Search results

From hotel luxury suites to working-class lunchboxes -- The United Fruit Company in Latin America: business strategies in a changing environment -- The United Fruit Company and local politics in Colombia -- The Labor conflicts of the United Fruit Company in Magdalena in the 1920s -- Nobody's triumph: labor unionism in Magdalena after World War II -- The United Fruit Company's relationship with local planters in Colombia.

For well over a century, the United Fruit Company (UFCO) has been the most vilified multinational corporation operating in Latin America. Criticism of the UFCO has been widespread, ranging from politicians to consumer activists, and from labor leaders to historians, all portraying it as an overwhelmingly powerful corporation that shaped and often exploited its host countries. In this first history of the UFCO in Colombia, Marcelo Bucheli argues that the UFCO's image as an all-powerful force in determining national politics needs to be reconsidered. Using a previously unexplored source—the internal archives of Colombia's UFCO operation—Bucheli reveals that before 1930, the UFCO worked alongside a business-friendly government that granted it generous concessions and repressed labor unionism. After 1930, however, the country experienced dramatic transformations including growing nationalism, a stronger labor movement, and increasing demands by local elites for higher stakes in the banana export business.In response to these circumstances, the company abandoned production, selling its plantations (and labor conflicts) to local growers, while transforming itself into a marketing company. The shift was endorsed by the company's shareholders and financial analysts, who preferred lower profits with lower risks, and came at a time in which the demand for bananas was decreasing in America. Importantly, Bucheli shows that the effect of foreign direct investment was not unidirectional. Instead, the agency of local actors affected corporate strategy, just as the UFCO also transformed local politics and society

"History of UFCO's Atlantic coast operations in Costa Rica from perspective of largely West Indian labor force. Examines formation of enclave economy, including role of West Indian labor, subsistence production, and health problems as occasion of worker-company misunderstandings. Also studies workers' cultural and political lives apart from, and sometimes in conflict with, company, and how West Indians and UFCO figured in Costa Rican nationalist thought and politics"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58

1 Capitalist Transformations -- PART ONE The World of Plantations -- Introduction to Part One -- 2 The Banana Boys Come to Ecuador -- 3 The Birth of an Enclave: Labor Control and Worker Resistance -- 4 On the Margins of an Enclave: The Formation of State, Capital, and Community -- 5 Imagining New Worlds -- 6 The End of an Enclave -- PART TWO The Emergence of Contract Farming -- Introduction to Part Two -- 7 From Workers to Peasants and Back Again: Agrarian Reform at the Core of an Enclave -- 8 From Struggles to Movement: The Expansion of Protest and Community Formation -- 9 The Reconstitution of State, Capital, and Popular Struggle -- 10 In Search of Workers: Contract Farming and Labor Organizing.

"Bitter Fruit" is a comprehensive and insightful account of the CIA operation to overthrow the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala in 1954. First published in 1982, this book has become a classic, a textbook case of the relationship between the United States and the Third World. The authors make extensive use of U.S. government documents and interviews with former CIA and other officials. It is a warning of what happens when the United States abuses its power.

In the late nineteenth century, migrants from Jamaica, Colombia, Barbados, and beyond poured into Caribbean Central America, building railroads, digging canals, selling meals, and farming homesteads. On the rain-forested shores of Costa Rica, U.S. entrepreneurs and others established vast banana plantations. Over the next half-century, short-lived export booms drew tens of thousands of migrants to the region. In Port Limon, birthplace of the United Fruit Company, a single building might house a Russian seamstress, a Martinican madam, a Cuban doctor, and a Chinese barkeep--together with stevedo