Banana

  In rereading the book a few months ago, I was once again moved not just by the author’s language but by the way it created, in just a few words, both a sense of sorrow and a photographic depiction of the events surrounding it.

  But what I also understood, after spending several years researching the book you’re reading now, was that this wasn’t fiction. Márquez had woven a story, for sure, but the event he was talking about—the Colombia banana massacre of 1929—was real.

  WITHOUT A NEW BANANA, a vicious cycle emerged: Fruit was grown then stricken; plantations were abandoned and new ones founded; disease would strike again. Unlike the apple industry, banana growers couldn’t afford to market multiple varieties of their fruit. If the uniformity of bananas was what made them so powerful and popular, it also brought about the emergence of the first monoculture—dependence on a single variety of crop, creating huge economies of scale and huge susceptibility to catastrophe—in the history of commercial agriculture. The system worked when Keith was building railroads and when it took just a few hoodlums and good timing to take over a country. But by the late 1920s, as the banana industry became larger, people in the countries where the fruit grew became more aware of just how valuable the product they were providing to American consumers was—and how little of that value they were receiving. They were underpaid and treated poorly. To add insult to injury, their land was being stolen. At the same time, a powerful wave of workers’ movements—inspired by the founding of the Soviet Union in 1917—was reaching Latin America.

  The banana industry—rightly—saw this as a huge threat. It couldn’t survive without cheap fruit, which meant cheap labor. Because Panama disease was permanently making fallow so much of its existing holdings, the fruit companies had a continuous need for new land, according to John Soluri, author of Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States. To keep bananas affordable, that territory needed to be acquired, and cultivated, as inexpensively as possible. Controlling labor and terrain couldn’t be done without cooperative governments (or military intervention, if they weren’t). But Latin American leaders also had to pay some attention to their constituents. Sometimes, the general public would be appeased; other times it was repressed. In either case, the banana industry had to work constantly to stay ahead and in control of an ever-deepening cycle of exploitation, violence, and revolution.

  But even in a region that had seen dozens of interventions and takeovers, what happened in Colombia, beginning in December 1928 and climaxing just after the start of the new year, was exceptional.

  United Fruit had been in Colombia since 1899, operating plantations in the Magdalena region of the country. Colombia was different from the other United Fruit nations. With large exports of coffee, it was not exclusively a banana land. Intense political conflict had been part of Colombia’s history long before the fruit was planted there: At the turn of the century, conservatives and liberals had fought the brutal War of a Thousand Days, which cost as many as 100,000 lives. The hostilities had also cost the country Panama—which had been a territory of Colombia—and brought a conservative and ultimately banana-friendly government to power.

  But the sweetheart deals banana companies received on land, taxation, and worker conditions had a backlash. The plantation operators became a target for liberal and social activists. By the early 1920s, Colombian workers began feeling confident enough to strike. Even some local growers attempted to loosen the American produce giant’s grip on the nation by opening their own independent export operations (they were defeated by generous “grants” United Fruit gave to plantation operators who remained in the fold).

  By 1927 Colombia’s political system seemed to be leaning against the banana conglomerate. The national assembly ordered an investigation into United Fruit’s land-acquisition policies. The conservative party’s thirty-year grip on power seemed to be loosening, with liberals making gains, especially in the countryside. Banana workers, who were without even the most basic rights, felt emboldened.

  The biggest labor action ever faced by a banana company began in October 1928, when 32,000 workers went on strike. They demanded to be granted medical treatment and proper toilet facilities; they insisted on being paid in cash rather than company-issued scrip only redeemable in United Fruit–owned stores. They asked that they be considered true employees rather than subcontractors who weren’t even afforded the minimal protection of Colombia’s weakly drawn labor laws.

  The strike panicked United Fruit. Even after the government sent troops to occupy Magdalena, effectively usurping liberal power, the nation was too volatile for anything to be guaranteed.

  The conflict made headlines in the United States. A New York Times article, published in December 1928, laid out the company position on the strike. Eight decades later, and in light of what happened next, United Fruit’s statements seem beyond cruel. Banana company spokesmen attributed the strike not to a genuine need to improve conditions for exploited workers but to a “subversive movement” and “not representatives of any established body of laborers.” In fact, the article quoted the company as saying, “no complaints have been received by our employees.”

  United Fruit reported that in response to the strike, the Colombian government had suspended the rights of free assembly and free speech. “We are convinced,” a spokesperson said, “that only this prompt action by the government prevented great loss of life.” The clampdown was also celebrated by the U.S. ambassador to Colombia, Jefferson Caffery. In a telegram sent to U.S. Secretary of State Frank Billings Kellogg, he wrote: “I have been following the…strike through United Fruit Company representative here; also through minister of Foreign Affairs who on Saturday told me government would send additional troops and would arrest all strike leaders and transport them to prison at Cartagena; that government would give adequate protection to American interests involved.”

  Martial law was declared on December 5.

  On December 6, in the town of Ciénaga—just as in Márquez’s fictional Macondo—banana workers gathered in the town square. The city hall stood at one end and the main church at the other. The workers were not there, specifically, to protest. December 6 was a Sunday; they’d attended mass and were waiting to hear a speech by the regional governor. Because the address would follow church services, the workers were accompanied by their wives and families.

  General Cortés Vargas—the military official in charge of the region, who claimed he acted only to prevent an even worse intervention by the U.S. military—had given his commanders these orders: “Prepare your mind to face the crowds of rebels…and kill before foreign troops tread upon our soil.”

  Four machine gun positions surrounded the square, on rooftops, one at each corner.

  An order was given. The area was to be cleared in five minutes. The countdown had begun. The crowd didn’t—and couldn’t, packed into the square as they were—disperse. The troops opened fire.

  As he had throughout the early stages of the crisis, U.S. ambassador Caffery reported the events to his superiors in Washington. The tone and language of the memo are beyond chilling. They are as clear a manifestation of terrible indifference as you will ever read: “I have the honor to report,” Caffery wrote, “that the Bogotá representative of the United Fruit Company told me yesterday that the total number of strikers killed by the Colombian military exceeded one thousand.”

  CHAPTER 16

  The Inhuman

  Republics

  THE EFFECTS OF THE COLOMBIA MASSACRE were beyond wide-reaching. Initially, the event was so outrageous that the liberals were able to use it to take power; they instituted land reforms and attempted to try the culprits for the massacre. The result was even more polarization. United Fruit attempted to maintain its position, but this time the company seemed to have gone too far. As operations in the South American nation became more difficult, the banana grower began closing plantations and shipping equipment to Costa Rica. This time Unit
ed Fruit used the advance of Panama disease as an excuse, though the New York Times reported that “labor troubles and difficulties with the government are responsible for the new policy.”

  In hindsight, the departure of the banana industry was one of the country’s smaller problems. The liberal who’d demanded an investigation into the banana massacre was Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, a politician and lawyer who’d come from an impoverished background himself.

  Using the country’s radio network—which had partially been built by United Fruit—Gaitán made fiery speeches advocating the interests of “the people” and denouncing the “oligarchy” that he saw as dominating them. Gaitán formed his own political party in 1933 and was a dominant force in Colombian politics until 1948. He was poised to win the country’s next scheduled elections when he was assassinated at a campaign rally in Bogotá.

  Like the Kennedy assassination in the United States, the truth about Gaitán’s murder will probably always be in dispute. The man who pulled the trigger, Juan Roa Sierra, was immediately beaten to death; in the years following, everyone from U.S. and Soviet agents to political rivals and Fidel Castro were accused of ordering the killing. What is known is that a period known as la violencia followed, during which rival political forces in Colombia would launch a brutal and deadly guerilla war. From the late 1940s through the 1950s, as many as 180,000 Colombians died; a military dictatorship seized control of the nation in 1953. The dominos continued to fall. Rebel groups began operating against the military forces ruling the country; paramilitaries were created as a response. With chaos throughout the country, drug cartels were able to establish domain over huge swaths of the countryside. Today, Colombia is a nation of kidnappings, murder, and violence; several insurgent organizations control different parts of the country; the cocaine trade mingles with both sides and is believed to finance at least part of the operations of the FARC, the guerilla faction that began as the military arm of the Colombian communist party, an offshoot of the liberal movement that fractured when Gaitán was assassinated.

  It isn’t fair to blame the banana industry for all of Colombia’s problems. But it is important to point out that in that country and throughout Latin America the destabilization resulting from banana-related interventions created a tradition of weak institutions, making it difficult for true democracy and fair economic policies to take hold. The Latin American tradition of governments not supported by the general population, and propped up by overseas commercial interests, was created under the authorship of United Fruit.

  There was even a name for such puppet-string governments. The term was first used by O. Henry in Cabbages and Kings, a 1905 collection of short stories that took place in a mythical Central American country called Anchuria. (The appellation is a play on words for Honduras, where the writer briefly sought refuge from U.S. officials pursuing him on a fraud conviction. In Spanish, the word for the real nation translates as “depths.” The name of the author’s mirror land comes from the Spanish ancho, meaning “width.”) But the term coined by O. Henry didn’t come into popular vogue until after the Colombia massacre, when it appeared in a 1935 Esquire magazine story that chronicled American adventures in the region. The article described the actions as “inhuman,” and termed the nations that so readily acquiesced to the fruit companies and the U.S. government as “banana republics.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Straightening Out

  the Business

  THE EVENTS OF EARLY 1929 came at a desperate time for United Fruit. As physically violent as its affairs were overseas, it was facing an opponent at home that was, from a business standpoint, even more aggressive. For years, the company had been able to steamroll competitors, forcing them into withering price wars. Of its early rivals, only Standard Fruit—the future Dole, started by Joseph Vaccaro, the entrepreneur who bought up all of the ice factories along the Gulf Coast in the late nineteenth century—was left standing, mostly because United Fruit had once been a partial owner of the company but was forced to divest by antitrust investigators. The larger banana company didn’t dare attempt to squeeze its legally designated rival from the market.

  But United Fruit did battle another company: Sam Zemurray’s Cuyamel Fruit. Fifteen years after it was founded, the smaller company owned an extensive steamboat fleet and had its own record of technological innovation—creating superior irrigation systems at the Honduran plantations it operated. Zemurray even competed with United Fruit to buy up regional competitors, and frequently won. Just after the Colombia intervention, Cuyamel’s stock began to rise. United Fruit’s shares plummeted.

  The larger banana company, just as it did when faced with worker challenges—or spreading blights—responded by rote. It started a price war.

  At first, the result seemed like little more than a draw. But as the world’s largest banana grower’s stock price fell further, it decided that rather than continue the battle it would buy Cuyamel, even if it had to pay a huge premium. In 1930 Zemurray sold his company, receiving 300,000 shares of United Fruit stock and a seat on the banana giant’s board of directors. The erstwhile banana baron’s intention was to retire and enjoy the $50 million fortune he’d acquired. But United Fruit’s stock continued to plunge. The situation was worsened by the crash of the U.S. stock market in October of that year. Prior to that, a single share of the banana company sold for $158. By 1932 it had declined to $10, taking Zemurray’s riches along with it.

  Enough was enough. At a directors’ meeting that year, Zemurray loudly voiced his concern.

  Zemurray, according to his United Fruit Historical Society biography, was never made to feel terribly welcome at United Fruit. After the deaths of Preston, in 1924, and Keith, in 1929, control of the company had fallen to shareholders, the largest being the Bank of Boston. The bank’s president, Daniel G. Wing, was a legendary old-money financier with decidedly patrician sensibilities. Like U.S. Secretary of State Philander Knox two decades earlier, Wing made the mistake of underestimating the up-by-his-bootstraps immigrant, who had uttered his protest in the thick Russian accent he’d never even remotely banished.

  Wing’s reply: “Unfortunately, Mr. Zemurray, I can’t understand a word of what you say.”

  An enraged Zemurray did what he always did—and what he believed banana men always had to do. He took matters into his own hands. Investor by investor, he convinced United Fruit’s shareholders that current management was destroying the company. At the next board meeting, Zemurray had gathered enough support to oust Wing and the rest of the company’s old guard. His final words to the departing executives: “You gentlemen have been fucking up this business long enough. I’m going to straighten it out.”

  Sam the Banana Man, who’d launched the banana industry’s first audacious seizure of power, had pulled off another one, this time in the boardroom, taking over the company responsible for the bloodiest and most recent of those interventions. But as terrible as the aggression in Colombia had been, it would soon be exceeded by actions of Zemurray’s own design.

  PART IV

  NEVER

  ENOUGH

  CHAPTER 18

  Knowledge Is

  Powerless

  THE BANANA INDUSTRY weathered stock market crashes and price wars. But Panama disease had turned an enterprise that relied on tight controls and stability into a bizarre and treacherous roller coaster ride. Not only did the number of bananas being grown in Central America swing wildly during the first decades of the twentieth century, but the places they were grown also began to shift at an alarming rate. “In some localities,” writes historian John Soluri, “production plummeted and economies all but collapsed, even as regional exports were rising.” In Honduras the output of Standard Fruit dropped from 4.5 million to 1.9 million bunches during the first half of the 1920s. The number rose the following decade but only because new plantations were opened in areas of newly cleared forest.

  A few attempts to research the banana out of its problems continued. In 1931 Scottish
agronomist Claude Wardlaw, working at Trinidad’s Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture, conducted a Panama disease survey and found devastation: 15,000 acres infected in Jamaica and 50,000 in Panama, with the entire Atlantic coast of that nation now unable to sustain banana crops. Even the figures for countries with seemingly low levels of the blight were ominous, since the numbers didn’t count land that was completely out of service. Honduras, for example, showed only 5,000 acres of loss (just a fraction of the country’s total production), but adding the written-off acres would have boosted the total close to Panama’s.

  Wardlaw was also one of the first to unlock the mystery of how Panama disease spread. It wasn’t something in the air that appeared out of nowhere or even something that had lurked in the soil for ages. The banana industry itself, Wardlaw said, was responsible. When he visited United Fruit’s Costa Rica plantations in 1929, he was astonished at the poor agricultural practices he encountered. The reason the disease moved so quickly, Wardlaw surmised, was that it was being transported by people—even to the very plantations that were being cut in order to grow disease-free fruit. “The amazing thing,” the scientist wrote, “is that very few [banana producers]…possess even a smattering of real agricultural knowledge, and if they do, it probably does not help them in the least.” Proper in-the-field husbandry seemed to be the one technical skill United Fruit was unable to master. It was easier just to pull up their stakes on ruined plantations and move on. The same problem exists today. At the Chinese banana plantation I visited, I watched as farmers and families came and went, transferring infected soil acre-by-acre via footprints and bicycle tracks. Houbin Chen, the scientist who accompanied me, took care to change his shoes every time he moved to a new plantation, keeping several pairs in the trunk of his car. The effort seemed futile, I noted, given what was going on around us. “I know,” he sighed. “But I need to set a good example.”