driving it, and singing their own, Latin American songs.
The banana women of Latin America offer a new model that explicitly integrates gender equity as part and parcel of any effective labor internationalism. They refuse to separate the global struggle against transnational corporations from the struggle at home for women’s equality and respect. Employees of some of the biggest corporate monsters in the world with household names like Dole and Chiquita, they are also well aware that other monsters, deploying domestic violence, can inhabit their own households. They inspire us to envision a new labor internationalism that places women’s issues at the center of global class politics.
Before launching into the banana world, I want to make clear my own relationship to this story. I first met the banana women when I was invited in December 2000 to help COLSIBA develop a banana union label for the US market. Since then I have worked with COLSIBA in a variety of solidarity work, mostly through the US Labor Education in the Americas Project (US/LEAP), a Chicago-based nonprofit. When I began researching the banana women I was already known to the leaders of the banana unions as an ally; I was introduced, and introduced myself, as both a researcher and someone working on behalf of the banana workers. Over the course of four years, as I interviewed three dozen male and female banana unionists and their allies, observed workshops in Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, participated in three international conferences of women banana workers, and attended four COLSIBA meetings, I was gradually embraced as part of the international network of women I was studying.
Along the way the banana women very pointedly directed and shaped my research process, teaching me both how to learn about them and what to learn. I was specifically instructed, for example, to write here that I didn’t just look at documents and figures, but stayed with women banana workers in their homes, ate with them, and visited their packing plants and union offices. I, too, was along on that road trip, another round, fortyish woman belting out songs she’d learned from the Nicaraguan Revolution. Unlike the Honduran women in that truck, though, I hadn’t spent twenty years packing bananas, standing up ten or twelve hours a day, six days a week. I brought all the privileges of a white, middle-class academic from the United States. But the mujeres bananeras of Latin America gave me another privilege: that of telling their story.
Packinghouse workers, Buenos Amigos Plantation, El Progreso, Yoro, Honduras, September 2004
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
