The dark history of bananas John Soluri
On a December night in 1910,
the exiled former leader of Honduras,
Manuel Bonilla, boarded
a borrowed yacht in New Orleans.
With a group of heavily armed accomplices,
he set sail for Honduras in hopes
of reclaiming power
by whatever means necessary.
Bonilla had a powerful backer,
the future leader
of a notorious organization
known throughout Latin America
as El Pulpo, or “the Octopus,”
for its long reach.
The infamous El Pulpo
was a U.S. corporation
trafficking in, of all things,
bananas.
It was officially known
as United Fruit Company—
or Chiquita Brands International today.
First cultivated in Southeast Asia
thousands of years ago,
bananas reached the Americas
in the early 1500s,
where enslaved Africans cultivated
them in plots alongside sugar plantations.
There were many different bananas,
most of which looked nothing like
the bananas in supermarket aisles today.
In the 1800s, captains
from New Orleans and New England
ventured to the Caribbean in search
of coconuts and other goods.
They began to experiment with bananas,
purchasing one kind,
called Gros Michel, from Afro-Caribbean
farmers in Jamaica, Cuba, and Honduras.
Gros Michel bananas produced large bunches
of relatively thick-skinned fruit—
ideal for shipping.
By the end of the 1800s,
bananas were a hit in the US.
They were affordable,
available year-round,
and endorsed by medical doctors.
As bananas became big business,
U.S. fruit companies wanted
to grow their own bananas.
In order to secure access to land,
banana moguls lobbied and bribed
government officials in Central America,
and even funded coups to ensure
they had allies in power.
In Honduras, Manuel Bonilla repaid
the banana man
who had financed his return to power
with land concessions.
By the 1930s, one company dominated
the region: United Fruit,
who owned over 40% of Guatemala’s
arable land at one point.
They cleared rainforest in Costa Rica,
Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras,
and Panama to build plantations,
along with railroads, ports,
and towns to house workers.
Lured by relatively high-paying jobs,
people migrated to banana zones.
From Guatemala to Colombia,
United Fruit’s plantations grew
exclusively Gros Michel bananas.
These densely packed farms
had little biological diversity,
making them ripe for disease epidemics.
The infrastructure connecting
these vulnerable farms
could quickly spread disease:
pathogens could hitch a ride from one
farm to another on workers’ boots,
railroad cars, and steamships.
That’s exactly what happened in the 1910s,
when a fungus began to level
Gros Michel banana plantations,
first in Panama, and later throughout
Central America,
spreading quickly via the same system that
had enabled big profits and cheap bananas.
In a race against “Panama Disease,”
banana companies abandoned
infected plantations
in Costa Rica, Honduras, and Guatemala,
leaving thousands of farmers and workers
jobless.
The companies then felled
extensive tracts of rainforests
in order to establish new plantations.
After World War II,
the dictatorships with which United Fruit
had partnered in Guatemala and Honduras
yielded to democratically elected
governments that called for land reform.
In Guatemala, President Jacobo Arbenz
tried to buy back land from United Fruit
and redistribute it to landless farmers.
The Arbenz government offered to pay
a price based on tax records—
where United Fruit had underreported
the value of the land.
El Pulpo was not happy.
The company launched propaganda
campaigns against Arbenz
and called on its deep connections
in the US Government for help.
Citing fears of communism,
the CIA orchestrated the overthrow
of the democratically elected
Arbenz in 1954.
That same year in Honduras, thousands
of United Fruit workers went on strike
until the company agreed to recognize
a new labor union.
With the political and economic costs
of running from Panama Disease escalating,
United Fruit finally switched
from Gros Michel
to Panama disease-resistant Cavendish
bananas in the early 1960s.
Today, bananas are no longer
as economically vital in Central America,
and United Fruit Company,
rechristened Chiquita,
has lost its stranglehold
on Latin American politics.
But the modern banana industry
isn’t without problems.
Cavendish bananas require frequent
applications of pesticides
that create hazards for farmworkers
and ecosystems.
And though they’re resistant
to the particular pathogen
that affected Gros Michel bananas,
Cavendish farms
also lack biological diversity,
leaving the banana trade
ripe for another pandemic.