By: Andres R Gomez
Featured Art: @sangre_indigena_art

American Imperialism

Global capitalism has created a vast inequality in the concentration of wealth. In The Global Police State, Professor William I. Robinson relates the richest 1% of humanity “controlled more than half of the world’s wealth while the bottom 80% had to make do with just 4.5% of this wealth”. One of the key instruments in enforcing this global inequality is militarized accumulation. “The more state policy is oriented toward war and repression, the more opportunities are opened up for transnational capital accumulation” (Robinson, 78). While the rich get richer, consumer demand stresses the exploitation of the Global South.

Ba • na • na
Origin of the word traces back to West Africa, likely a Wolof word introduced to the Americas in the 16th century

Bananas are the most consumed fruit in the United States. Cultivated best in tropical environments, bananas in our supermarkets are mainly imported from Central and South America – Honduras, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Colombia, and Ecuador produce 94% of U.S. banana imports. But what makes bananas so popular, and why are they sold for fractions of the price of other fruit?

Banana Republic

The United Fruit Company grandfathered the banana industry with the help of dictatorial regimes. The American corporation monopolized railways, telecommunication systems, and owned 42% of the land in Guatemala. Under President Ubico, a dictator who compared himself to Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, United Fruit was allowed to exploit Guatemala’s land and labor tax-free. Ubico was eventually overthrown in a revolution which birthed the first-ever democratic Guatemala in 1945.

Democratically-elected President Jacobo Arbenz spoke of land redistribution for farmers and ensuring basic worker’s rights. Arbenz was overthrown in a 1954 Coup d’état orchestrated by the CIA. President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, John Dulles, was a lawyer who previously represented United Fruit. His brother, Allen Dulles, was the director of the CIA, also on United Fruit’s board of directors. This is to say, U.S. interests lie in corporate ownership of land in Central America, and they hammered out anti-communist propaganda to justify taking it by force.

The next 30 years erupted in the Guatemalan Civil War as U.S. backed military regimes employed terror tactics to fight leftist insurgents advocating for land reform. Notably, the dispossession and execution of indigenous peoples, specifically Maya civilians, has been grimly named The Silent Holocaust. Tens of thousands of indigenous people were “disappeared” or openly executed to paralyze anyone who dared dissent from the corporatocracy. For too long, people have lived in fear of breaking that silence.

The corporate landscape has changed in 50 years, but not by much. Standard Fruit Company was another extension of U.S. imperialism exercising foreign diplomacy in Central America, it has since been renamed Dole Food Company; United Fruit Company has since become Chiquita Banana. Land ownership in Latin America has been historically dominated by the Church, European bourgeois such as peninsulares and criollos, and the torch has been passed down to American multi-national companies. Names change and systems of oppression remain.

In their documentary Bananaland: Blood, Bullets, and Poison, film-makers reveal that Chiquita Banana paid right-wing paramilitary groups in Colombia from 1996-2004 to suppress any social organization from plantation workers. The Colombian AUC was officially designated a terrorist organization by the United States in 2001 for its role in public massacres and drug-trafficking. Yet, film-makers point out Chiquita continued making payments even after the AUC was recognized as a terrorist organization.

“Over that 8 year period [1996-2004], the banana companies paid nearly $53 million to the AUC” in just one Colombian region. Paramilitary groups such as AUC have been linked to nearly ⅓ of Colombian legislators, effectively steering the power and interests of the state. Independent journalist Victor Villa highlights the alarming increase in civilian deaths by paramilitary groups in Colombia, recording 1,350 deaths in 2004 alone.

In 1928, United Fruit Company workers went on strike in Magdalena, Colombia. They demanded living wages and a 6-day work week, but the United States threatened to invade if the Colombian government did not protect United Fruit’s interests. The result was the Banana Massacre, where as many as 2,000 United Fruit workers were executed by Colombian military. Nearly a century later, Chiquita walks in its predecessors’ footsteps. The corporate interests of multi-national companies are secured through militarized repression, the cost of bananas stays low at the expense of worker’s rights and the lives of indigenous populations. 

Global capitalism relies heavily on the exploitation of natural resources and indigenous labor. The realities of militarized violence in capital production remain largely invisible. A Google search of Banana Republic reveals a retail store where one can consume the fashion standards of the dominant social class, but not the reality of political coups and private military massacres. Searching Blood Diamond reveals Leo Dicaprio’s face and not a maimed child soldier in Sierra Leone supplying the rocks sitting on bourgeois fingers. A search for Black Panther prompts a page dedicated to the Disney film instead of black fathers protecting their families from racialized violence.

Whether it’s lithium mines in Bolivia or conflict minerals from the Congo, we must recognize the unethical accumulation under global capitalism.  The rising danger of militarized repression serves to enforce global inequality in a continuous threat to indigenous land and life.