Yes We Have Some Bananas
The Fruit Company, Inc. reserved for itself the most succulent, the central coast of my own land, the delicate waist of America. It rechristened its territories as the Banana Republics Banana...
...For the moment, however, he chose the most direct path to weaken the reform process in the countryside...
...Their original concessions had provided that the railway would revert to the government whenever the company ceased operating it...
...People increasingly would be forced to the already crowded west and south since the rich coastal lands were already occupied by the companies...
...The government employed the same tactic against FENACH that it had used against the striking United Fruit workers in 1954: it fostered the creation of a parallel peasant association to challenge it...
...Slutzky and Alonso...
...a broad triangle of alluvial soil that has been washed down by the rivers from the highlands...
...was shaken by a strike destined to change the course of both labor and capital in Honduras...
...And its own industries increasingly were branded, "owned by the U.S.A...
...or in zones where land ownership was never clearly established...
...Oswaldo L6pez Arellano seized power and deposed the Villeda government...
...Yet Carias was not unbending...
...256ff...
...Honduras, 1977-1981 (unpublished), pp...
...For Honduras is the quintessential banana republic...
...The anger of the landless and the peasant minifundistas soared in the post-World War II period as population growth put a real pressure on the land...
...2 6 By the time the Central American Common Market (CACM) was officially created, however, the United States had taken over the process, seeing the common market as an excellent opportunity for U.S...
...According to the 1952 Agricultural Census, the top 4% of the farms spread over 57 % of the territory while the smallest 65 % of the farms occupied only 15% of the land.' Concentration, nevertheless, did not imply a greater capitalization of the land...
...7. Mario Posas, "Politica estatal y estructura agraria en Honduras (1950-1978)," Estudios Sociales Centroamericanos [Costa Rical, No...
...Yet the mileage that was laid was little more than what was strictly necessary for the operation of the banana industry...
...influence, foreign investors would be guaranteed freedom of investment, without any regard for regional balance...
...the railways, cohesion and peace...
...As such, the term is often loosely applied to Latin America as a whole, homogenizing the region into a single contemptible image...
...Although Honduran workers had been organizing and striking since the 1920s, only after the 1954 strike did the government and private enterprise legally recognize trade union organizations, making Honduras virtually the last country in the hemisphere to accept unionization...
...SITRATERCO) was recognized, replete with the most conservative members of the Central Strike Committee on its executive board...
...company could have serious consequences on Honduras' own stability at a critical time...
...A reformer, Ram6n Villeda Morales of the Liberal Party, had slipped through the split in the National Party to be elected president in 1954...
...The choice coincided with a desire on the part of the banana companies to diversify and reorganize their productive activities, a move which required a much more active presence of the government...
...The companies would then register the additional land in their name...
...A growing international demand for agricultural raw materials spurred the banana companies, particularly Tela Railroad Co., to diversify into such crops as abacd (a type of hemp) and African palm oil...
...4. William H. Durham, Scarcity & Survival in Central America: Ecological Origins ofthe Soccer War(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979), pp...
...The solution which was reached foreshadowed an entirely new approach to labor militancy by U.S...
...Only the occasional tight pocket of fertility breaks the monotony of the mountains...Only in the north, along the Carib, do the puckered wastes of pine give way to good level lands...
...They saw as their main activity the creation and maintenance of the legal and political conditions necessary for the functioning of the foreign capitalists...
...This would become a serious problem in the second half of the twentieth century when the population expanded rapidly...
...Present at FESITRANH's foundation was none other than Andrew McLellan, later the AFL-CIO's InterAmerican representative.* It was FESITRANH that, a year after the appearance of FENACH, created the National Association of Honduran Peasants (ANACH), again with the aid of the AFL-CIO and ORIT...
...Thus, when the Panama fungus struck in the 1930s, for example, the companies just picked up and moved, leaving the jungle to reclaim the formerly productive lands.' Dictatorships and Reformers United and Standard Fruit ruled Honduras in the 1930s and 1940s, but it was Tiburcio Carias Andino whom they chose as their top banana...
...The fruit companies gathered for themselves not only the bulk of the land, but the best lands...
...Instead, they imported large numbers of black workers from the Caribbean to work on their plantations...
...The result was nothing short of disastrous for those sectors of Honduran capital which saw in the CACM an opportunity for equal access to the region's markets...
...By forcing the fruit companies to recognize trade union organizations in 1954, the Honduran workers won an important victory...
...The Peasant Movement and U.S...
...Ibid., p. 13...
...capital drove into Honduras was the Central American Common Market...
...That was not what Zemurray saw in his trances...
...On ORIT, see Hobart Spalding, Jr., Organized Labor in Latin America (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977), pp...
...Posas, "Politica estatal," p. 54...
...Their gradual accommodations to shared interests, i.e., the economic development of the countryside, brought about an end to the earlier period of feudal struggles in which landholding had been viewed not as a means of capitalist exploitation, but rather as a source of political power and prestige...
...See Ronald Radosh, American Labor and United States Foreign Policy (New York: Vintage, 1969), pgs...
...labor movement (using ORIT and, after its founding in 1962, the American Institute for Free Labor Development, AIFLD) continue to play a very active role in the Honduran workers' movement, both among industrial workers and the peasantry, as we will see...
...6. Durham, Scarcit & Survival, p. 116...
...Labor President Villeda did not rely only on the agrarian reform to silence peasant militancy, however...
...The.bananas were to have brought railways...
...Clearly the ever more preponderant role of foreign firms in Honduras discouraged the emergence of a local economic elite...
...Ibid...
...In the mid-1950s, the fruit companies paid approximately one-fifth of all salaries earned in the country (both because they employed the greatest number of high-paid technicians and management and because they paid the highest wages) and employed 5% of the economically active population...
...The fruit companies began to move down from the Caribbean to the lower humidity Pacific coast...
...Thus the new alliances in these countries achieved a measure of political stability along with the modernization of infrastructure necessary for foreign investment and internal capital accumulation...
...Not only were more rural dwellers without land, but the size of small plots decreased...
...As we noted, only a small percentage of Honduran land is suitable for agriculture...
...From the United Fruit strike of 1954 until the present day, conservative forces in the U.S...
...This is regarded by some AFL-CIO colleagues as more the result of ties with certain government agencies than of his labor union experience...
...Fruits of the Strike One of the most important consequences of the 1954 strike was least expected by the workers...
...With its backbreak*Published in Spanish, Krehm's manuscript was never issued in its original English...
...But it is not a chicken-and-egg question...
...5. Rafael del Cid, "Aproximaci6n al estudio de las clases sociales en el agro hondureiio," Economia Politica [Tegucigalpa] (May-Oct...
...And, as before, it got a little help from its friends, the AFL-CIO and ORIT...
...The Gilvez government fostered the general conditions for the capitalist development of the countryside not only through the construction of a necessary transport infrastructure, but also by providing easy financing and technical assistance...
...Land to the Landowners As late as 1950, only 48% of the country's land was in private hands...
...2 2 When the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD) was founded by the AFL-CIO in 1962, it established a close and influential relationship with ANACH which has continued until this day...
...He sought out ex-president Manuel Bonilla, tough Conservative leader, perennially plotting Divila's overthrow from exile...
...On the other, elections were coming up in October and Gilvez hoped that his new split-off from the National Party, the National Reformist Movement (MNR), could defeat the old dictator Carias by appealing to more liberal sentiments in the country...
...In later years, McLellan helped build a dual union in the Dominican Republic whic was closely linked to the United States and which highly praise the military's overthrow of Juan Bosch...
...Dictator Carias, more impressively, had done away with much of the country's railway system altogether...
...27-48...
...The interests of private business once again outweighed the consideration of potentially lost revenues by the U.S...
...405-8.] Similar to other ORIT-inspired unions, ANACH begain its life by raiding members from the more combative FENACH .2 As a 1968 Senate investigation of U.S...
...3NACLA Report ing British debt, Honduras was a natural for such an arrangement...
...2. Anthony Winston, "Class Structure and Agrarian Transition in Central America," Latin American Perspectives, No...
...investment alone in Central America had tripled to more than $500 million...
...If the landed elite were not inclined to convert their landholdings into capitalist enterprises, the foreign fruit companies most certainly were...
...Bananas, which represented 88 % of the value of Honduran exports in the 1925-1939 period, declined to 70% of the total value of exports by 1950 and to 45% by 1960.24 Pushed by international demand and supported by the state's credit mechanisms and technical aid, coffee, cattle, 10NovIDec 1981 cotton and timber grew impressively after the war...
...On the one hand, it could hardly afford to displease United Fruit, the country's largest employer, by either supporting the workers or even remaining neutral in the struggle...
...2 Honduras, on the other hand, has been characterized by the lack of a local economic oligarchy until the late 1950s, by the predominance of the foreign agro-exporting firms and by the continuation of precapitalist forms of land tenure...
...These small plots were clustered on generally poor land both in terms of location and topography...
...Under U.S...
...multinationals and Latin American governments...
...But to Hondurans in the hopeful year of 1911, they promised an interoceanic railway...
...The United Fruit received the Tela and Trujillo regions...
...investments in Honduras totaled more than $200 million, in a country whose entire GNP was only slightly more than $500 million...
...Planners at the United Nations' Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) first sponsored the notion of a free zone for the movement of labor and capital among the five Central American countries in the late 1950s...
...Over the next ten years, L6pez Arellano would act first as a conservative and close collaborator of the National Party-as in 1965 when he was "constitutionally elected" president under their banner-and then as a reformist, championing the cause of the more progressive sectors of the Honduran bourgeoisie in 1972...
...Mario Posas, "Tendencias ideol6gicas actuales en el movimiento obrero hondurefio," Anuario de Estudios Centroamericanos [Costa Rical, No...
...The Cuyamel Co...
...Antonio Murga Frassinetti, "Concentracion industrial en Honduras," Economia Politica, No...
...Other general studies of the Honduran labor movement include: Mario Posas, Luchas del movimiento obrero hondurefio (San Jos6, Costa Rica: EDUCA), 1981 and Lucha ideoldgicay organizacidn sindical en Honduras (1954-1965) (Tegucigalpa: Editorial Guaymuras), 1980...
...Sliced and added to cold cereals, they make a savory breakfast dish...
...The agrarian reform process begun in 1962 was abruptly halted on October 3, 1963, when Air Force Col...
...In 1950, the government authorized the creation of the National Development Bank (BANAFOM) which began to provide credit and financing for cattle raising in the north and south, for cotton in the south and for coffee...
...Between the malarial marshes around the Gulf of Fonseca and the Atlantic lowlands, Honduras is a billowing sea of pines," William Krehm wrote...
...See AIFLD, Country Labor Plans...
...For the idea of a customs receivership drew the displeasure of Samuel Zemurray...
...As United Fruit's profits plummented in the early 1930s, Zemurray could no longer remain on the sidelines...
...Their plantations first spread along the northern Caribbean coast and later dropped south to the Gulf of Fonseca...
...Congress and the courts became tools of the presidency, and the country suffered through nearly 16 years of martial law...
...Adding to the govern7NACLA Report ment's dilemma, at precisely that moment the CIA was using Honduran territory to plan its invasion and overthrow of the progressive Arbenz regime in neighboring Guatemala...
...1 After a month on strike, the negotiators managed to remove the most militant leaders on the Central Strike Committee and replace them with known anticommunists...
...The vehicle in which U.S...
...44-46...
...Huge tracts, both on plantations and on the smaller farms, were 6Nov/Dec 1981 either left idle or were underutilized...
...Elected to office in 1932 for a fouryear term, Carias persuaded congress to extend his term, first to 1938, then to 1943, and then until 1949...
...capital played a dominant role in the vast majority of them...
...They are useful in combating dread sprue disease...
...The Customs Receivership "That staggering indebtedness had its sequel...
...The money stuck to the fingers of politicians and bankers, and to top it all Honduras made the grievous mistake of paying the contractor by the mile...
...In 1943, his nephew, a general, returned from Cuba with a renewed enthusiasm for baseball...
...He unleased a furious repression against the combative FENACH, which led to its destruction...
...At the same time, in most countries, the increase of beef production has not directly benefited the local population...
...Encouraged by a militant Central Strike Committee, the strike took hold among some 25,000 workers, including dockworkers at the northern ports...
...The greatest interest in these scholarship students is to be found on the north coast, land of the Banana Companies...
...The local landed power groups remained content to rent out their holdings to peasant farmers, limiting their role to more of a political than economic alliance with the foreign companies...
...Similar to other reform programs of the period, it hoped to reach a number of goals...
...The U.S...
...They also ripped up their railways from Puerto Castilla to Olanchito, and from Omoa to the Guatemalan border...
...The fundamental explanation resides in the particular agrarian structure of Honduras, a structure strongly influenced by Honduras' very low population density...
...Coffee, which continues to be grown by small producers even though its marketing is monopolized by a few exporters, more than doubled between 1945 and 1960...
...In 1935, United Fruit abandoned its entire Trujillo division, ripping up 125 kilometers of railway from Puerto Castilla to Iriona and shipping rails and bridges out of the country...
...investments...
...influences in the Latin American labor movement noted, "ORIT has never quite solved the problem of emphasis as between fighting communism and strengthening democratic trade unions...
...The swift mountain streams, grown fat and lazy, overflow each year and renew the richness of their valleys...
...Its plight became clear when hostilities broke out between the United Fruit and Cuyamel companies...
...Dec...
...One of those most often used was the "re-measurement...
...Bananas are a wonderful fruit," Krehms continued...
...The State Department saw to that, as well as to Krehm's expulsion from Mexico and from Time...
...31-33...
...Second, the law attempted to create a legal basis for the recuperation of national and ejido land which had been illegally occupied over the years...
...Victor Meza, "Crisis del reformismo military coyuntura politica en Honduras," ALAI [Montreal], Vol...
...In Honduras," he often remarked, "a mule costs more than a deputy...
...These changes begun in the post-19 5 4 period were the first in a series of major reorganizations which would ultimately lead the fruit companies, as we will see, to rely increasingly on local producers for direct production of bananas, reserving for themselves the role of commercialization.Nov/Dec 1981 Table 1 Banana Productivity in Honduras 1950154 - 1970174 Boxes Boxes Years per Worker per Hectare 1950/54 552 849 1955/59 820 964 1960/64 1,030 1,151 1965/69 1,793 2,314 1970/74 2,131 2,208 Source: F. Ellis, Commodity Exports and Employment in Developing Countries (1977) cited in Daniel Slutzky and Esther Alonso, Les transformations recentes de I'enclave bananiere au Honduras (Paris: CETRAL, 1979), p. 3 2. A First Attempt at Reform No sooner out of the frying pan of the United Fruit strike, than the government found itself slowly roasting in the fires of social conflict created by the fruit companies' massive dismissal of workers...
...In most of the other Central American nations, a native oligarchy arose in the late 1800s or, at latest, by the first third of the 1900s...
...19 (Fall 1978), p. 31...
...Honduras," Krehm began, "is a country in quest of a railway...
...Finally, the agrarian reform law hoped to put a lid on an increasingly militant rural population...
...2 3 During the early 1960s, ANACH served to provide the government with a conservative base of support in the countryside...
...Four years later, the five principal concessionaires held more than one million acres of coastal land, much of it the most fertile land in the country.' While the banana companies would return some of this land to the state over the years, they continued to own vast tracts of the best land in the country...
...Able to extend production almost without limit, the banana companies took few steps to develop disease-resistant strains of bananas or to plan irrigation systems...
...Far from the rich coast lands, their property was subject to the most severe erosion, particularly as neighboring cattle ranchers expanded their holdings by destroying nearby forest lands...
...Zemurray was a Bessarabian immigrant who started his career buying overripe bananas from the United Fruit Co...
...He also ordered a number of land colonization plans, distributing lands in low population density areas to peasant families (lotes de familia) as well as creating new areas of colonization (colonias agricolas...
...Encouraged by the Alliance for Progress, Villeda modeled himself after the Latin American reformers of the period: Jos6 Figueres in Costa Rica and R6mulo Betancourt in Venezuela...
...But in that 48 %, pro...
...2 9 The myth of the Central American Common Market, a fairy tale which featured Honduras as Cinderella rising to equal her more powerful siblings in the region, exploded in 1969 with the outbreak of hostilities with El Salvador...
...The Absentee Oligarchy The fruit companies' stranglehold on the Honduran state points up one of the most significant differences between this country and its Central American neighbors-a difference which merits Honduras the definitive title as the true banana republic...
...In fact, the Honduran agrarian reform law of 1962 was a close replica of the Venezuelan law of 1960...
...Further, foreign capital was allowed to acquire local firms, dominate new areas of investment and employ local credit facilities without restriction...
...In Honduras, production of beef went up from 17,600 metric tons in 1961 to 30,000 in 1970 while consumption actually declined during those same years...
...5 (May-June 1973), pp...
...70, 85-86...
...It tended, therefore, to run parallel to the sea instead of climbing into the highlands...
...Illegally and at a nominal price, they acquired these 'alternative lots' so that their plantations might stretch in vast unbroken domains...
...Of this, only 20% was in production...
...In El Salvador, for example, an 1882 "Law for the Destruction of the Ejido" provided for the massive alienation of communal lands...
...The 1962 agrarian reform law never met all 9NACLA Report its goals...
...as late as 1927 the government was losing fully one-third of its revenue from import duties under such special exemptions...
...1976...
...now a subsidiary of Castle & Cooke) owned or leased over 630,000 acres of Honduras' most verdant flatlands...
...YES, WE HAVE SOME BANANAS 1.Stacy May and Galo Plaza, The United Fruit Company in Latin America (New York: National Planning Association, 1958), pp...
...3-19...
...The National Agrarian Institute (INA), created in 1961 to oversee the new colonization projects and given authority over the reform process, was hamstrung by a lack of funds and the relative sympathy of many of its directors for the large landowners...
...FENACH concentrated its efforts on mobilizing renters and other marginal tenants living on the lands of the Tela Railroad Co...
...In 1929, sniffing depression in the air, he sold his interest in the Cuyamel Fruit Co...
...3 What accounts for this difference, a difference that Honduras shares in large measure with Nicaragua...
...When these writers think of banana republics, they think first of Honduras...
...In the 1940s and 1950s, most Honduran cattle were shipped on the hoof to neighboring Central American countries...
...In the late 1 940s, William Krehm,* a reporter for Time Magazine covering Central America, described how the fruit companies maneuvered their conquest...
...But the debts contracted, with accumulated interest, amounted to $125 million in 1916, and proved a millstone around the neck of the tiny land...
...Between 1867 and 1870 the Government contracted four British loans totalling six million pounds to build the railway...
...VII, No...
...In May 1954, the United Fruit Co...
...Naturally the terms of these concessions had a marked effect on the Honduran fiscal system...
...With an understandable influence over the Bonilla regime, he not only obtained princely concessions for his own Cuyamel Fruit Co., but also for the United Fruit Co., his deadly rival of later years...
...As such, Menachem Begin can employ it to shrilly proclaim what Israel is not...
...But the companies, through intermediaries, went in forNovlDec 1981 homesteading too...
...24 (Sept...
...If for Honduras every potential gain became a sacrifice, for Zemurray the opposite was true...
...8. Daniel Slutzky and Esther Alonso, Les transformations ricentes de l'enclave bananiere au Honduras (Paris: CETRAL, 1979), p. 21...
...Slutzky and Alonso, Transformations, pp...
...In coordination with foreign firms which by that time were beginning to invest in the region, these oligarchies ruled for the mutual benefit of both...
...The concessions covered railway construction and banana farming, and included customs exemptions not only on all materials required for the railways, telephone systems, irrigation works, but during the first ten years even on articles for the personal use of the companies' employees...
...Thus, the law raised the possibility that the idle property of large landowners could be expropriated...
...declined from 26,456 to 13,284, virtually a 50% drop...
...Particularly in Guatemala, El Salvador and Costa Rica, an alliance was formed between local large landowners and merchants, and foreign capital...
...Some important changes had already been occurring in the rural sector since the end of the Second World War...
...Workers at the Tela Railroad company's north coast installations marched out on May 1 demanding a 50% wage hike, better conditions and, most importantly, legal recognition...
...But they nevertheless favored the modernization of the Honduran productive system...
...Within a year, ORIT had sponsored the organization of an additional 15 unions in Honduras...
...Throughout the nineteenth century, Honduras was one of the most sparsely populated countries in -Central America...
...Telling United Fruit's president in so many words to stop screwing up, he ordered him out and took over complete control of Latin American activities as Managing Director in Charge of Operations.' Zemurray continued to run the show from Honduras where the political climate was to his liking...
...Leaders of the American Federation of Labor (the following year it would merge with the CIO), and its Latin American spinoff, the Inter-American Regional Organization of Labor (ORIT), sent advisers to Honduras to mediate the crisis...
...Within two years he had organized his own party and, in the words of one mystified textbook writer, "somehow won every seat in the 1956 elections for a new constitutional convention...
...9, pp...
...made similar promises...
...Counting the lines torn up," Krehm noted, "and construction from which the company was released, [Honduran dictator Tiburcio] Carias Andino signed away over 700 kilometers of vital railway in a country that has repeatedly pawned its soul in the hopes of acquiring railroads...
...Posas, "Politica estatal," p. 53...
...3. Ibid., pp...
...the Cuyamel the western side of the Chamelecon River...
...By introducing the concept of the "social uses" of the land, the new law recognized that society's interests could outweigh the interests of private property at times...
...9. Ibid., pp...
...consuls overwhelm us with visas...
...One consequence was that a coffee oligarchy never arose in Honduras as it did in most other Central American countries...
...In the 19 3 0s, a new blight, the Panama fungus, swept over the Caribbean coast, ruining huge areas for banana cultivation...
...Railways for Land "To obtain such generous franchises, the United Fruit Co...
...After a certain number of years Honduras' capital would be connected with Puerto Castilla on the Carib, or the Honduran treasury would be prosperous enough with United Fruit fines to undertake the construction on its own...
...State Department had evolved a special formula for bringing the Carib lands under its sway: loans for the liquidation of their European debts, guaranteed by an American customs receivership-much as'a dentist fits a golden crown upon an enervated molar...
...banana companies...
...In 1952, 75% of Honduran farms were under 10 hectares (24.7 acres), and most averaged less than 4 hectares (9.9 acres...
...The rest was held in reserve, used for flood fallowing, or given over to pasture or the cultivation of some small-scale crops so that it would not be threatened by peasant invasions...
...This required that idle or poorly utilized land be put into production and the traditional landowners be "transformed" into modern capitalist entrepreneurs...
...The moderate ANACH was a lesser victim of L6pez Arellano's wrath, and survived to inherit some of the militant members of the peasantry from FENACH...
...Between 1958 and 1960 the government distributed nearly 75,000 acres of land...
...See Table 1.] The impact of productivity increases and employment of labor-saving devices on the work force was nothing short of disastrous...
...In October 1961, a radical organization known as the National Federation of Honduran Peasants (FENACH) had begun organizing in the northern part of the country...
...multinationals controlled 100% of the production of Honduras' five largest firms, 88.7% of the 20 largest and 82 % of the 50 largest companies...
...These later helped shape its more progressive stands...
...The fruit companies also owned the railroad and the ports, the congresses and the presidents...
...Gilvez sent troops to the northern plantations, but agreed to listen to a new voice emanating from the United States...
...For one thing, they didn't have to rely on local laborers...
...First, it tried to promote productive exploitation of the country's farmlands...
...Given assurances of "labor peace," the companies for the first time began to invest in new, more productive varieties of bananas with a greater resistance to disease and a greater yield per acre...
...agreed to build a railway to Juticalpa, half way from the north coast to the capital, and eventually to the capital itself...
...Slutzky and Alonso, Transformations, Table 4. 25...
...But these others also saw the jido as a serious block to the development of the countryside and thus destroyed it...
...1 4 On July 9, the AFL and the CIO pressured United Fruit to settle the strike and, after a firm basis was laid for the creation of a conservative, anti-communist, "free democratic" trade union in Honduras, they agreed...
...In 1946, for example, the Tela Railroad Co...
...As just compensation for their generosity, the military wrote into the new Honduran constitution the right of the chief of the armed forces to contest the president's orders, thus establishing a much more formalized role for the military in the political affairs of the nation...
...Somehow, things often seemed to work out otherwise for Honduras in its relations with the banana companies...
...By utilizing BANAFOM funds, the state itself established some agro-industrial processing firms which would later be turned over to the private sector...
...New Crops and New Buyers The forces which inspired the 1963 coup sought to destroy the impetus for change from below...
...According to an article by Dan Kurzman in The New Republic (June 1966), McLellan rose to that important position "despite a limited trade union background...
...It was all laid out with engaging precision...
...5 The Honduran reformers, by contrast, preserved its legal status...
...3 (October 9, 1981), p. 41...
...Called the United Federation of Northern Workers (FESITRANH), it relied on the strength of the Standard Fruit Workers (SITRASFRUCO) and the ORIT-inspired United Fruit union (SITRATERCO...
...One day Americans may learn to regard them as a vegetable and roast them with meats as Latin Americans do...
...21-22...
...For a century its sons have dreamed of steel ribbons that would span the isthmus and bring to the scattered settlements the blessings of civilization...
...Yet his assumption of office was blocked when the Nationalists together with their splinter, the MNR, refused to provide a quorum for his, or anyone else's, confirmation...
...firms...
...Alberto Ruiz, a Honduran labor leader at the time, noted that before the 1954 strike, neither the AFL nor the CIO would offer Honduran workers the time of day: After the strike, the AFL-CIO, the U.S...
...Cattle exports also rose during this period...
...15-18...
...Land sown to cotton shot up almost 26 times between 1950 and 1965, creating a demand for nearly 30,000 seasonal laborers...
...His vice president, Julio Lozano Diaz, constitutionally assumed power...
...On October 1, 1911, Bonilla was elected president and Honduras became a banana republic...
...The Trujillo Railway Co., subsidiary of the United Fruit, would build 12 kilometers of railway each year, or pay a fine of $2,000 yearly for each kilometer of railway construction that fell behind schedule...
...V, No...
...Douglas R. Shane, "Hoofprints on the Forest: an Inquiry into the Beef Cattle Industry in the Tropical Forest Areas of Latin America," (mimeographed, 1980), pp...
...In fact, it met quite few of them...
...By the time 50 miles had been built, the funds had evaporated in the tropical heat...
...Banana companies (or local ranchers) would continually call for a resurvey of a neighbor's land which, .remarkably, would always be shown to have smaller boundaries than previously thought...
...Honduras was not Cinderella, and if anyone was enjoying the largess of Prince Charming, it was the corrupt politicians and military officers and those local sectors most tied to foreign investment...
...In 1949, Carlas' choice as successor, Juan Manuel Gilvez of the National Party, was elected president...
...Brought around to see the force of Zemurray's logic, the State Department stepped in to negotiate Divila's surrender...
...In 1895, it was 5NACLA Report estimated to have a population slightly less than 400,000 compared to El Salvador's 700,000...
...4-5, 88-93...
...1 7 By 1959, Standard Fruit also had fired almost 50% of the workers which it employed in 1954.18 In all, nearly 19,000 banana plantation workers lost their jobs at the same time that production rose from 9.2 million bunches to 12.4 million...
...But just when Divila was congratulating himself on his excellent relations with the Americans, something that augurs well for any Central American regime, his doom was shaping...
...Aid to the Central American Common Market," NACLA 's Latin America &Empire Report, Vol...
...It rechristened its territories as the Banana Republics Banana Republics: an easy epithet, connoting backwardness, unworthiness as nations, mere appendages of the United States...
...Claudio Veliz, Latin America and the Caribbean (New York: Praeger, 1968), p. 210...
...Typical of industrialization programs throughout Latin America in the late 1950s and 1 9 60s, the process was designed to allow local producers to manufacture some of the commodities which previously had been imported...
...At the same time they began a process of "labor rationalization" -intensification of labor and the mechanization of certain areas of work including aerial spraying and machine packing of bananas in boxes instead of shipping them in bunches...
...A move to crush an obviously popular strike against the U.S...
...19 The military wasn't quite so baffled, taking only two weeks to toss Lozano out and call new elections which returned Villeda to the presidency in 1957...
...and Victor Meza, Historia del movimiento obrero hondurefiio (Tegucigalpa: Guaymuras), 1980...
...6 (19 0), p. 25...
...Some understanding had to be reached with the large fruit companies, and a whole system of precarious land tenancies which had sprung up on these lands had to be systematized...
...In 1957, Honduras' first trade union federation was formed, based largely on banana workers...
...To understand their role, it is necessary to digress four years...
...Transformations, p. 20...
...Zemurray bought him the ship Hornet and equipped it with arms...
...Honduras was flooded with products "made in Central America," which had been manufactured in El Salvador and Guatemala...
...Posas, Lucha ideoldgica, p. 41...
...The railway will o' the wisp had the Hondurans bemused again, and Zemurray exploited it to the fullest...
...Honduras' fateful dream of railways had saddled it with a burden more oppressive than the British debt...
...In time he began purchasing his bananas directly from Honduran planters, and learned bananas and Honduras from within...
...The expansion of beef exports from Honduras is characteristic of a trend which has affected all of tropical Latin America since the 1950s...
...But it was clearly conditional...
...22, 106-107...
...perty ownership was very unevenly divided...
...Beef production in the tropical forest areas (particularly the Amazon basin and most of Central America) has generally doubled in the last two decades while production in the temperate countries (Argentina, Uruguay) has either grown more slowly or actually declined...
...In the tropical valleys where commercial cultivation of the banana could prosper and where small national producers were no match for them, the fruit companies muscled their way in through a variety of illegal devices...
...Within three years, from 1954 to 1957, employment at the Tela Railroad Co...
...Posas, Lucha ideoldgica, pp...
...The strike, and a disastrous flood in September 1954, directly led to a massive reduction of the workforce on the plantations...
...government...
...Critical to their notion was the equalizing of development and investment among the five countries, a process which, if achieved, would more benefit Honduras and Nicaragua, the region's most underdeveloped countries, than El Salvador, Guatemala or Costa Rica...
...2 5 Enter the Common Market This was also to be the period of significant industrial growth in Honduras...
...Villeda set about designing a public works program which would both provide the nation with some basic infrastructure (as of 1950 the capital city still had no paved roads), and employ some of the thousands of dismissed banana workers...
...Personal correspondence from William Krehm...
...and peddling them in New Oreleans...
...United Fruit's Honduran subsidiary) owned or leased 410,000 acres...
...The Hornet disembarked men and arms at Trujillo, and after a few stirring weeks of campaigning, had Divila down on his knees...
...For each kilometer of railway built, the companies received from 550 to 1,100 acres in lots of 10,000 to 12,000 acres alternating with similar lots reserved for homesteaders...
...The railway wriggled imaginatively in the easy lowlands, and got winded before it had penetrated too far inland...
...2 8 By 1969, U.S...
...He convinced Carias to allow the sport as it was useful in teaching the soldiers to throw hand grenades...
...1979), p. 38...
...Over 70% of Honduras' largest firms were founded between 1950 and 1968, and U.S...
...These lands are the sweet fruit of the U.S...
...1 0 The Strike of 1954 Economic development produced its own contradictions...
...By 1950, the United Fruit Company (since renamed United Brands) and the Standard Fruit and Steamship Co...
...ECLA's vision would never come to fruition...
...And, similar to other such programs, the Honduran industrialization plan resulted not in a lessening of imports, but rather in an increasing penetration of foreign, particularly U.S., capital and capital goods imports into the manufacturing sector...
...It worked out otherwise: the traditional strife of rival political bands was now geared to the pitched warfare of banana barons...
...Honduras' two greatest reformers of the period, Ram6n Rosa and Marco Aurelio Soto, split up church lands and sold some state lands, much like their counterparts in Guatemala (Justo Rufino Barrios) and Mexico (Benito Juirez...
...Thus, even though only 20-30% of the Honduran land mass is suitable for any kind of agriculture, the population density was still much less than in El Salvador, a country five and one-half times smaller...
...Under President Taft the U.S...
...In addition he helped him foil the vigilance of the United States authorities at New Orleans, who were determined that no expedition should sail against DAvila and the Customs Receivership...
...4 With little pressure on the land, there was less motivation to destroy older communal forms of landowning (the ejido) during the so-called liberal reform period in the nineteenth century...
...1 2 If the fruit companies were forced to recognize the union, other employers would soon follow...
...doing business in Honduras would thus have been reduced to the same dull affair as in the United States or any other sovereign land...
...In 1910 the Liberal regime of President Miguel Divila, harassed by the inevitable civil wars, was showing itself amenable to State Department pressure on the point...
...Even baseball clubs were outlawed by Carias as providing conspirators with a potential meeting ground...
...In bygone days Mussolini aroused the admiration of vacationing ladies by making the trains run on time...
...But in the 1960s, Honduras began to export beef, mainly to the United States, thanks to the installation of the country's first meat packing plants...
...Embassy and ORIT have fallen on us like a plague, offering us scholarships to 'study in Puerto Rico,' and getting us all kinds of favors from our emplbyers...
...Wages went up 10-15%, some conditions were improved and the Workers Union of the Tela Railroad Co...
...The Gilvez government suddenly found itself between a rock and a hard place...
...2 7 Between 1960 and 1968 the book value of U.S...
...1 6 Between the periods 1950/54 and 1970/74, productivity per hectare increased almost three times while productivity per worker quadrupled...
...By 1910, 80% of all banana lands were under the control of U.S...
...As was to be expected, the law immediately drew howls of protest from the large fruit companies and local ranchers who maintained extensive holdings...
...to United Fruit for 300,000 shares of the latter's stock, a transaction which made him their largest single stockholder...
...Not only do these companies easily grant their permission for these workers to spend months on leave, but they are favored with the choicest jobs, and are placed, very 'democratically,' as union leaders, when they return...
...For others, writers such as Neruda and O'Henry, the term is descriptively and geographically particular: the territories of Central America run as private plantations by giant, U.S.-based fruit companies...
...Further, in September 1962, Villeda shepherded through the country's first agrarian reform law...
...Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on American Republics, Survey of the Alliance for Progress, Labor Policies and Programs, 90th Congress, 2nd Session, July 15, 1968, p. 9. 23...
...And this implied important changes in both the city and the countryside...
...1-17...
...Now the Customs Receivership Agreement contained a clause barring tariff exemptions until the American loan was paid off...
...The war with El Salvador would make this quite clear...
...See Susanne Jonas, "Masterminding the MiniMarket: U.S...
...This has produced serious ecological and environmental problems as forests are cut down to make way for pasture land...
...2 0 Most of the colonies were established on lands ceded back to the government by the Tela Railroad Co...
...8 The very facility with which the fruit companies could acquire land encouraged the most wasteful types of "migratory" cultivation...
...They could not have picked a better target...
...While this was due in part to the fact that the coffee-producing areas were hard to get to, more importantly there was neither a pressure to use land more productively nor was there a large landless workforce which could be harnessed to capitalist agricultural production...
...Alberto Ruiz, "Agentes patronales en el movimiento obrero hondurefio," Octubre [Tegucigalpa], November 2, 1957, p. 2. 16...
...Posas, "Politica estatal," pp...
...Zemurray had visions of provinces of banana trees soaking up the tropical sun, and of railways built to service them...
...The rest belonged to the state (31%), ejidos (17 %), or other forms of communal holdings...
Vol. 15 • November 1981 • No. 6
