Colombia: survivors remember "Massacre of the Bananeras"

[Judi Lynn]

Colombia: survivors remember "Massacre of the Bananeras"
Submitted by WW4 Report on Wed, 12/10/2008 - 18:35.

Unions and social organizations held a commemoration Dec. 6 in Ciénaga, in the Colombian Caribbean coast department of Magdalena, marking the anniversary of the 1928 "Masacre de las Bananeras," carried out by the army against hundreds of striking workers of the United Fruit Company. Hundreds gathered in what is now called Plaza of the Martyrs to hear speeches and testimony from aging survivors of the massacre. Up to a thousand were killed by some estimates when the army surrounded and opened fire on a union rally in Ciénaga's central plaza in the midst of a strike over collective bargaining rights—although the official death toll was put at nine. (Radio Caracol, Dec. 6)

Chiquita Brands, successor company to the United Fruit Co., is currently mired in a scandal over collaboration with Colombia's right-wing paramilitaries. The company is accused of paying the paramilitaries up to $1.7 million, as well as directly providing weapons, over the past seven years. During this period, some 4,000 residents of Colombia's northern banan-producing regions have been killed by the paras.

http://ww4report.com/node/6500

[Judi Lynn]

1. Reference to this massacre in an article published early this year in "The Nation."

Banana Kings By Emily Biuso

February 28, 2008

~snip~
United Fruit's brutal tactics extended, naturally, to labor issues. Low wages and dangerous working conditions were the norm, and any attempt by the workers to assert their rights was met with harsh consequences. In 1928 thousands of striking United Fruit workers in Colombia gathered in a town square to call for a six-day week, an eight-hour day, free medical treatment and wages paid in cash rather than scrip redeemable only at the company store. Government troops were called into the square to protect US interests, and after giving a five-minute warning, the Colombian military fired on the crowd with machine guns. The strike was broken and the massacre covered up. No one knows how many were killed that day--it's widely believed that the bodies were buried in the forest or dumped in the sea--but a United Fruit estimate (likely low) put fatalities at more than 1,000. Gabriel García Márquez drew on the event in his 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.

More:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080317/biuso