The Case Against Chiquita

Last week, a jury in South Florida ordered that $38.3 million should be paid to 16 family members of farmers and other civilians who were killed in separate incidents by the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, a right-wing paramilitary group that was active in Colombia for parts of the 1990s and 2000s. The party that is obliged to pay that money is Chiquita, a produce company known in the United States and around the world for producing bananas. Chiquita was found guilty of bankrolling this paramilitary group—a groundbreaking instance of a company being held liable in a U.S. court for human rights violations elsewhere in the world. It also marks the culmination of a long history in which Chiquita has inflicted violence on South America.

What role did Chiquita play in making bananas a popular fruit? To what extent was it public knowledge that Chiquita engaged in violence on its plantations? And what options do companies have to maintain security in unstable countries?

Those are a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast that we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter.

Cameron Abadi: Chiquita is indelibly associated with bananas. When did bananas go from being an exotic delicacy to the most popular fruit in the United States? And what role exactly did Chiquita play in that process?

Adam Tooze: It’s a truly astonishing story, because if you put another set of lenses on, when you talk about trade theory and economics, one of the standard examples of something you probably can’t have in most of Europe is the banana, right? You’ve got to grow it somewhere else and then ship it. It’s a delicate tropical fruit that in no way can be nativized in an efficient way outside the tropics. It has to be picked and packed by hand, shipped, delivered quickly or refrigerated all the way along. And it’s a truly astonishing achievement of the development of global capitalism that the banana in the form that we know it today really is the generic fruit that it is.

And it goes back to the 1880s, to American businessmen Andrew Preston and Minor Cooper Keith, who began importing what were then Gros Michel bananas, under the auspices of the Boston Fruit Company. And that would then become the United Fruit Company and then Chiquita. They built a packaging system, a storage system that would keep the bananas in good shape to make them available to American customers. They kept the prices low. In Jamaica, they built agricultural plantations. They built railways. They equipped themselves with a shipping fleet to ship the bananas. Not for nothing, many of the nations of the Caribbean, Central America—and not so much south, but Central America—were known as banana republics. And when the Gros Michel variety was hit by Panama disease fungus in the 1950s and ’60s, they then innovated and introduced a new brand, the one that we know today, the Cavendish banana, as the new standard industrial crop banana. As many of us know, it’s quite a bland thing. But it’s tough, it withstands shipping, and it’s really the kind of ultimate industrial agricultural product. In many ways, the banana is no less an engineered, industrially produced artifact than many consumer goods, mass-produced consumer goods. It’s an entirely artificial, industrially produced, agro-economical system with global reach.

CA: It’s very clear that the company has always engaged in violence of various kinds on its plantations, to keep its workers in line, to keep them productive despite poor conditions. And that entire time, Chiquita was also a publicly traded company in the United States, in New York. How much of its nefarious activities on the plantations was public knowledge? How does a company maintain what seems to me like a kind of schizophrenic identity—on one hand, overseeing de facto military operations on its plantations, on the other hand writing catchy jingles for the public on the radio or television?

AT: I think you’re right that any plantation agriculture of this type, which involves tough labor on plantations that are going to produce goods which are going to be shipped abroad, obviously has its origins in the slave economies of the Caribbean. There’s an argument to be made that it was in the slave-based plantation economies that were centered around sugar in the Caribbean region that various types of industrial labor, factory-style production were for the first time carried out and tried out. I mean, the case of the United Fruit Company, notably in Colombia, I mean, it has taken on repeatedly extremely dramatic form.

And, you know, one moment in particular is really emblematic, I think, of this history. It’s the so-called Banana Massacre, which took place in a small town near Santa Marta in Colombia in December 1928 when, after several weeks of striking, the United Fruit Company refused to negotiate with the workers. There was an appeal to the outside for American assistance. There was the threat that America would intervene. In part under the threat of American external intervention, conservative forces in Colombia itself then dispatched military forces to the region. And if you like, in the name of preserving Colombian autonomy against the threat of American intervention, on the one hand, and on the other hand, in the interest of suppressing what was being stylized and described as a communist insurgency against the powers that be in Colombia, the Colombian troops opened fire and killed, depending on who you talk to, whether it’s the official report afterward, 47 people, or well-attested unofficial reports which put the figure closer to 2,000. In any case, they inflicted a horrendous massacre on this striking population, which was then immortalized. It becomes a standing reference point in Colombian politics and is truly immortalized in Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.

So from that moment onward, really, there’s no secret about the kind of violence that’s necessary to sustain this kind of production in the face of left-wing challenge in South America, in Colombia’s case, or Central America, in general. But it’s not made a secret because what you’re basically saying is: We will defend this interest. This is also what you say to your shareholders. We will defend this interest. We are threatened with communism. This is a legitimate use of force. And we will call on both the powers of the United States government, and if supplementary to that, the local authorities to ensure that our control remains in place. And that, I think, is the kind of tough logic behind this. It’s really not a secret at all. It’s actually an overt promise that when push comes to shove, your interests will indeed be defended.

CA: Chiquita is being held liable for paramilitary killings, but the company claimed that it paid those paramilitaries to keep its own employees safe in those countries. How plausible are those claims? And what are the options available to businesses operating in unstable countries to achieve security? Are they required to have a de facto military policy of one kind or another?

AT: I think it really depends by what we mean by “unstable” and what the source of the instability is. I mean, it is definitely the case that rich, powerful Western companies operating in places where there are serious law and order issues have quite carefully defined policies about what risks they will cover for local employees and whatnot, how they will defend them and how they will not defend them. For their expat employees, they have security and extraction plans. I mean, on behalf of a friend who was in a dangerous place at a recent business meeting, I was in fact offered a telephone number to be used in case of emergencies. So if that person needs getting out quick, we’ll help. This is the number. You call me on this number and we will set in train a process that will extract that person. So companies do have these kind of mechanisms in place. We’ve spoken about it a little bit with Western oil companies and the way they operated in Russia. They have go bags. People need to be able to leave in 24 hours. Like, you don’t mess around when somebody suddenly gets a death threat.

But I think, in the case of Colombia, it’s even more kind of entangled, because there you’re not substituting your own security for the absence of a state power or protecting your folks against the threat of kidnapping simply. What Chiquita did is not that, because they were threatened by kidnapping by FARC, and they did make payoffs for that, and they’ve never really been held liable for those actions, because I think everyone understands how complicated those kinds of transactions are. No, what they’ve been held liable for is a much more proactive engagement, which is that they picked a side in a civil war, and they didn’t just pick any side, they picked the anti-left side.

And there are memos exchanged between Chiquita people saying, “We pay these paramilitaries because they offer us much higher levels of support than we can get from the official military.” In other words, the Chiquita people were looking for hit men, paramilitary death squads that would deal with leftist insurgents in the banana regions that they were interested in. And they didn’t think they would get enough coercion from the state. And so they shot for some extra coercion from somebody who was more determined to push their interests. And so that’s a very different story from simply protecting yourself against the risk of kidnapping. This is proactively taking a side and backing the side that will crush and destroy your leftist antagonist.