Dysnomie in extensive banana plantations

in Colombia
By Fabio CastroForero
1880 words

The expansion of transnational corporations all over the Third World is

right now a determinant factor of the social changes that are happening
in the Global South. The globalized markets created a race among
enterprises to reach the places with less transference costs and empty
of expensive consequences due to environmental or social harms. At the
same time, the expansion of the idea of reaching development through
foreign investment, fostered by the IMF and the WB during the second
half of XX century, made the developing countries began a race to offer
the cheapest production place deregulating everything related with
environmental or social protection. However, the International Law of
Human Rights and other human rights regulations appear to be the
bottom line that cannot be surpassed.

The present essay analyzes the relation between large banana

plantations in Colombia and its relation with human rights violations
focusing on the activities of the United Fruit Company, today Chiquita
Brands Corporation. Our aim is to unveil the determinant factors that
unleash that bloody relation.

Colombian Banana Production and Chiquita

The extensive production of banana in Colombia began by the very

beginning of the XX century in the Department of Magdalena brought
and mainly conducted by the United Fruit Company. By 1928 the

company already controlled 59.000 Ha.; 225 railways km.; 34 train

stations; 34 river channels; and 9 towns. The bloody baptism of the
production came up the 5 and 6 of December in the municipality of
Cinaga, Magdalena: During a strike of 25.000 workers asking to be
actually recognized as workers of the corporation, receive wages instead
of tickets to buy products of the corporation and receive 4 cents of USD
per cage. After the calling of the corporations directive board, the
Colombian Army attacked the population with machine guns. The
General Corts Vargas, who commanded the operation, recognized first
9 civilian deaths, then 47; the French Ambassador 100; the USA
Ambassador 10001; and according to the stories of local people the
deaths were between 2000 and 3000 and the corpses were transported
in the same trains used for the banana exportation and threw into the
sea. The caudillo Jorge Elicer Gaitn initiated the debate in the
Congress stressing the point that several women were raped in orgies
perpetrated by the army, the disappearance of the corpses and how the
wounded were topped with bayonet, among others. The General answer
that he was following the commands of the President who has received a
call from the USA President asking for protection to the interests of his
nationals or be prepared for a landing of USA marines in the North Coast
of Colombia.

In the 60 and 70 the corporation moved to the region of Urab in the

Department of Antioquia. In 2007 the corporation recognized the funding
(1.7 USD M) of paramilitary groups in Colombia from 1997 to 2004(The
United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia 2) and was condemned by the
USA Courts, because of violating the Act Against Terrorism, to pay a fain
of 25 million USD to the USA. The Colombian victims asked for a
reparation in the USA, the case concluded in April 2015 with a negative
decision of the Supreme Court that decided not to hear the case because
of lack of competence. The victims are still without reparation whereas
the case in Colombia has not answers yet in part because the
recognition of responsibility in the USA was part of an agreement with
the prosecutor that implied the complete confidentiality of the identity of
the responsible people of the company and to pay just the half of the
earning that Chiquita got during the Human Rights violations period.
The company recognized later to had funded the FARC (left-guerrilla
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) without any fain or reparation
yet. According to the documents the company was not extortionate but
it was a funding relation with mutual benefit. The crimes committed just
by the paramilitary forces in this region during the time that were funded
1http://web.archive.org/web/20120717004708/http://www.icdc.com/~pa
ulwolf/colombia/santamarta.htm
2 Declared a terrorist organization by the EU and the USA.

by Chiquita include more than 4.000 murders and more than 40.000 Ha.
of violently occupied lands. Colombia was until 2015 the country with
the largest forced internal displacement surpassing 5 M of people, and
however Urab represents just 3% of the National territory in a distant
region, it got 20% of the national massive forced displacement and 10%
of the national individual displacement during the conflict.

Today Latinamerica is still the major source of banana for the world
producing the 80% of the world tons of bananas and having as main
importers the USA and the EU. Colombia still has one of the largest
shares of the market producing more than 1800.000 Tons in 2012
according to the FAO3. The Chiquita Brands Corporation has suspended
all its activities in Colombia, operating just in trade relations with socalled independent producers. However, the reactions to workers
protests has not changed too much: Last August of 2014 a strike of
18.000 workers in Urab asking for nine week-wages that a company
was owing them finished with 14 workers wounded by bullets, one death
and 30 captured by the Army.

Anomie, institutional weakness and transnational economy

These facts allow us to observe a dysnomie phenomenon happening in

the extensive banana plantations: is not only that the rules that are
supposed to guide the behavior of people within the Colombian territory
are not a precise guide anymore, but that in extensive banana
plantations another set of rules -different from the general ordinary lawis working.

Behaviors that are generally illegal according to the Colombian legal

framework as stop paying wages are not strongly condemned there by
the State. At the same time, the mode of production of the people
working here is different from the traditional peasant way of production
because they will never get property of the land. Finally, other behaviors
that are supposed to be legal as peaceful protest are criminalized and
punished.
3 http://www.fao.org/docrep/019/i3627e/i3627e.pdf

This socio-legal phenomenon can be explained better looking to the

internal and external factors:

Coming from inside the main factor that contributes to the dysnomie is
the institutional weakness of the State and the absence of rule of Law
exercised by a rechtstadt in the whole territory. This issue is common in
the Third world and as Sousa Santos says 4 the public space has not the
exclusivity of law and power in a capitalist society, but even less in
societies that still have other modes of production -as those of the global
South-, where the civil society is practically created as a project of the
State and not conversely. And I would add that the non complete fit of
the transplant of the French and English constitutional institutions to a
people of 400 years of a different understanding of the public issues and
the actions and limits od the State. In that sense, the spaces not
completely fulfilled by the State will be occupied by enterprises that will
define the normative schemes there.

The outwards factors can be studied standing from the history of

capitalism and how it expanded through the world: When the second
industrial revolution advanced in the USA and Germany, the pressures of
the global market began to stronger each day. Industrial countries
needed to expand their markets in order to continue increasing profit
and avoiding a crisis. This expansion would mean not only to seek new
abundant resources but specially new workers and consumers of the
goods they will produce. After the discourses of Monroe, the world was
divided in two parts America for the Americans would mean that the
USA will get the market of all the continent and in general of the Spanish
Empire former colonies, holding a neutrality policy towards the rest of
the world where the European countries would expand their market.
Finally the most disadvantaged countries were those countries that got
industrial late (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Japan, Ottoman Empire,
Russia) by the moment in which the rest of countries (Britain, France,
The Netherlands, USA) had already expanded their markets, these
pressures will later bring out two world wars.

4 SOUSA SANTOS, Boaventura. Toward a New Legal Common Sense.

Second Edition. Butterworths LexisNexis. 2002. Pag. 368.

Thus, were developed to models of expansion of markets: The British

model, used by all European countries and exceptionally by USA that
consisted in colonize politically other territories and establish a free
market economy with them; and the USA model, that we can name a
lean colonization that consisted in create free market relations and open
markets without an absolute control of the countries and exceptional
direct interventions in strategic places (Panama, Cuba, Philippines,
Nicaragua). In accordance with Arrighi 5 the political control elements
that the British Empire took from the Spanish Empire were precisely the
main causes of its defeat in front of the USA model that was much more
cost-efective.

The expansion did not need to takeover a huge territory but just to get
cheap labor and associated costs, transport means, security of the
merchandise and create new consumers. Through the discourse of build
transport means and increase employment, industrialization and
technology transfers, was quite easy for the companies to enter in all
the countries of the former Spanish Empire. However the competence
between Europe potencies and the emerging American one for market
territories was apparently finished, the competence for prices in the
market will never finish. Thus, in order to compete with the semi-slave
workforce of the European colonies, the USA enterprises needed to
decrease as possible the workers conditions and protect against their
rebellions. In other words, in order to hold themselves globally
competitive USA corporations got security from states and illegal forces
to squeeze the last drop of sweat of the workers under the promise of
being industrializing the countries and sometimes getting alliances with
local elites that got part of the benefits.

Finally, it is important to state that however we have mentioned several

times the USA, the mentioned problem is not a problem based on
nationalities neither of the companies nor the owners. The mentioned
problem comes from a business model that was triumphant on the race
of global expansion of markets. That business model can be issued and
used by persons from the Global North or South, even for Colombians
within Colombia, who are in control of several banana plantations today.

5 ARRIGHI, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century. 2010 Verso. London.

Pag. 37-65.

In conclusion, the global construction of the current economic system

added to the local construction of the modern State play a determinant
role in the happening of dysnomic phenomena specially when the latter
is the weakest and the former the strongest as is the case of banana
extensive exploitation in Magdalena and Urab. However we have
started from the statement that international law of human rights is a
bottom limit in the career proposed by the first, and in that sense it is
necessary to develop strategies to strengthen the capacity of State of
the South to deal with their own territory and to develop fair global
strategies to enforce the human rights as first limit of the expansion of
capital.