Banana Massacre

The massacre of the banana plantations was a massacre of the workers of the US banana company United Fruit Company at the hands of the Colombian army, which occurred between December 5 and 6, 1928 in the municipality of Ciénaga, Magdalena.

The bananeras massacre was a massacre of the workers of the US banana company United Fruit Company at the hands of the Colombian army, which occurred between December 5 and 6, 1928 in the municipality of Ciénaga, Magdalena Colombia.

An undefined number (approximately 1,800) of workers died after the government of conservative Miguel Abadía Méndez decided to end a month-long strike organized by the union of workers seeking to guarantee better working conditions.

On November 28 of that year, the largest strike in Colombian history had broken out. More than 25,000 plantation workers refused to cut down bananas produced by the United Fruit Company and by domestic growers under contract with the company.

Despite such pressure, the United Fruit Company and the strikers were unable to reach an agreement, and the army intervened, gunning down several workers and wounding others who were peacefully protesting. Template:Citation needed

Authors such as Gabriel García Márquez, in his work One Hundred Years of Solitude ; Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, in his novel The Big House ; and the playwright Carlos José Reyes, have portrayed the event, ensuring that the events are preserved in Colombian culture.

Background

The Ripe Guineo originated in Asia and was introduced to the American tropics only after 1492. Ciénaga's geography made it very suitable for banana production. By the mid-19th century, however, Ciénaga's potential had not been tapped. Hardly anyone in the United States of America or Europe had ever seen, much less tasted, bananas, and they were considered an exotic fruit. Ciénaga was a sleepy town, isolated from the rest of Colombia and the world. A few families with mercantile interests lived in the town. They also own rural properties, but the abolition of slavery in 1851 had impoverished the estates and many had been abandoned. Interspersed with the great estates were huge tracts of unclaimed vacant land. A few indigenous people fished and grew subsistence crops and a few scattered towns of indigenous, black, and mulatto settlers produced crops for food.

The initial encouragement for banana exports came from the prominent families of Santa Marta. With the development of export agriculture in other parts of the country, they tried to break their isolation. The arrival of a French company helped them.

At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, several foreign companies were involved in agriculture and livestock production on the Colombian Atlantic Coast, especially in the regions of the Sinú River, Mompox and Santa Cruz de Mompox. Martha. One of the first was the Compagnie Immobilier et Agricole de Colombie, which in the 1870s bought 20Template:Esd000 hectares near Santa Marta. Local elites took advantage of the renewed economic activity stimulated by the company: they began to plant tobacco, cocoa and sugar cane, which the company exported. At the same time they made efforts to develop an infrastructure that will connect Santa Marta with the markets.

In 1881 a group of samarian notables obtained authorization to build a railway from Santa Marta to the Magdalena River, and in 1887 began a plan to improve the port. Around the same time the first Farmers' Society was founded and its members began to experiment with a new product, the Gros Michel banana, a variety unknown until about 1885, when José Manuel González imported the seeds from Panama . Don José Manuel and a group of Samaritan businessmen established the first banana plantation in Colombia, in Ciénaga. The experiments showed an interesting potential: in 1889 Santa Marta exported 5,000 bunches, and three years later this figure rose

at 45Template:Esd000.

Although the initiative was Colombian, local entrepreneurs could not fully develop the banana industry. Large-scale production for international markets required enormous amounts of capital, beyond the capacity of any individual or company in Colombia at the end of the nineteenth century. Railways had to be built to bring the bananas to the port, port facilities had to be improved, ships had to arrive on time, and a well-coordinated distribution network in the importing country was necessary. Furthermore, in the arid region of Santa Marta, irrigation canals were a necessity. Aside from the high capital requirements, the banana business was risky: any plantation could easily be wiped out by soil exhaustion, banana disease, or hurricanes. These factors favored the development of bananas by a large company based on industrial effluent from the United States and with extensive investments in many regions.

The man who ran the United Fruit Company first appeared in Colombia in 1890. Minor Cooper Keith had left the United States of America for Latin America in the 1870s, hired by the government of [[Costa Rica] ] for the construction of a railway.

Once this was finished, Keith began to produce bananas as cargo to make the rail line profitable. A few years later he extended his banana operations to Santa Marta in Colombia and Bocas del Toro in Panama. In 1892 he acquired 6,100 hectares of land in Riofrío, with which he founded the Colombian Land Company; at the same time he bought the new railroad concession which became the Compañía del Ferrocarril de Santa Marta (Santa Marta Railroad Company). In 1899 he joined with two other Americans to create the United Fruit Company, a company whose headquarters were located in Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America. At the time of its creation, the company controlled eighty percent of the international banana industry. In the year 1900, the exports of Jamaica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Panama and Colombia totaled twelve million bunches

During the first three decades of the 20th century, the banana industry expanded rapidly. The United Fruit Company not only developed its operations in the countries mentioned, but also in Guatemala and Honduras. By 1930 he owned 1 383 485 hectares of land, of which 76 612 were dedicated to bananas; they had built 1,500 miles of rail, and owned ninety steamships, known as the "Great White Fleet," that transported bananas to North America and Europe. To coordinate its vast empire, the company had laid 5 363 kilometers of telegraph cables and built twenty-four radio stations, had become the largest employer in the Caribbean, with a force workforce of 150Template:Esd000 people. Banana exports reached 65 million bunches per year.

The development of the Colombian enclave was only a small part of this rapid expansion. In Colombia, as elsewhere, the banana plantations followed the railroad. In 1911 the railway reached Aracataca and in 1920, with one hundred and thirty kilometers, to Fundación, where it ended. Next to the railway, new banana plantations were created, reaching eleven kilometers on each side of the track. Some branches connected each plantation with the main line, and from there to the pier in Santa Marta and to the sea. In the 1920s, the banana zone covered a good part of the municipalities of Santa Marta, Ciénaga, Aracataca, Fundación and Pivijay. Banana exports from Santa Marta grew from 275,000 bunches in 1900 to 6.5 million in 1915, and from there to 10.3 million in 1929. In this year, Colombia was the world's third largest supplier of bananas, and this product constituted seven percent of Colombian exports.

The capital that the United Fruit Company invested in the banana zone and the marketing connections it established opened up new opportunities for some Colombians. The area was inundated by port, railway and field workers, by small farmers, merchants, shopkeepers and farmers eager to produce bananas. In some way, these people benefited from the presence of the United Fruit Company due to the appreciation of the land, the growth of a cash economy, and new employment and market possibilities. At the same time, the dominance of the United Fruit Company in the regional economy and its control of local political life frustrated the ambitions of many groups.