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Tales of United Fruit Company intrigue in Latin American politics throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s are many. Dennis McCarthy, writing in International Business History: A Contextual and Case Approach, aptly described the company’s involvement in Guatemala as “a classic case of business as an insensitive and meddling corporate guest.” Economic and agrarian reforms initiated under Guatemala’s democratically-elected Jacobo Arbenz soon drew the ire of the produce giant. As prelude to his CIA-orchestrated ouster, Arbenz was denounced in planted newspaper articles and flyers as a Communist stooge. Despite repeated attempts by Arbenz to negotiate with Washington, and to avoid incident with the mounting counterrevolutionary forces on Guatemala’s border with Honduras, bombing raids came to Guatemala. Under pressure, both internal and external, Arbenz resigned on June 27, 1954. Arbenz was eventually granted refuge in Mexico, but not before being made to publicly strip at the airport.
I recite all of this as preamble to the latest unpleasant intersection of business and Latin American domestic politics. After the recent military-led ouster of Honduran president Manuel Zelaya under “constitutional” pretexts (it should be noted that Zelaya’s desired reforms, beyond term limits, extended to sweeping progressive reforms on the recent Ecuadorean model), produce giant Chiquita is again under media scrutiny. Nikolas Kozloff of CounterPunch has chronicled Chiquita’s abysmal labor record in Honduras—a record that includes ridiculously long hours in the field, child labor, and exposure to cancer-causing pesticides—as well as ties to the Honduran military establishment that deposed Zelaya, and its paramilitary roots. Earlier this year, Chiquita loudly protested the Zelaya government’s raising the minimum wage by 60%. Appeals to COHEP, the Honduran National Business Council, had been largely unsatisfactory.
Given it’s infamous past in Latin America and long political ties to Bush holdovers among Obama’s Latin American postings (whose foreign policy approach in Latin America, sadly, is mirrored in much of current Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s public brokering on the Zelaya issue), is it fair to suggest complicity? There is no “smoking gun” as of yet. I’ll be interested to see what develops—to see, again quoting McCarthy, if the “perception, widespread south of the border, that U.S. business will stop at nothing to protect its capacity to ‘exploit’” is strengthened yet again.