City Bank, suspended the salaries of the president and his ministers so that they might think again.
Alternating the "big stick" with "dollar diplomacy," similar actions were carried out in the other Caribbean islands and in all of Central America, the geopolitical space of the imperial mare nostrum.
The Koran mentions the banana among the trees of paradise, but the "bananization" of Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, and Ecuador suggests that it is a tree of hell. United Fruit became owner of the biggest latifundio in Colombia when a big strike broke out 108
on the Atlantic coast in 1928, Banana workers were mowed down with bullets in front of a railroad station. "The forces of public order are authorized to punish with the aid of appropriate weapons," it was officially decreed, and no further decree was necessary to wipe the massacre from official memory. (This is the theme of Alvaro Cepedi Sanitidio's novel La casa grande (1967), and also makes a chapter of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude: "You must have been dreaming the officers insisted.") Miguel Angel Asturias described the process of Central American conquest and plunder in his novel The Green Pope, about Minor Keith, the uncrowned king of the region, great white father of United Fruit, devourer of nations:
"We have docks, railroads, land, buildings, and water. . . . The dollar circulates, English is spoken, and they fly our flag.... Chicago could not help but feel proud of that son who went off with a brace of pistols and returned to demand his position among the meat emperors, the railroad kings, the copper kings, the chewing-gum kings.38 (The novel is one of Asturias's trilogy; the other two are strong Wind and Los ojos de los enterrados (The Eyes of the Buried), published in Buenos Aires in the 1950s. Mister Pyle, a character in Strong Wind, says prophetically: "If instead of making new plantations, we buy fruit from the individual growers, it'll be much better for the future."39 This is exactly the present situation in Guatemala: United Fruit imposes its banana monopoly through the selling end, a more effective and less risky method than direct production. It is worth noting that banana production fell sharply in the 1960s from the moment when United Fruit decided to sell and/or lease its Guatemalan plantations, then threatened by social agitation.) In The 42nd Parallel John Dos Passos traced the dazzling career of Keith and United Fruit:
In Europe and the United States people had started to eat bananas, so they cut down the jungles through Central America to plant bananas, and built railroads to haul the bananas, and every year more steamboats of the Great White Fleet steamed north loaded with bananas, and that is the history of the American empire in the Caribbean, and the Panama canal and the future Nicaragua canal and the marines and the battleships and the bayonets.40
The land was as exhausted as the workers--the land was robbed of humus and the workers of their lungs--but there were always new lands to exploit and new workers to exterminate. Comic opera dictators watched over United Fruit's interests with knives between their teeth. Banana production eventually fell and the omnipotent corporation
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went through various crises; although cotton and sugar have pushed the banana off its privileged perch, Central America remains to this day a bonanza-sanctuary for adventurers. Bananas are still the main source of foreign currency for Honduras and Panama and, in South America, for Ecuador. Around 1929
Central America exported 38 million bunches and United Fruit paid Honduras a penny tax on each. There was no way to see that this mini-tax--which later rose slightly--was actually paid; nor is there to
day, for even now United Fruit exports and imports what it likes, operating outside the state customs system.
The country's trade and payment balances are the works of fiction of exceptionally imaginative technicians.
THE CRISIS OF THE I930S: "KILLING AN ANT IS A GREATER
CRIME THAN KILLING A MAN"
Coffee depended on the U.S. market, on U.S. consumption capacity, and on U.S. prices; bananas were a business of, by, and for the United States.
Suddenly, in 1929, came the crisis. In the Caribbean, the New York stock market disaster which cracked the foundations of world capitalism fell like a huge block of stone into a puddle. Coffee and banana prices plummeted, along with sales. Peasants were evicted on all sides, unemployment soared, and a wave of strikes swept city and countryside; credit, investment, and public spending collapsed; and in Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, state employees' salaries were cut almost in half. Jackbooted dictators were the order of the day: in Washington it was the dawn of the Good Neighbor policy, but social agitation was boiling up everywhere and had to be sternly suppressed.
For about twenty years-for some more, for some less-power would remain in the hands of Guatemala's Jorge Ubico Castaneda, El Salvador's Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez, Honduras's Tiburcio Carias Andino, and Nicaragua's Anastasio Somoza.
The epic of Augusto Cesar Sandino stirred the world. The long struggle of Nicaragua's guerrilla leader was rooted in the angry peasants' demand for land.
His small ragged army fought for some years against 12,000 U.S. invaders and the National Guard. Sardine tins filled with stones served as grenades, Springfield rifles were stolen from the enemy, 110
and there were plenty of machetes; the flag flew from any handy stick, and the peasants moved through mountain thickets wearing strips of hide called huaraches instead of boots. The guerrillas sang, to the tune of Adelita: In Nicaragua, gentlemen,
the mouse kills the cat.
Neither the Marines' firepower nor the bombs dropped from planes sufficed to crush the rebels of Las Segovias; nor did the calumnies spread worldwide by Associated Press and United Press International, whose Nicaraguan correspondents were two North Americans who controlled the country's customs houses. In 1932 Sandino had a presentiment: "I won t live very long." A year later, under the influence of the Good Neighbor policy, hostilities ceased. The guerrilla leader was invited by the president to a decisive meeting in Managua, and on the way was killed in an ambush. The murderer, Anastasio Somoza, later said that U.S. Ambassador Arthur Bliss Lane had ordered the execution. Somoza, then head of the army, soon installed himself in power. He ruled Nicaragua for a quarter of a century and then bequeathed the job to his sons. Before wrapping the presidential sash across his breast, Somoza had conferred upon himself the Cross of Valor, the Medal of Distinction, and the Presidential Medal of Merit. Once in power he organized various massacres and grand celebrations for which he dressed up his soldiers in sandals and helmets like Romans. He became the country's biggest coffee producer, with forty-six plantations, and raised cattle on fifty-one additional haciendas. But he was never too busy to spread terror. During his long reign he lacked for nothing and even retailed with some wistfulness his youthful years when he had to forge gold coins to pay for his amusements.
The crisis brought tensions to a head, too, in El Salvador. Nearly half of Honduras's banana workers were Salvadorans, and many had to return to their country, where there was no work for anyone, A peasant rising n the Izalco region in 1932 quickly spread throughout western El Salvador. Hernandez sent troops with modern equipment to deal with the "Bolsheviks." The Indians fought with machetes against machine-guns and the incident ended with 10,000
dead. Hernandez, a vegetarian crank and theosophist, maintained that "killing an ant is a
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greater crime than killing a man, because a man is reincarnated after death while an ant dies once and for all."41 He said he was protected by "invisible legions" who reported all plots and were in direct telepathic communication with the president of the United States. A pendulum clock showed him if food on a dish placed beneath it was poisoned, or showed places on a map where pirate treasure or political enemies were hidden. He used to send condolence notes to the parents of his victims, and deer pastured in the patio of his palace.
He ruled until 1944.
Massacres were continual throughout the area. In Guatemala in 1933, Jorge Ubico shot one hundred trade union, student, and political leaders while restoring the laws against Indian "vagrancy." Each Indian had to carry a book listing his days of work; if these were deemed insufficient, he paid the debt in jail or by bending his back over the ground without pay for half a year. On the unhealthy Pacific coast men worked up to their knees in mud for $.30 a day and United Fruit explained that Ubico had forced it to cut wages. Just before the dictator fell in 1944, Reader's Digest ran a eulogistic article about him; this harbinger of the International Monetary Fund had avoided inflation by lowering wages from $1 to $.25 a day in the construction of the emergency military highway, and from $1 to $.50 for jobs on the air base in the capital.
Ubico granted coffee and banana concerns permission to kill: "Plantation proprietors will be exempt from criminal responsibility. . . ." This decree--
number 2,795--was revived in 1967 during the democratic and representative government of Julio Cesar Mendez Montenegro (1966-1970).
Like all the Caribbean tyrants, Ubico thought he was Napoleon. He surrounded himself with busts and portraits of the Emperor who, he said, had the same profile. He believed in military discipline: he militarized post office employees, schoolchildren, and the symphony orchestra. Dressed in uniforms, the orchestra members played Ubico's selections, with techniques and instruments decided by him, for $9 a month. He felt that hospitals were for sissies, and patients who were poor as well as sick were put on the floors of corridors and passageways.
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WHO STARTED THE VIOLENCE IN GUATEMALA?
Ubico was swept off his pedestal in 1944 by a revolution of liberal hue, led by some young officers and middle-class university people. Juan Jose Arevalo, elected to the presidency, instituted a vigorous education plan and a new labor code to protect rural and city workers. Trade unions sprang tip; United Fruit, the virtually untaxed and uncontrolled owner of vast lands and of the railroad and port, was no longer omnipotent on its domains. In his farewell speech in 1951 Arevalo disclosed that he had had to deal with thirty-two conspiracies financed by the Firm. The administration of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman continued and extended the reforms. Highways and the new port of San Jose broke United Fruit's monopoly of transport and export. With national capital, and without begging from any foreign banker, various projects were launched to lead the country to independence. An agrarian reform law, aimed basically at developing a peasant capitalist economy and an agricultural capitalist economy in general, was approved in 1952. By 1954 over 100,000 families had benefited, although the law only affected idle lands and paid expropriated owners an indemnity in bonds. But since United Fruit was using a mere 8 percent of its land, which extended from ocean to ocean, its unused lands began to be distributed to the peasants. A frenetic international propaganda campaign was launched: "The Iron Curtain is failing over Guatemala," roared the radio, newspapers, and the bigwigs of the Organization of American States. Colonel Rodolfo Castillo Armas, a graduate of the Fort Leavenworth military post, invaded his own country with troops trained and equipped for the purpose by the United States, and with support from U.S.-piloted F-47 bombers. "We had to get rid of a Communist government which had taken over," Dwight D.
Eisenhower said nine years later.42 Testifying before a Senate subcommittee on July 27, 1961, the U.S. ambassador to Honduras said that the "liberating"
operation in 1954 had been worked out by a team which included himself and the ambassadors to Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua. Allen Dulles, then the number one man at the CIA, had cabled them his congratulations on a job well done. Dulles had
previously been on United Fruit's board of directors, and a year after the invasion his seat was occupied by another CIA man, Walter Bedell Smith. Allen's
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brother, John Foster Dulles, had shown burning impatience at the OAS
conference that approved the military expedition against Guatemala; it so happened that the United Fruit contracts in the Ubico era had been drafted in his law office.
Arbenz's fall started a conflagration in Guatemala which has never been extinguished. The same forces that bombed Guatemala City, Puerto Barrios, and the port of San Jose on the evening of June 18, 1954, are in power today.
Foreign intervention was followed by a series of ferocious dictatorships--
including the administration of Mendez, who lent democratic trappings to the tyranny. Arbenz's agrarian reform was blown to smithereens when Castillo Armas fulfilled his mission of returning the land to United Fruit and other expropriates landlords; Mendez promised agrarian reform but merely signed an authorization for landlords to carry guns and to use them.
The worst year in the orgy of violence begun in 1954 was 1967. Thomas Melville, a U.S. Catholic priest expelled from Guatemala, told the National Catholic Reporter in January 1968 that in little more than a year right-wing terrorist groups had murdered more than 2,800 intellectuals, students, trade union leaders, and peasants who were trying "to combat the sicknesses of Guatemalan society." Melville based his figure on information in the press, but most of the corpses never earned any report at all: they were poor Indians of no known name or habitat whom the army included sometimes only as numbers--
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