Recent NACLA Reports (Nov.-Dec. 1977 and Mar.-Apr. 1978) described Castle & Cooke’s union-busting activities in Honduras and its role in smashing a workers’ self-managed cooperative that ran a banana plantation. Now the other transnational giant operating in Honduras – United Brands (formerly United Fruit Co.) – is moving to take over another worker-managed plantation. The following letter, just received from Honduras, describes the company’s and the Honduran military’s moves against the workers’cooperative, or empresa. The empresa grows African palm, whose fruit is used to make vegetable oil. To meet rising world demand for vegetable oil, United Brands has begun diversifying into African palm production on plantations in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and
Honduras. Its maneuvers to take control of the Empresa de Area
de Guaymas, the largest cooperative-run African palm plantation in Honduras, are part of its move to capture a greater share of the palm oil market.
As the last paragraph in the document indicates, the current
Honduran military government is collaborating with the transnational agribusiness companies – in this case with United Brands – to reserve the previous administration’s progressive agrarian reform laws under which the workers’ cooperatives were originally established.
NACLA-West
Agribusiness Project
The Empresa de Area de Guaymas is one of the largest in Honduras with 1,339 members and covering over 7,000 hectares. It is in the municipality of El Negrito on land that had previously been exploited by the Tela Railroad Company, the Honduran subsidiary of United Brands. The secretary general, Fausto Orellana, was approached recently by a senior executive of the multinational. He expressed the company’s interest in administering the Empresa’s African Palm project and handling its marketing as well. The Empresa has over 2,000 hectares planted in African Palm. Included in the company’s offer was the promise of financing various social projects as well.
The proposal was presented to a general assembly of the members and roundly rejected. The common sentiment was that we have not fought to get our own land and free ourselves from working for the company only for it to take control of our lives once again. The members then returned to their respective rank and file groups to discuss alternatives. On Sunday, April 9, 1978, a detachment of the national police rounded up 17 leaders and jailed them on charges of “illegal gambling.” They were freed the following day amidst fierce protests that the police were acting on behalf of the company.
Two days later Lt. Col. Amilcar Zelaya, the head of the armed forces in the region, visited the leaders of Guaymas. He was explicit. It doesn’t matter whether or not the campesinos want to accept the offer of the company. They had better accept it with grace or else they would suffer. The implication was clear. If the members tried to fight being swallowed by the multinational they would be smashed by the Honduran army as has already happened in another region of Honduras where the army took a successful empresa by force in the interests of United Brands’ rival Castle & Cooke.
The problem is that it will be another three years before
the palm comes into production during which time the
Empresa needs credit. The attached document [not reprinted here – NACLA] shows how much the government had budgeted for this year. The Empresa could survive with one million Lempiras [one Lempira is worth 50 cents] of credit a year but not less. This would go to pay members a salary of 24 Lempiras a week. The National Agrarian Institute [a government agency], which had been behind the project, stopped paying this money over eight weeks ago.
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The Horse’s Mouth:
“Ellis Island has long since closed its doors, but says Forbes, the Mexican border is the new, unofficial Ellis Island. That, says James Flanigan, Forbes’ Southwestern Bureau manager, is our modern ‘dirty little secret.’ While we pretend that our society can continue to exist without immigration and without underprivileged labor, in fact it cannot. And we know it. In this sense the presence of 7 million to 8 million illegal immigrants, most of them Mexican, is not a police problem, it is not a labor problem, it is not a political problem. It is a problem of coming to grips with the contradictions in our own society.”
From Forbes,
April 15, 1977, p. 6
