These days, following the ruling of a judge from the Southern District of Florida, who condemned the company Chiquita Brands International for financing the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC)one of the most memorable scenes from One Hundred Years of Solitude, the emblematic novel of the Nobel Prize in Literature Gabriel Garcia Marquez, has returned to the minds of the general public. It is the scene of the banana massacre, a historical event that at the time shook the country and, in some way, gave support to the narrative of the Colombian writer.
You may be interested in: See you in August: keys to reading the latest novel by Gabriel García Márquez
And the connection between both events, separated by almost a century, is not capricious. In the past Chiquita Brands was called United Fruit Company and it was with that name that he had a leading role in the event narrated by García Márquez. Founded in 1870, the United Fruit Company maintained a long presence in the Colombian market until it ceased operations in 2004. The Banana Massacre took place when the company pressured the Colombian government to send the National Army to repress a strike organized by the union of its workers. Things got out of control and ended in a bloodbath in the main square of Ciénaga, a municipality near Aracataca, the Nobel’s hometown.
“The captain gave the order to fire and fourteen machine gun nests responded immediately. But it all seemed like a farce. It was as if the machine guns had been loaded with pyrotechnic tricks, because you could hear their longing clicking, and you could see their incandescent spit, but not the slightest reaction, not a voice, not even a sigh, could be perceived among the compact crowd that she seemed petrified by instant invulnerability. Suddenly, on one side of the station, a death cry tore through the enchantment: “Aaaay, my mother.” A seismic force, a volcanic breath, a roar of cataclysm exploded in the center of the crowd with enormous expansive power. José Arcadio Segundo barely had time to pick up the child, while the mother with the other was absorbed by the crowd centrifuged by panic,” reads One Hundred Years of Solitude.
You may be interested in: Chiquita Brands: the details of the sentence against the company that financed the paramilitaries and the guerrillas in Urabá
After its bankruptcy in the 1970s, the United Fruit Company was reorganized as Chiquita Brands International. Its subsidiary in Colombia was linked to paramilitarism since the late 1990s, a connection that was discovered by authorities in 2004. After a long legal process that began in 2007 with civil lawsuits filed by nine victims, the company admitted to having carried out said payments between 1997 and 2004. Records indicate that senior managers of the parent company in the United States were aware of the payments made to the AUC, a paramilitary group responsible for thousands of murders, disappearances and other crimes, by the Colombian subsidiary.
