Banana (10 page)

T
HE EFFECTS OF THE COLOMBIA MASSACRE
were beyond wide-reaching. Initially, the event was so outrageous that the liberals were able to use it to take power; they instituted land reforms and attempted to try the culprits for the massacre. The result was even more polarization. United Fruit attempted to maintain its position, but this time the company seemed to have gone too far. As operations in the South American nation became more difficult, the banana grower began closing plantations and shipping equipment to Costa Rica. This time United Fruit used the advance of Panama disease as an excuse, though the
New York Times
reported that “labor troubles and difficulties with the government are responsible for the new policy.”

In hindsight, the departure of the banana industry was one of the country's smaller problems. The liberal who'd demanded an investigation into the banana massacre was Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, a politician and lawyer who'd come from an impoverished background himself.

Using the country's radio network—which had partially been built by United Fruit—Gaitán made fiery speeches advocating the interests of “the people” and denouncing the “oligarchy” that he saw as dominating them. Gaitán formed his own political party in 1933 and was a dominant force in Colombian politics until 1948. He was poised to win the country's next scheduled elections when he was assassinated at a campaign rally in Bogotá.

Like the Kennedy assassination in the United States, the truth about Gaitán's murder will probably always be in dispute. The man who pulled the trigger, Juan Roa Sierra, was immediately beaten to death; in the years following, everyone from U.S. and Soviet agents to political rivals and Fidel Castro were accused of ordering the killing. What is known is that a period known as
la violencia
followed, during which rival political forces in Colombia would launch a brutal and deadly guerilla war. From the late 1940s through the 1950s, as many as 180,000 Colombians died; a military dictatorship seized control of the nation in 1953. The dominos continued to fall. Rebel groups began operating against the military forces ruling the country; paramilitaries were created as a response. With chaos throughout the country, drug cartels were able to establish domain over huge swaths of the countryside. Today, Colombia is a nation of kidnappings, murder, and violence; several insurgent organizations control different parts of the country; the cocaine trade mingles with both sides and is believed to finance at least part of the operations of the FARC, the guerilla faction that began as the military arm of the Colombian communist party, an offshoot of the liberal movement that fractured when Gaitán was assassinated.

It isn't fair to blame the banana industry for all of Colombia's problems. But it is important to point out that in that country and throughout Latin America the destabilization resulting from banana-related interventions created a tradition of weak institutions, making it difficult for true democracy and fair economic policies to take hold. The Latin American tradition of governments not supported by the general population, and propped up by overseas commercial interests, was created under the authorship of United Fruit.

There was even a name for such puppet-string governments. The term was first used by O. Henry in
Cabbages and Kings
, a 1905 collection of short stories that took place in a mythical Central American country called Anchuria. (The appellation is a play on words for Honduras, where the writer briefly sought refuge from U.S. officials pursuing him on a fraud conviction. In Spanish, the word for the real nation translates as “depths.” The name of the author's mirror land comes from the Spanish
ancho
, meaning “width.”) But the term coined by O. Henry didn't come into popular vogue until after the Colombia massacre, when it appeared in a 1935
Esquire
magazine story that chronicled American adventures in the region. The article described the actions as “inhuman,” and termed the nations that so readily acquiesced to the fruit companies and the U.S. government as “banana republics.”

T
HE EVENTS OF EARLY
1929 came at a desperate time for United Fruit. As physically violent as its affairs were overseas, it was facing an opponent at home that was, from a business standpoint, even more aggressive. For years, the company had been able to steamroll competitors, forcing them into withering price wars. Of its early rivals, only Standard Fruit—the future Dole, started by Joseph Vaccaro, the entrepreneur who bought up all of the ice factories along the Gulf Coast in the late nineteenth century—was left standing, mostly because United Fruit had once been a partial owner of the company but was forced to divest by antitrust investigators. The larger banana company didn't dare attempt to squeeze its legally designated rival from the market.

But United Fruit did battle another company: Sam Zemurray's Cuyamel Fruit. Fifteen years after it was founded, the smaller company owned an extensive steamboat fleet and had its own record of technological innovation—creating superior irrigation systems at the Honduran plantations it operated. Zemurray even competed with United Fruit to buy up regional competitors, and frequently won. Just after the Colombia intervention, Cuyamel's stock began to rise. United Fruit's shares plummeted.

The larger banana company, just as it did when faced with worker challenges—or spreading blights—responded by rote. It started a price war.

At first, the result seemed like little more than a draw. But as the world's largest banana grower's stock price fell further, it decided that rather than continue the battle it would buy Cuyamel, even if it had to pay a huge premium. In 1930 Zemurray sold his company, receiving 300,000 shares of United Fruit stock and a seat on the banana giant's board of directors. The erstwhile banana baron's intention was to retire and enjoy the $50 million fortune he'd acquired. But United Fruit's stock continued to plunge. The situation was worsened by the crash of the U.S. stock market in October of that year. Prior to that, a single share of the banana company sold for $158. By 1932 it had declined to $10, taking Zemurray's riches along with it.

Enough was enough. At a directors' meeting that year, Zemurray loudly voiced his concern.

Zemurray, according to his United Fruit Historical Society biography, was never made to feel terribly welcome at United Fruit. After the deaths of Preston, in 1924, and Keith, in 1929, control of the company had fallen to shareholders, the largest being the Bank of Boston. The bank's president, Daniel G. Wing, was a legendary old-money financier with decidedly patrician sensibilities. Like U.S. Secretary of State Philander Knox two decades earlier, Wing made the mistake of underestimating the up-by-his-bootstraps immigrant, who had uttered his protest in the thick Russian accent he'd never even remotely banished.

Wing's reply: “Unfortunately, Mr. Zemurray, I can't understand a word of what you say.”

An enraged Zemurray did what he always did—and what he believed banana men always had to do. He took matters into his own hands. Investor by investor, he convinced United Fruit's shareholders that current management was destroying the company. At the next board meeting, Zemurray had gathered enough support to oust Wing and the rest of the company's old guard. His final words to the departing executives: “You gentlemen have been fucking up this business long enough. I'm going to straighten it out.”

Sam the Banana Man, who'd launched the banana industry's first audacious seizure of power, had pulled off another one, this time in the boardroom, taking over the company responsible for the bloodiest and most recent of those interventions. But as terrible as the aggression in Colombia had been, it would soon be exceeded by actions of Zemurray's own design.

T
HE BANANA INDUSTRY
weathered stock market crashes and price wars. But Panama disease had turned an enterprise that relied on tight controls and stability into a bizarre and treacherous roller coaster ride. Not only did the number of bananas being grown in Central America swing wildly during the first decades of the twentieth century, but the places they were grown also began to shift at an alarming rate. “In some localities,” writes historian John Soluri, “production plummeted and economies all but collapsed, even as regional exports were rising.” In Honduras the output of Standard Fruit dropped from 4.5 million to 1.9 million bunches during the first half of the 1920s. The number rose the following decade but only because new plantations were opened in areas of newly cleared forest.

A few attempts to research the banana out of its problems continued. In 1931 Scottish agronomist Claude Wardlaw, working at Trinidad's Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture, conducted a Panama disease survey and found devastation: 15,000 acres infected in Jamaica and 50,000 in Panama, with the entire Atlantic coast of that nation now unable to sustain banana crops. Even the figures for countries with seemingly low levels of the blight were ominous, since the numbers didn't count land that was completely out of service. Honduras, for example, showed only 5,000 acres of loss (just a fraction of the country's total production), but adding the written-off acres would have boosted the total close to Panama's.

Wardlaw was also one of the first to unlock the mystery of how Panama disease spread. It wasn't something in the air that appeared out of nowhere or even something that had lurked in the soil for ages. The banana industry itself, Wardlaw said, was responsible. When he visited United Fruit's Costa Rica plantations in 1929, he was astonished at the poor agricultural practices he encountered. The reason the disease moved so quickly, Wardlaw surmised, was that it was being transported by people—even to the very plantations that were being cut
in order to grow disease-free fruit
. “The amazing thing,” the scientist wrote, “is that very few [banana producers]…possess even a smattering of real agricultural knowledge, and if they do, it probably does not help them in the least.” Proper in-the-field husbandry seemed to be the one technical skill United Fruit was unable to master. It was easier just to pull up their stakes on ruined plantations and move on. The same problem exists today. At the Chinese banana plantation I visited, I watched as farmers and families came and went, transferring infected soil acre-by-acre via footprints and bicycle tracks. Houbin Chen, the scientist who accompanied me, took care to change his shoes every time he moved to a new plantation, keeping several pairs in the trunk of his car. The effort seemed futile, I noted, given what was going on around us. “I know,” he sighed. “But I need to set a good example.”

The banana industry did fund some research. Scientists backed by United Fruit determined that Panama disease was probably spread via water, running through the banana's root systems. They identified the malady as a fungus in the fusarium family. When breeders created IC2, the second human-bred banana resistant to the blight, by crossing Gros Michel with a wild Asian species, banana companies agreed to grow it in Honduras. But the fruit lost resistance before it was able to be put into large-scale production.

The problem was that the programs banana scientists came up with were largely ignored by growers working for the same companies. Even if a new banana couldn't be found, even if the disease couldn't be cured, plantation managers could adopt practices that would extend the life of existing growing areas and slow the malady's advance. They could quarantine infected areas and make sure that workers, trains, vehicles, and tools were cleaned and sanitized so they'd be prevented from spreading contaminated soil. For the most part, they didn't do any of this.

Wardlaw also was one of the first to see that banana growing was throwing the entire Central American ecosystem out of balance. “Virgin forest,” he wrote, “is the raw material of the agricultural pioneer. Before it can be exploited to advantage, its value must be truly assessed, otherwise the exploiter may find himself bankrupt while posterity is left with an infinitely poorer heritage.” Wardlaw believed that Panama disease was the product of willful disregard of the laws of nature. Bananas were growing in a place where they never belonged, and—like many biologic newcomers—came under attack from pathogens they couldn't resist.

Banana growers did find havens where the Gros Michel seemed to be the stronger force. For years, the Santa Marta district of Colombia—a focal point of the 1929 strike—remained free of the blight even as surrounding areas succumbed. The region became a key source of the clean, disease-free plants needed to jump-start new plantations. Why Santa Marta was resistant wasn't clear—it might have had something to do with climate or soil conditions—but in 1948 the disease arrived there, and the plantations quickly succumbed.

In the 1950s, Wardlaw and his colleagues reprised the 1931 survey. By then the blight had gone global. Eight nations in Asia were infected, five in the Pacific, twelve in Africa, and twenty-two in the Americas, including the entire Caribbean. Even the United States was struck. A few nascent—and probably ill-fated, with or without a fungal attacker—plantations were hit in Florida, and promptly shuttered. In every case, the failure of the banana companies to enforce proper quarantine and isolation practices hastened the spread of the disease.

The banana moguls knew what Panama disease was. They knew what it did. They knew how it spread. But they refused to use any of this knowledge for positive change. It was as if the power of the banana, which had changed both the nations that consumed it and those that grew it, had addicted United Fruit and its rivals to just one method of growth: blunt marauding through the tropics without considering the consequences of, or alternatives to, standard procedure. Now that nature had answered back, the banana companies seemed deaf and baffled.