Is abuse, corruption and violence still inherent in multinational capitalism?
Follow this authorEduardo Porter's opinions
FollowAnd yet Chiquita’s employment of death squads to protect its interests into the 2000s raises an uncomfortable question for the protagonists of 21st-century globalization, hunting around the Global South in pursuit of natural resources or other opportunities to exploit. Is abuse, corruption and violence still inherent in multinational capitalism?
Chiquita’s is not an isolated incident. A palm oil company financed by the World Bank in Honduras allegedly used force to displace local farmers. Mining companies in Peru have been accused of a variety of human rights violations. And ExxonMobil settled a case with villagers that sued it for human rights abuses allegedly perpetrated by its hired security forces.
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Abuses persist despite loud pledges of corporate responsibilities. One study of 273 instances of human rights violations in developing countries from 2002 to 2017 found that 90 percent of the 160 multinational corporations involved had corporate social responsibility or sustainability committees and were signatories to the United Nations Global Compact.
“How are we still here?” asks Marissa Vahlsing, director of transnational legal strategy at EarthRights International, which is coordinating the legal case against Chiquita. One would hope that global capitalism would have overcome its murderous instincts by now.
Modernity arrives in García Márquez’s Colombian landscape of Macondo via one Mr. Herbert, an American “of topaz eyes and fine rooster skin,” who bit into a banana in the house of Aureliano Segundo Buendía, a descendant of the town’s founder, José Arcadio, the fourth generation of a family that forms the backbone of the novel. Mr. Herbert immediately tasted profit.
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Within a week, the town pulsed with surveyors, hydrologists, topographers and, yes, lawyers. “Endowed with means that had been reserved for Divine Providence in former times, they changed the pattern of the rains, accelerated the cycle of harvest, and moved the river from where it had always been and put it, with its white stones and its icy currents, on the other end of town, behind the cemetery.”
Nicaraguan author (and former vice president) Sergio Ramírez put it thus in an epilogue to the 50th anniversary edition of García Márquez’s masterwork: “The connection of the rural world with modernity is consummated with the arrival of the banana company, which transformed Macondo into something unfamiliar to its own inhabitants.”
This is a merciless world. Besides the experts, the company also brought “dictatorial foreigners” and “hired assassins with machetes” to run the town. When the banana company leaves, Macondo is “in ruins.” Most everybody is dead, slain in the town square under a hail of bullets fired by soldiers summoned by El Pulpo to break a strike. José Arcadio Segundo, Aureliano Segundo’s brother and one of only two survivors of the massacre, is left for dead, waking up in a train car atop countless bodies to be disposed of secretly somewhere far away. The bodies “had the same temperature of plaster in the autumn, and the consistency of petrified........