One hundred years of authoritarian practices: United Fruit and its banana plantation workers

Abstract

The statist focus of comparative politics has withheld from view the ability of powerful actors such as transnational corporations to engage in authoritarian practices on their own initiative, in different alliances, regardless of the national regime type in which they find themselves. Focusing on plantation-level interactions, this article analyses how the United Fruit Company and its successor companies could control and exploit its workers, using silencing, secrecy and subterfuge so as to sabotage accountability, from the 1900s to the early 2000s. Over time, the company’s practices evolved from violent repression and mass dismissals to manipulating trade unions to a mix of engagement, deception, and outsourcing to evade accountability. This corresponded to scalar shifts: the company always operated transnationally, but workers moved from local to national and finally transnational organising, curtailing the company’s room for manoeuvre. Spatially, the company’s physical control over its plantation workers could be as forceful as that of a national state, but its ‘territory’ has been one of shape-shifting network nodes, becoming even more ‘porous’ in the twenty-first century. This spatial mobility and ambiguity has in turn been deployed by the company to sabotage accountability to its workers.