The 1928 Banana Massacre When White Gold Met State Violence

---

In December 1928, Colombia’s banana-rich region around Ciénaga became the site of one of the most brutal labor crackdowns in Latin American history. Plantation workers for the U.S.-owned United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) had organized a strike demanding fair wages, written contracts, and hygienic living conditions, such as six-day workweeks and clean dormitories. What began as a collective plea for dignity escalated into a tragedy when Colombian troops, backed by rooftop machine guns, opened fire on striking workers and their families after a brief warning to disperse.
The death toll remains uncertain—official reports cited as few as 47, while historians and diplomatic sources estimate up to 2,000 fatalities. One U.S. embassy dispatch bluntly stated: “the total number of strikers killed by the Colombian military exceeded one thousand”. Eyewitness accounts on Reddit describe the horror vividly:
“The army had set up…machine guns…after a brief warning…slaughtering them like animals.”
This massacre did more than crush a strike—it shifted Colombia’s political trajectory. It fueled labor movements, boosted populist leaders like Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, and permeated Latin American culture, most famously in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, where he fictionalizes the atrocity in Macondo and notes how history is erased: “Nothing ever happened…It didn’t matter”. Nearly a century later, the Banana Massacre remains a stark reminder of the deadly entanglement between multinational corporate power, governmental force, and workers’ rights—a cautionary tale on how the pursuit of “white gold” can drown in blood.
The post The 1928 Banana Massacre: When “White Gold” Met State Violence appeared first on Alongxp.

---