Battling the Banana Baron: Rural Hondurans fight Chiquita

In June 1994, at the height of a strike against Chiquita Brands International, the company closed four banana farms in northern Honduras, fired 1,200 temporary workers, and told 800 permanent workers to choose between relocation or termination. The fired workers lived in company towns and to keep their jobs, Chiquita said, they had to move to faraway plantations. Chiquita told those remaining at one of the plantations, called Tacamiche, to move out or face eviction. Some braved the intimidation tactics and continued to live in their homes and communities. But with no advance warning on February 1, 1996, Chiquita destroyed Tacamiche, including homes, a school, three churches, and the health post. Now fired workers at the three remaining towns are resisting the same fate.

The eviction of 123 Tacamiche families had roots in the early 1990s, when Chiquita refused to maintain wages for plantation workers on a par with the crushing 30 percent Honduran inflation rate. Between 1987 and 1994, wages slid from eight dollars a day to less than three dollars. In response, 6000 Chiquita workers from several of Chiquita's 22 Honduran farms went on strike.

Honduran law specifically forbids the closure of a plantation in order to defeat a strike or unionization. Nevertheless, Chiquita closed four farms midway through the strike in June, 1994, totaling 2,964 acres, including the one at Tacamiche. Chiquita told 800 permanent workers to choose between relocation or $500 severance pay, and laid-off about 1,200 temporary workers. Within one month, such tactics coerced the union into settling the strike for a 9 percent pay increase, which, considering the country's inflation rate, meant a lower real wage than the previous year.

As for the possibility of future labor disputes, Chiquita has a plan. Most of the land in the decommissioned farms, according to Miguel Rodriguez, a vice president of Chiquita, will be sold at market rates as soon as the government grants permission. For decades, United Fruit/United Brands, now known as Chiquita, has been selling off its banana land, concentrating instead on the less controversial and more lucrative shipping and marketing end of the business. Smaller local producers can often grow the bananas more cheaply, Rodriguez notes, because their labor expenses are lower than Chiquita's, whose workforce has unionized. Rodriguez says these producers may find banana production on the abandoned lands more profitable, because they pay lower wages, provide fewer benefits, and work on a smaller scale.

The Land Revolt

Standing in the way of this master plan were the Tacamiches, who refused to vacate the company town and illegally planted corn and beans on the defunct plantation. "For the company, Tacamiche is just a former banana plantation that, after having the juice sucked from it, has been abandoned without a thought for the fate of those who lived here," an evicted Chiquita worker told the New York Times in a July 22 story. "But for those of us from Tacamiche, this is our life, these are the cabins that watched as we were born and grew up." Many of the fired workers who refused relocation had lived in Tacamiche their entire lives. For some, family roots extended back to the 1920s, a decade before the Honduran government sold the 3,000 acres to United Fruit in 1936 for one dollar as part of a railroad concession.

Chiquita first attempted to evict the Tacamiches on July 26, 1995. Four hundred police and soldiers arrested 26 plantation residents, injured about 75 more with tear gas, rubber bullets and clubs, and destroyed 200 acres of corn and beans planted two months before. Rocks thrown by the Tacamiches injured "some" of the troops, according to La Nacion, and police retreated. Subsequently, the government agreed to give the Tacamiches until September 26, 1995 to move out.

But the public outcry in Honduras delayed the second eviction attempt until February 1996, when Chiquita finally gained the approval of President Carlos Roberto Reina and the Honduran judiciary. This time, the police and military gave no advance notice. Caught by surprise, most Tacamiches lost everything except the clothes on their backs. An onslaught of 500 troops and over 400 Chiquita employees pounced on the village and made 100 arrests. They bulldozed everything: subsistence crops, homes, the school, three churches, the health post, kitchen utensils, books, bedding, tools, and radios. Wilfredo Cabrera, a 34-year-old banana worker, told a New York Times reporter,

"It was very painful to see all of our corn, peppers, tomatoes, carrots and melons being plowed over by bulldozers, not to mention what they did to the churches. We have been peasants all of our lives, making the land produce, so we can never forgive that kind of destruction."

Asked why no advance notice was given, Rodriguez offers some insights into the tactics of the Honduran police and military: "Whenever they announce that an operation is going to be undertaken, it is like going to war. You don't announce the moment you are going to strike, because at that moment the police were convinced that these outsiders would bring in five or six thousand people. It would probably have led to rock throwing, which is what happened on July 26, maybe even people killed."

After the eviction, Chiquita promised in a letter sent to thousands of concerned persons around the globe that the evictees would be rehoused. Yet Chiquita has built only 46 ramshackle huts, mostly from lumber torn from the old Tacamiche houses. The huts have no electricity or water. The Honduran government also made a promise, entering into an agreement to provide a school, health and sports centers, drinking water and sewage systems. But to date the government has built only the school and health center. The 123 Tacamiche families have yet to receive any compensation for their personal effects or crops.

Because the Tacamiches distrust Chiquita and the government, they have refused to move to the construction site until enough houses are built for all 123 families. But even if the houses are built, the construction site has no land for agriculture, and with their Chiquita positions terminated they will have few employment alternatives except as shoe-shiners, maids, and similar low-paid jobs in the informal sector.

As they await their uncertain future, the Tacamiches now live in a one-room "social club" in La Lima, many of them infected with Bronchitis. They subsist entirely with the help of friends, charity, and the local Catholic parish.

Of the four Honduran plantations "terminated," as Rodriguez describes it, Chiquita has evicted only Tacamiche. Communities at the plantations of San Juan, Copén, and La Curva still remain and, in the case of these three, Rodriguez has promised that Chiquita will not evict. "We know there are hundreds of people there who are no longer related to the company," Rodriguez says, "and yet we have decided to let them stay there. Because these are just people who are out of a job, and they have no place to go. We don't want to exacerbate the social problem that Honduras right now has."

Rodriguez denies that the human rights and media outcry over Tacamiche helped persuade Chiquita to grant clemency to the other three plantations. He says Chiquita insisted on the application of law in the case of Tacamiche because, led and joined by "opportunistic" outsiders, the former workers illegally occupied company land. Many Tacamiches did occupy part of the vacant plantation to sow corn and beans in June of 1994. They also occupied 50 hectares on the Copén plantation three weeks before the February eviction. But after Chiquita fired them, the former workers had few other sources of food.

Fired workers at Chiquita's other three terminated plantations, Copén, La Curva, and San Juan, have watched the events at Tacamiche closely. To improve their chances against eviction, they chose not to illegally plant crops on the defunct plantations. But despite promises by Rodriguez that Chiquita will not evict, they fear Chiquita will break yet another promise. Their offers to buy the land, like the offers by the Tacamiches, are being ignored. And according to Joe Owens, a Jesuit priest and the Executive Director of Radio Progreso, the independent producers who lease the defunct plantations from Chiquita are putting pressure on the former banana workers to move out so they can install their own workers into the company housing.

Community members organized militant protests in November against that possibility, and are now threatening to occupy Latin American and European embassies in the capitol. "They say they are being made refugees in their own country, and their only escape is to declare themselves political refugees and to escape into an embassy," says Owens.

Meanwhile, Chiquita has acted as though the eviction of Tacamiche taught them nothing. Chiquita security guards have harassed 16 squatter communities in the San Alejo region, in hopes of clearing about 650 hectares of land to produce palm oil. "These are very very poor people, much poorer in fact, then the banana workers," said Owens. Many of the squatters had lived on their tiny pieces of land since the 1980s, when the agrarian reform law allowed peasants to occupy vacant lands. But the government refused to legalize their occupations. In 1992 the agrarian reform law was repealed and according to Owens, Chiquita's delay in carrying out the evictions may have ended because they are "feeling emboldened by their victory at Tacamiche, and the prostate posture of the present government, who is not doing anything to defend campesinos against the company."

One teenager was found dead at a squatter camp, and according to Jose Garcia, one of the residents, Chiquita security guards have assaulted and wounded various community members, and killed domestic animals. In October, Chiquita destroyed the homes and crops of three squatter communities near Urraco in the Sula Valley, uprooting 150 families, or about 1000 people.

The Slippery Politics of Chiquita Republic

The current struggle between fired workers and Honduras' biggest landowner continues a steady United Fruit/United Brands tradition of sordid dealings in Honduras that began with the overthrow of President Miguel Davila in 1911. The replacement president paid his political debts with massive quantities of free land for banana plantations, and ever since observers have called Honduras the quintessential banana republic.

In an attempt to escape United Fruit's shameful record, executives changed its name to United Brands in 1970. But then in 1975 the Chairman of the Board, Eli Black, got caught bribing President Arellano and other Honduran officials $1.25 million to lower banana export taxes. With the lower tax, United Brands saved 7.5 million in the first year alone. When the bribes became public, the Honduran legislature deposed Arellano. Eli Black flung his briefcase through his sealed office window. He followed it 44 floors to his death on the pavement of New York City.

The Cincinnati-based Lindner family took control of United Brands in 1987 and in 1990 changed the name to Chiquita Brands International. The Lindners, worth over $500 million, now hold 46% of Chiquita's stock. But the company will have to change its name again shortly if it wants to polish its image, which seems to be of the lackluster variety that quickly tarnishes. Twenty-five-thousand plantation workers from 12 developing countries are currently suing Chiquita and other companies for using DBCP, a pesticide that causes cancer, birth defects, and sterility, years after the U.S. banned it from the United States. According to a lawyer representing the workers, Chiquita's use of the pesticide sterilized 3,500 male banana workers in Costa Rica, Panama, and the Philippines. Last year, Multinational Monitor rated Chiquita fourth on its top-ten list of worst corporations.

Though Chiquita no longer uses DBCP, they have substituted other harmful pesticides, one reason not to buy bananas with the distinctive blue label. Another reason not to buy Chiquita is that a fraction of the proceeds of each banana you buy may go to purchase corrupt politicians. According to a Council on Hemispheric Affairs occasional paper released on November 21, the head of the Lindner family and Chiquita's Chairman of the Board, Carl Lindner, has used steady donations to both Democrats and Republicans as a way to pedal political influence. In addition to hedging his bets with $525,000 donated to Democrats in 1994, including congressman Richard Gephardt (D-MO), and Senator John Glenn (D-OH), Lindner donated $430,000 to his favored Republican Party. He was the biggest 1994 contributor to the GOP Action Committee, headed until recently by Newt Gingrich, and gave generously to Senator Dole's 1994 reelection campaign for the Senate. Lindner has reportedly given at least as much since, including the unrestricted use of his private jet for Dole's presidential campaigning in 1996.

In exchange, leading lights of Washington from Dole to Secretary of Commerce Mickey Kantor have taken up the cudgels in trade wars over the European banana market. The Clinton administration brought suit in the World Trade Organization against the European Economic Community, which has granted small banana producers in former colonies like St. Lucia and Dominica a modest 10% entrance quota into the EU market. Even with the quota, Chiquita and the other big companies have access to 70.5% of the European banana market. Chiquita Brands International controls close to 70% of the world banana market, and is worth an estimated $3 billion.

The Caribbean producers, who pay high wages to strongly unionized workers and have high-cost cultivation methods, cannot compete with banana giants like Chiquita, who recently broke the back of unionized banana labor on its plantations. Without the quota, according to John Sheehan, Commander of U.S. forces in the Atlantic and Caribbean, independent and family-centered banana growers could face economic disaster. With no quota, Sheehan predicts the cultivation of cocaine on former banana plantations and increased illegal immigration into the United States. The World Trade Organization will probably rule on Chiquita's complaint in January.

In a much more deadly sort of influence pedaling, some have speculated that Lindner used his financial might to support the Nicaraguan Contras. Notebooks of Oliver North show Lindner making "grants" to known Contra fund-raisers, and Lindner held a key Contra-support meeting at his Ocean Reef Club in Florida in March 1984, one month after the Lindner family increased their holdings in United Brands from 29.3 percent to 45.4 percent. Some speculate that convicted drug trafficker Jack DeVoe, who had connections to right-wing politicians, used the hangars at the Ocean Reef Club for drug smuggling.

Perhaps taking a cue from the Contras or its own past as United Fruit/United Brands, Chiquita has blatantly bribed Honduran officials, and according to the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA), has extended its tactics to the use of assault of competitor executives, and the theft and destruction of competitor banana stocks. Several years after Chiquita sold its former subsidiary, Fyffes Group Ltd., the smaller company began offering $4.40 per box to independent Honduran banana producers who previously sold to Chiquita for $3.16. Within five years, Fyffes was shipping 7 million boxes of bananas annually to Europe, compared to Chiquita's 11 million boxes. To retain its low-paid banana sources, Chiquita began a campaign of harassment against defected growers and Fyffes. COHA says Chiquita bribed judges to doctor court documents, later used to embargo bananas bound for Fyffes boats and warehouses. Armed with automatic weapons, employees boarded ships owned by Fyffes, confiscated or destroyed bananas, derailed Fyffes banana trains, and attempted the kidnapping and possible murder of Otto Stalinski, Fyffes' head agent in Honduras.

In litigation over these banana battles, COHA says that Chiquita continued its policy of bribing judges, police, and witnesses. One judge indicted for bribery in the case in 1994, Mario Matias Galindo, got a large sum of cash, a new car, and an expedited visa to the United States. He now lives in Miami. After Fyffes suffered an estimated $10 million in operational damages, and because executives lacked confidence in the skewed judicial and political system, they sold their operation to Dole for $26 million. Fyffes will withdraw from Honduras on January 1, 1997.

IMF Increases Rural Poverty

Chiquita's recent evictions have highlighted a trend in the past few years in which large landowners and multinational corporations have steadily eroded the land base of poor Hondurans. A 1974 study found that 4 percent of the agricultural holdings in Honduras encompassed 56 percent of the land, while the other 64 percent of landholders accounted for only 9 percent. Another 150,000 households were landless. To survive, almost 80 percent of all Hondurans must sell their labor to large landowners. Honduran land reform legislation during the 1970s and 1980s failed to make a significant dent in this maldistribution because it left most of the largest landowners untouched.

Yet even these extremely modest gains are being attacked. In 1992, at the height of Chiquita's influence in national politics under the corrupt Administration of Rafael Callejas, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) pushed Honduras to pass its Law for the Modernization of the Agricultural Sector. This law withdrew technical aid, loans, and marketing assistance to small farmers and has severely weakened the country's agrarian reform. The measure confiscates land distributed through the agrarian reform process (the reform sector) by designating it as national forest. Government experts in Germany concerned with international development estimate that 100,000 Honduran families will lose their land because of the law.

Implementation of the 1992 law also allowed big landowners like Chiquita to buy reform sector land never meant for ownership by large foreign corporations. "In all of 1992," says Owens, "there was frenetic movement on the part of the big investors and fruit companies to get the best of this land." A similar withdrawal of protection from communal ejido lands in Mexico was an important grievance voiced by the Zapatistas in their 1994 rebellion.

Chiquita now possesses 800,000 acres in Honduras. The 1992 "modernization" law may have benefited the buyer of reform sector land, yielded more profit to local elites and foreign agribusiness like Chiquita, and also garnered more foreign exchange for Honduras to pay its debt to the IMF and the World Bank. But it will almost certainly lead to an even more concentrated land ownership pattern and, in the long run, it may erode the relatively dependable and roughly egalitarian food-supply provided by small farmers.

Because Honduras devotes so much of its land to export agriculture, it also depends on food imports and is vulnerable to the wild market swings of agricultural produce. The drought in the United States this year, for example, will probably decrease the caloric intake of the average poor Honduran. Since the middle of 1996, a tremendous food crisis has already begun to evolve. The basic foods in Honduras, beans and corn, have tripled or quadrupled in price, making it difficult for many small farmers to even buy seed for the next season's crop.

The government's turn towards neoliberal policy in the 1990s has also affected a shift in its attitude towards squatters. In the 1970s and 1980s, landless peasants squatted vacant land to encourage the government to enforce the agrarian reform law. Government officials at the National Agrarian Reform Institute did help the peasants with creative financing, or outright expropriation from large landowners who left the land vacant. But since the modernization law of 1992, which repealed the land reform, the government almost always uses the might of the Honduran military to help landowners like Chiquita in evictions.

This made many in the campesino movement more cautious. According to Owens, "I think a general sense of demoralization has affected the popular movements over the past two years. Not just campesino organizations, but the trade unions and everybody have fallen into a state of low morale. There is no sense of combativeness, of resistance, of feeling that somehow organizing from the grassroots will get anyplace. It is really quite discouraging. I believe very much in movement building, but it is very hard to get anybody to do anything in terms of grassroots organization."

When asked what needs to happen for people to escape low morale, Owens said that the growing poverty may increase the likelihood of more militant tactics. "I am afraid it will be some extreme crisis. There has been terrific inflation. If the inflation continues and if the shortage of food continues, then there could be some sort of real civil unrest." Already for over a week in November, local community groups seized and refused passage to anyone on the major highway between the capital and one of the richest agricultural areas of the nation. "That type of thing could happen on a general level if things don't get better somehow," Owens said. "It would tend to be chaotic, and I am not sure that anything great would come from that. There is no easy way."

Tacamiche Resistance Pays Off

The good news is that the resistance to eviction and subsequent refusal of the Tacamiches to move into a scant 46 homes rebuilt by Chiquita garnered them widespread sympathy and the possibility of a better settlement. Sympathetic media coverage within Honduras has been extensive, as well as support from Honduran human rights and campesino organizations. FIAN-International, a human rights group based in Heidelberg, Germany, organized a letter-writing campaign that garnered over 10,000 letters to Carl Lindner and President Reina. In November, FIAN presented the Tacamiche case to the United Nations Committee of Economic, Social, and Cultural Human Rights in Geneva. An article in the New York Times and one in a local Cincinnati weekly, where Chiquita has its headquarters, seems to have increase the pressure as well.

Locals in Cincinnati have organized two demonstrations in front of the Chiquita building since the Tacamiche conflict started, one with about 40 participants, the other with about 70. A frigid winter day caused the low turn-out for the smaller one, at which a waiter emerged from the Chiquita building with hot chocolate and mugs on a cart. Asked why the hospitality, the waiter replied that the chocolate was "courtesy of Carl Lindner." The demonstrators refused such sweet nothings.

Possibly as a result of widespread support for the Tacamiches, Chiquita has promised to build an additional 47 homes and provide $60,000 towards the rebuilding of the destroyed churches. Also, FIAN heard rumors that the government of Honduras has recently considered granting $300,000 for improvements to the construction site for the new village. But to date these promises and rumors remain just promises and rumors. Meanwhile, Chiquita continues to threaten residents of the remaining three terminated plantations and thirteen squatter camps. Given the attention focused on the evicted Tacamiches, Chiquita might actually profit by adding line items to its corporate balance sheets labeled "broken promises" and "human rights."

Anders Corr is the author of "Squats, Occupations, and Rent Strikes," forthcoming from South End Press in Fall 1997. He lives in San Francisco.