The Octopus in the Cathedral of Salt

[Joanne98]

http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2007/fall/robertson-octopus-cathedral-salt/

Colombia, June–August 2007

When the trumpet sounded,
everything was prepared on earth,
and Jehovah divided the world
among Coca-Cola Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors, and other corporations:
The United Fruit Company Inc.
reserved for itself the juiciest piece,
the central coast of my own land,
the sweet waist of America.
—Pablo Neruda, “The United Fruit Co.”


Our flight from Bogotá to Apartadó headed north along the great verdant spine of the Andes. Flying over Medellín, a city of brick high-rises surrounded by mountains, you can look down onto the cocaine mansions and see if there is anyone in the pool. All of the country’s cities have growing slums on their peripheries, filled with war-displaced peasants and the dispossessed looking for work. Neighborhoods lit with a single bulb. Corrugated metal roofs on rough shacks lining red-dirt roads. The inhabitants of the poor barrios are the refugees from a war that has lasted more than forty years. White veils of clouds drifted over the ridges as we landed in Medellín then took off again a few minutes later for Apartadó. From the air you want to buy a parcel, you want to get in on all that beauty. We flew down out of the cool air of the Andes toward an airport that was nothing more than a few lines of asphalt cut out of the bright green banana plantations. The plane touched down and we were in the belly of the organism, but we didn’t know it yet.

When the beat-up taxi pulled away from the airport onto the shaded road, the air pouring through the windows was rich with the smell of wet earth and rotting leaves. Black men walked slowly through the fields with machetes. Most are the descendants of African slaves, and they still get the jobs that keep a man out in the sun. Spanish colonists brought the ancestors of these men here and worked them until they simply gave out.

Today, the banana region exports hundreds of millions of dollars of bananas and plantains, but the workers at the bottom of the export pyramid have little to show for it. They live in the slums at the edge of town, such as barrio Obrero, where paramilitary groups targeted them in the late nineties and murdered them in their homes. During this time of extreme militarization in Urabá, anyone suspected of labor activism or sympathy with the leftist rebels was at risk of being assassinated. The Colombian military let the gunmen work without interruption. “We patrolled side by side, fighting the guerrillas,” a former paramilitary fighter told me over beers a few days after we arrived in town. “Sometimes we traded with the army. We gave them hostages in exchange for ammunition.” Paracos (as the paramilitaries are known), their hair cut short like a soldier’s, would come for their victims on motorcycles. They called it grabbing someone. It didn’t matter what you said to them; when the paracos grabbed someone that person always died, and it was always the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) that did the grabbing. In 2004, AUC leader Salvatore Mancuso negotiated a ceasefire with the Colombian government and surrendered to authorities at a demobilization ceremony that December. Not all of the blocks demobilized, however, and some of the old AUC groups are still actively looking for new recruits.

As the taxi clattered out of the green labyrinth and into Apartadó, there was no welcome sign, but were there one it should read, founded by united fruit, 1963. before us, there was nothing. population x. Apartadó was just a small village before the company arrived, and likewise Turbo to the east. The banana-growing region was a marshy stretch of coast near Panama with a few indigenous people, and that was all. Then United Fruit, one of the most powerful companies in the history of the Americas, transformed this section of Colombia, remade it in its own protean image and then left it behind.


A couple walks through the barrio Obrero in Apartadó. The neighborhood, formerly a farm, was occupied several years ago and the land taken away from its owner. Most of the families who live there today work in the banana industry. During the nineties, the neighborhood was the scene of several massacres staged by the FARC and paramilitary groups who fought for the control over the industry. * * * *

Americans did not always eat bananas. In fact, the tropical staple only came to the nation’s table through an act of desperation by a Brooklyn railroad speculator named Minor Keith. In 1871, Keith went into business with his uncle, Henry Meiggs, to build a railway from the Costa Rican capital, San José, to the port city of Limón. It was, by all accounts, a miserable undertaking. Italian workers mutinied over the conditions, and inmates from Louisiana prisons were brought in when no one else would do the job. Most of them died—as many as five thousand—trying to complete Meiggs and Keith’s project, an enterprise that was already unpopular and strangled by debt when it finally reached completion in 1890.

Not longer after the railway began operations, it quickly demonstrated itself to be a losing proposition for passenger transport, but Keith wasn’t ready to give up. During the construction of the railway he had started planting banana groves—to feed his workers—on government-ceded land near the tracks, so he decided to try his hand at the export business. He moved his trackside bananas to the port at Limón for free—he already owned the train—and freighters sailed with the fruit to the United States, where Keith sold it for a hefty profit. Soon, his banana gamble was worth more than the railroad. In 1899, on the eve of the twentieth century, Minor Keith merged his United Fruit with Boston Fruit, famous for its giant fleet of white ships, and “the octopus”—as the company is known among Latin American journalists—was born.
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http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2007/fall/robertson-octopus-cathedral-salt/