Was listening to one of the podcast episodes in this series, "Under the Shadow" and heard about this evil atrocity perpetrated by the United Fruit Company (later renamed the Chiquita Banana company) and was surprised to see this entry at Wikipedia!
I will be looking for MORE information on this, repeatedly:
The Banana Massacre (Spanish: Matanza/Masacre de las bananeras[1]) was a massacre of workers of the United Fruit Company, now Chiquita, that occurred between December 5 and 6, 1928 in the town of Ciénaga near Santa Marta, Colombia. A strike began on November 12, 1928, when the workers ceased to work until the company would reach an agreement with them to grant them dignified working conditions.[2] After several weeks with no agreement, in which the United Fruit Company refused to negotiate with the workers, the conservative government of Miguel Abadía Méndez sent the Colombian Army in against the strikers, resulting in the massacre of 47 to 2,000 people.
U.S. officials in Colombia and United Fruit representatives portrayed the workers' strike as "communist" with a "subversive tendency" in telegrams to Frank B. Kellogg, the United States Secretary of State.[3] The Colombian government was also compelled to work for the interests of the company, considering they could cut off trade of Colombian bananas with significant markets such as the United States and Europe.[4]
Gabriel García Márquez depicted a fictional version of the massacre in his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, as did Álvaro Cepeda Samudio in his La Casa Grande. Although García Márquez references the number of dead as around three thousand, the actual number of dead workers is unknown.
Strike
The workers of the banana plantations in Colombia went on strike on November 12, 1928. The workers made nine demands from the United Fruit Company:
Stop their practice of hiring through sub-contractors
Mandatory collective insurance
Compensation for work accidents
Hygienic dormitories and 6-day work weeks
Increase in daily pay for workers who earned less than 100 pesos per month
Weekly wage
Abolition of office stores
Abolition of payment through coupons rather than money
Improvement of hospital services[2]
The strike turned into the largest labor movement ever witnessed in the country until then. Radical members of the Liberal Party, as well as members of the Socialist and Communist Parties, participated.[5]
The workers wanted to be recognized as employees, and demanded the implementation of the Colombian legal framework of the 1920s.[6]
Massacre
An army regiment from Bogotá was dispatched by the government to deal with the strikers, which it deemed to be subversive. Whether these troops were sent in at the behest of the United Fruit Company did not at first clearly emerge.
Three hundred soldiers were sent from Antioquia to Magdalena. There were no soldiers from Magdalena involved because General Cortés Vargas, the army-appointed military chief of the banana zone in charge of controlling the situation, did not believe they would be able to take effective actions, as they might be related to the plantation workers.[2]
The troops set up their machine guns on the roofs of the low buildings at the corners of the main square, closed off the access streets,[7] and, after issuing a five-minute warning that people should leave,[1] opened fire into a dense Sunday crowd of workers and their families, including children. The people had gathered after Sunday Mass[7] to wait for an anticipated address from the governor.[8]
Number of people dead
General Cortés Vargas, who commanded the troops during the massacre, took responsibility for 47 casualties. In reality, the exact number of casualties has never been confirmed. Herrera Soto, co-author of a comprehensive and detailed study of the 1928 strike, has put together various estimates given by contemporaries and historians, ranging from 47 to as high as 2,000.[1] According to Congressman Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the killed strikers were thrown into the sea.[1] Other sources claim that the bodies were buried in mass graves.[2]
Among the survivors was Luis Vicente Gámez, later a famous local figure, who survived by hiding under a bridge for three days. Every year after the massacre he delivered a memorial service over the radio.
The press has reported different numbers of deaths and different opinions about the events that took place that night. The conclusion is that there is no agreed-on story, but rather diverse variations depending on the source they come from. The American press provided biased information on the strike.[2] The Colombian press was also biased depending on the political alignment of the publication. For example, the Bogotá-based newspaper El Tiempo stated that the workers were within their rights in wanting to improve their conditions. However, since the newspaper was politically conservative, they also noted that they did not agree with the strike.[2]
Official U.S. telegrams
Telegram from Bogotá Embassy to the U.S. Secretary of State, Frank B. Kellogg, dated December 5, 1928, stated:
I have been following Santa Marta fruit strike through United Fruit Company representative here; also through Minister of Foreign Affairs who on Saturday told me government would send additional troops and would arrest all strike leaders and transport them to a prison in Cartagena; that government would give adequate protection to American interests involved.[3]
More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Massacre
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