Packinghouse workers, Buenos Amigos Plantation, El Progreso, Yoro, Honduras, September 2004

       CHAPTER ONE

       The Work Enslaves Us

      Bananas are a familiar part of the daily life of most North Americans and Europeans. But few know where their bananas come from, let alone anything about the daily life of the men and women who produce them. For over a hundred years a few giant transnationals with enormous concentrated power have controlled the Latin American banana export industry. The surprise, though, is that banana workers are often unionized—which makes all the difference for women and men banana workers alike.

      First, a few broad strokes: Of all bananas produced globally, three-quarters are consumed within the country that grows them; only a quarter hit the export market. The export banana industry, in turn, is divided into two large categories. On one side are so-called ACP bananas, produced in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Philippines, representing about 19 percent of export bananas. While the big transnational corporations are increasingly producing bananas on plantations in all these regions, most ACP bananas are still grown by very small producers, usually a family unit; many are sold through a single giant conglomerate, Fyffes, based in Ireland. Fyffes, in turn, sells to a guaranteed, protected market in the European Union.¹

      Most export bananas, though, are “dollar bananas,” grown in Latin America. In contrast to the ACP sphere, Latin American export bananas are overwhelmingly grown in a plantation system dating back to United Fruit’s initial conquests in the 1880s. In 2004 approximately 400,000 workers labored on these banana plantations, with 150 to 300 workers on each, about one-quarter of them women.² Three giant transnationals with familiar names sell two-thirds of dollar bananas today: Chiquita, Dole, and Del Monte Fresh Produce, in descending order of global sales. The remainder are largely grown on plantations owned by local elites, known in the industry as “national producers.” It’s all about colonialism. In the ACP sphere, former European colonies sell to Europe and are in large part controlled by a European-based corporation; in the dollar sphere, countries in thrall to US-based corporations sell to US, Canadian, and European markets.

      In Latin America the big three banana producers have been moving away from direct ownership of plantations since the 1950s, preferring instead to subcontract to plantations owned by the national producers, who absorb the risks and have to answer to tightly controlled quality standards—while helping the transnationals evade responsibility to their workers. The corporations still own their own docks, ships, railroads, and politicians, though, making it difficult, often impossible, for independent or small producers to reach export markets.³

      In the past decade a new thug on the banana block has emerged, Ecuador, driving a classic global race to the bottom for banana workers. The worst culprit is Ecuador’s giant Noboa Corporation, which sells Bonita brand bananas and is number five after Fyffes in global sales. By 2002 Ecuador produced 28 percent of all export bananas in the world, including one-fourth of all bananas consumed in the United States. Dole alone now gets 31 percent of its bananas from Ecuador. Since the 1970s the Ecuadoran banana industry has been entirely nonunion. Its over 250,000 workers receive as little as one-fifth the wages and benefits of banana workers elsewhere in Latin America. Their work is almost entirely casual, with no health care, vacations, retirement, or job security of any kind. That’s why the banana transnationals are gradually pulling out of other parts of Latin America and sourcing from Ecuador, or using Ecuador as a pretext to lower standards elsewhere—with devastating effects throughout the region.⁴

      The challenge of Ecuador has combined with a crisis in global banana overproduction since the early 1990s to put enormous pressure on the banana unions of Latin America. These unions, like the banana corporations, have a powerful history, however, and remain the core of the private-sector labor movement in Central America and Colombia. To understand them, we need to pull back a bit and look at the history of the region.

      The small countries of Central America haven’t been known as “banana republics” since the beginning of the twentieth century for nothing. The companies that would eventually consolidate as United Fruit and Standard Fruit (later Chiquita and Dole, respectively) moved in on Central America, Ecuador, and Colombia beginning in the 1880s and have never left, buying off, threatening, and manipulating national governments as aggressively as they originally seized the lands of peasants who resisted their incursions. In 1954 Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz learned the limits to any reform of the banana corporations’ rule the hard way when he tried to nationalize fallow lands held by the United Fruit Company—the United States overthrew him in a coup. Throughout the twentieth century the US government backed repressive governments in the banana-producing regions to guarantee profits and “stability” for the banana corporations. Whether headed by dictators, generals, or elite oligarchs, these regimes were all held in place at the point of a US-made gun, viciously holding the lid down on workers’ and peasants’ protests through systematic assassinations and state terror.⁵

      By the 1970s, though, the lid was flying off. In Guatemala, guerrilla movements linking urban mestizos with indigenous communities in the Highlands spread rapidly. The Guatemalan and US governments responded with two decades of horrendous repression, in which whole towns were slaughtered and buried in hidden, mass graves. In El Salvador and Nicaragua, similarly, insurgent movements rose up throughout the 1970s. At the decade’s end the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (Sandinista National Liberation Front; FSLN), known as the Sandinistas, came to power in Managua. But US president Ronald Reagan, inaugurated in 1981, soon swept down in retaliation and occupied bordering Honduras for use as a military base against the Sandinistas. During the 1980s the US-funded “Contra War” killed tens of thousands of Nicaraguans and Salvadorans. The blood only stopped flowing when peace processes brokered settlements in Guatemala and El Salvador in the early 1990s, and the Sandinistas lost out to a US-sponsored slate in the 1989 elections. Repression continues today throughout the region.⁶

      Most of the banana unions rose up in the 1950s and reached their greatest power just as these rebellions were emerging during the 1970s. The US-backed “counterinsurgency” project dovetailed with local elites and the banana transnationals to launch big attacks on labor throughout Latin America. First came the destruction of the Ecuadoran banana unions in the 1970s, followed by attacks on Costa Rica’s labor movement, which paid a high price for solidarity with the rebellions to its west and north. In 1984 Costa Rica’s banana unions counted 18,000 members, with excellent contracts and a full range of benefits. Three years later they were almost entirely wiped out by an alliance of the Costa Rican government, the Catholic Church, the US government, and the banana transnationals, which combined to introduce a bogus company union system, known as Solidarismo, that rapidly supplanted the legitimate unions and remains in place today on almost all corporate-allied plantations in Costa Rica.⁷

      In Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, already weakened banana unions were devastated in 1998 when Hurricane Mitch wiped out plantations throughout the region. After Mitch, Chiquita, in particular, either tried to walk away from unionized plantations or replanted them with African palms (for