Sué Gonzales Hauck offers a feminist perspective on the interplay of power dynamics between the state and corporations, focusing on the historical role of the United Fruit Company. By examining its connections to contemporary multinationals and state actors, the author underscores the corporation’s pivotal role in shaping international legal history and the strategies employed to challenge their influence on labor practices.
TWAILR: Reflections #61/2024
This reflection highlights the importance of retelling the story of the masacre de las bananeras as an international law story, thereby locating the central agent in the events leading up to this massacre, the United Fruit Company (UFC), in the history of international law.
In October 1928, discontented Colombian banana workers from Magdalena convened to voice their grievances against the UFC’s management. Their management process included a third-party contracting system allowing the UFC to circumvent Colombian labour laws, leading to gruelling hours and meagre pay, often issued as vouchers for UFC-run shops. The workers decided to go on strike and issued a list of nine demands to the UFC. The Colombian armed forces swiftly intervened, appointing General Carlos Cortés Vargas as the military chief for Santa Marta and the so-called bananera region. Within days, he stationed a battalion in Ciénaga, escalating tensions during the two-month-long strike. The workers challenged the company’s authority by asserting popular sovereignty and counting on the support of small farmers, shop owners, and other people in the region negatively affected by the UFC. The strike reached a critical juncture on December 5, 1928, when news arrived that the governor of Magdalena had summoned the workers to Ciénaga for negotiations. Thousands gathered, only to face a tragic turn of events. Just before midnight, Decree Number 1 was issued, declaring a state of siege in the bananera region. The military, under General Cortés Vargas, opened fire on the assembled workers and their families at the Ciénaga train station.
In the aftermath, General Cortés Vargas recounted the chilling orders given to disperse, punctuated by a final ultimatum: “People, disperse; we will open fire!” After this, the military delivered a deadly blow to the multitude, with the number of victims unknown to this day but likely ranging at least in the hundreds. This dark episode exemplified the oppressive power dynamics between the UFC, supported by US diplomatic and military might, and banana workers, who paid a heavy price for daring to demand their rights.
I argue that it is crucial to retell the story of the masacre de las bananeras as a story belonging not just to Colombia but to international law’s violent history. The UFC was a central agent both in generating the grievances that led to the strike and in exerting pressure on the Colombian government to end the strike with military force. Through the story of the massacre, it is possible to appreciate why and how the UFC needs to be studied closely by international legal scholars.
The reflection begins by exploring the UFC’s place in the history of international law through a TWAIL feminist analysis of how the public-private divide enabled it to exercise significant public power under the guise of the ‘corporate veil’. This is part of an ongoing research project, which interrogates the critical tension of law (as mobilised by both the workers and UFC) as generative of ‘anti-imperial/anti-capitalist international-law relevant norms and practices’, in keeping with how Vasuki Nesiah encourages us to explore in the quest of developing an account of insurgent jurisprudential traditions. Future work will analyse the UFC’s role across the region, how it intervened in the struggles over land, and how it relied on and shaped racialised divides among both workers and soldiers to stifle collective demands for better working conditions. It will foreground how liberal accounts of what counts as ‘violence’ versus what is simply considered a necessary means of constituting ‘order’ have legitimised a mode of corporate violence of which the UFC is emblematic.
The UFC as one of the ‘missing links’ between chartered companies and modern multinationals
The UFC was incorporated in 1899 in Boston, Massachusetts, through a merger of Andrew Preston’s Boston Fruit Company and Minor C. Keith’s Tropical Trading and Transport Company. The leading legal architect of the merger and later the overall leading figure within the UFC was Bradley Palmer, who was also involved in creating multiple other corporations. The UFC established divisions across the Caribbean region. Its vertical integration and horizontal expansion strategies are key characteristics of the managerial revolution, which was formative for the modern variant of ‘big business’ capitalism. The UFC was the first multinational corporation after chartered companies like the British and Dutch East India Companies.
In contrast to the multinational corporations that became dominant, especially after formal decolonisation in the 1960s and 70s, the UFC did not hide its colonial ambitions. Frederick Upham Adams’ book Conquest of the Tropics (published in 1914) praises the UFC for ‘attacking the wilderness’ (p. 35) and further pursuing Columbus’ colonial project. Adams invokes a direct link between the ‘greatness’ of Spanish, British, German, and French colonial conquests and the urge for US expansion beyond its own borders (pp. 3 et seq), which he describes as ‘linking commercially the temperate and the tropical zones’ (p. 7).
The direct connection between the words of praise for violent colonial conquest, on the one hand, and the seemingly neutral language describing commercial links between North and South illustrates how the UFC operated in a moment in time when the openly racist variant of the ‘civilising mission’ co-existed with the seemingly more neutral but similarly structured language of commercial links and ‘improvement.’ As Ntina Tzouvala has shown, the latter came to replace more blatantly racist and biologistic justifications for colonial conquest. This combination of the modern corporate form and the seemingly neutral language of commercial links, trade, and development with the open colonial ambitions and the exercise of many ‘public’ sovereign functions is what characterises the UFC as one of the ‘missing links’ between modern multinational corporations and the chartered companies of the past. The role of ‘private’ companies in international legal history has been a major focal point of TWAIL scholarship, especially in the work of Sundhya Pahuja (see, e.g. here and here). A closer examination of UFC allows us to understand better the specific lines of continuity between colonial chartered companies and modern corporations.
Drawing these lines of continuity between the ‘private’ corporate form of the present and the more ‘public’ or ‘hybrid’ colonial ambitions of the company-states of the past is crucial to understanding how colonialism and imperialism may have changed registers but continue to display the same patterns of violence and extractivism. For instance, anti-union violence continues to characterise Colombian political life and, unsurprisingly, women are disproportionately affected by this violence. Several thousand cases of murder have been registered since the 1980s, with prominent cases of the past decades involving not only the UFC’s successor, Chiquita but also the Dole Company and Coca-Cola. Some of these cases are pending before domestic courts and discussed in the international law community under the popular heading of ‘business and human rights.’ Unpacking the UFC’s role in the history of international law is critical to complicating the assumptions behind contemporary ‘business and human rights’ approaches and finding better ways of holding ‘private’ businesses accountable for their past and present violent acts.
Considering the UFC as one of the missing links between chartered companies and modern multinationals reveals important characteristics of the UFC and the place it occupied in the development of international law: The UFC combined openly colonial ambitions similar to chartered companies and their sovereign colonial projects, with the ostensibly neutral and ‘private’ corporate form. The UFC was just as central to the United States’ colonial ambitions in Latin America as the Dutch and British East India Companies were to the respective colonial projects of the Netherlands and Great Britain. Like these chartered companies, the UFC used its commercial mandate to wield sovereign, ‘public’ powers.
The UFC was just as central to the United States’ colonial ambitions in Latin America as the Dutch and British East India Companies were to the respective colonial projects of the Netherlands and Great Britain.
Across the Caribbean region, the UFC built entire company towns equipped with hospitals, laboratories, ice and power plants, commissaries, social clubs, athletic facilities, bungalows, and swimming pools. In countries like Costa Rica and Honduras, the UFC obtained concessions to build and operate the entire country’s railroad systems. In Guatemala, it operated the country’s postal service and controlled large parts of its communications infrastructure, particularly radio and telegraph. Through its control over infrastructure as well as through its role as one of the most – if not the most – significant landowners and employers in smaller Central American countries, it exerted influence over these countries’ governments, leading to the coining of the term ‘banana republic.’ Similar to chartered companies of earlier centuries, the quasi-sovereign power that the UFC wielded was backed by the US government, which was ready to intervene by force if any of the governments in the countries where the UFC operated tried to implement policies that were contrary to the UFC’s interests.
As will be elaborated in the remaining sections of this reflection, exemplified by the events of the 1928 massacre, the UFC’s sovereign, ‘public’ authority culminated in its hegemonic power to assert its interests as interests of ‘public order’. This provided access to numerous legal arguments that could justify violent intervention on behalf of the UFC – either by local police or military forces or by the US. This aspect can be best explained not by reference to the pre-capitalist colonial model of chartered companies but by understanding how protecting private property and capital is generally conflated with ‘public order’ in capitalist societies. The liberal state derives its legitimacy from maintaining public order in this sense. Viewing the UFC as a ‘missing link’ – an archaeopteryx of global business enterprises – allows us to see it not as a unique creature but to assess its features compared to other creatures sharing certain characteristics.
Simultaneously, looking at the UFC as a ‘missing link’ between chartered companies and modern multinational corporations teaches us important lessons on the evolution of different models of transnational business enterprises throughout the centuries. Just as the discovery of archaeopteryx revealed that reptiles and birds were not entirely distinct from each other but that birds evolved from reptiles, the UFC and similar companies marking the transition from chartered companies to modern multinationals indicate a direct line of continuity between the two. Adopting this analytical framework helps us become more attuned to lines of continuity in specific aspects of international law, particularly in observing how colonialism and imperialism, which were overtly embraced by chartered companies, merely changed registers with modern multinational corporations. This framework further complicates assumptions behind the often-problematised but still commonly accepted public-private divide, which also lies at the core of much of the ‘business and human rights’ debate. The latter often concedes and thereby reifies the common assumption that international law, in principle, only applies to states and that holding other entities, like multinational corporations, accountable under international law requires special rules. Drawing a line of continuity from the central role that chartered companies played in the emergence of international law to the exercise of sovereign authority by companies like the UFC, which combined elements of the openly colonial model for exercising sovereign authority over foreign land through business enterprises with the modern corporate form allowing neo-colonial projects to be operated in a more disguised manner, to present-day multinational corporations further challenges these assumptions.
UFC’s veiled power and the public-private divide in international law
As explained in the previous section, the colonial character of UFC’s business model is evident not only in its ambitions but also in its exercise of sovereign power through its control over basic infrastructure and its backing by the US government, which would reliably intervene by force if local governments refused to cooperate or if labour movements threatened its power.
Additionally, the UFC’s public authority was expressed in its power to depict its interests as interests of ‘public order,’ enabling it to summon military force. This public authority, however, was veiled through its private incorporation and international law’s strict division between ‘public’ and ‘private’ domains. Vasuki Nesiah recently drew attention to the nuances in critiques of the public/private divide and the distinction between the ‘form’ and ‘substance’ of international law, which are core points of convergence between TWAIL and feminist international law scholarship. The public/private divide in classical legal scholarship teaches us to see sovereignty and public order, as well as state violence carried out to promote this public order, distinct from private property, trade, labour, and other business practices. Problematising this public/private divide in the long tradition of feminist, TWAIL and Marxist legal thought invites us, among other things, to look at how ‘public order’ is equated with preserving the conditions for private interests consisting of (neo-)colonial and imperial exploitation. Public violence through the military and the police is wielded to preserve public order in this sense, as the banana massacre and the events leading up to it illustrate. The form/substance divide refers to rigid categories involving who gets to participate in law-making and under what conditions.
Corporate violence is one of the major sites where we can see the effects of the artificial public/private divide play out. As Doreen Lustig noted in her analysis of the history of international law and the private corporation, ‘[t]he co-emergence of the international legal vocabulary […], developments in corporate law […], and ideological sensibilities in favour of the public/private divide provided the legal vocabulary and tools for private business corporations to externalize to imperial governments the growing administrative challenges’ of colonisation. In line with the characterisation of UFC as one of the missing links between openly colonial chartered companies and modern multinational corporations, we can see that while the UFC exercised many sovereign functions regarding infrastructure, the primary role that the UFC externalised was the deployment of violent force.
The implications of the UFC’s externalisation of violent force can be observed through the reporting of the Times in the aftermath of the massacre. An article published on 07 December 1928 cites the Colombian Minister of War declaring that ‘news of the arrival of an American warship was absurd because it would be tantamount to intervention, which the Colombian Government would not tolerate’. This firm rejection of intervention has been at the heart of a Latin American approach to international law. However, what typically does not count as intervention is when a government equates ‘public order’ with the interests of foreign capital and, under foreign pressure, deploys military force to protect the interests of foreign companies – to the detriment of its citizens, as was the case in the events leading up to the 1928 massacre.
The Critical Tension of (in) International Law
Legal claims and their connection to ‘public order’ were a crucial part of how both the workers and UFC officials tried to influence public perception of the strike. This concerned questions of the legal grounds of workers’ demands, how the strike was carried out, and whether it was perceived as within the law and, therefore, ‘civil’ or as outside the law and, therefore, ‘violent’, and consequently calling for a violent response. Ultimately, the UFC’s narrative that the strike was not only unlawful but a veritable rebellion, which called for the restoration of the ‘public order’ through military force, prevailed.
The workers on strike worked for UFC but were officially employed by third-party contractors. This labour contracting system allowed the UFC to ignore Colombian labour and social security laws. Throughout the 1920s, workers, local farmers, and local merchants who were negatively affected by UFC-run shops started to organize in resistance. In 1926, they founded the Unión Sindical de Trabajadores del Magdalena, which approved the list of nine demands issued during the 1928 strike. Formal employment and legal recognition as UFC workers were the most prominent on this list.
A delegation of workers tried several times to present the list of demands to Thomas Bradshaw, the head of UFC in Colombia, who refused to entertain and negotiate with them, insisting that they were not UFC employees. Finally, when the workers’ assembly decided to go on strike in November 1928, the accompanying statement started with the assertion that ‘the workers of the bananera region are acting within the law’ (los obreros de la zona bananera están dentro de la ley). It further called on the Colombian federal government to take a stand on whether they were on the side of their citizens or against them and on the side of North American capitalism and its imperialist systems. The workers specifically asked the Colombian government to put out a statement reaffirming the legality of their claims. However, they were unsuccessful. Instead, the UFC’s calls to restore ‘public order’ ultimately prevailed and culminated in the massacre.
Concluding remarks
Retelling the story of the masacre de las bananeras and examining the role of the UFC in the history of international law sheds light on the enduring patterns of colonialism, imperialism, and corporate violence. The UFC, combining the openly colonial ambitions and the direct exercise of the sovereign authority of Chartered Companies with the legal form of the modern multinational corporation, provides one of the ‘missing links’ which further elucidates the continuities between these two forms. Exploring the UFC’s history contributes to critically examining contemporary approaches to ‘business and human rights’ and searching for better ways to hold private corporations accountable. The ongoing struggles for justice and recognition of the victims of anti-union violence underscore the importance of research and analysis into the UFC’s regional impact and the resistance against UFC and its inheritances.
