In Nicaragua’s dusty capital, a group of several hundred ex-banana workers migrated from the northern department of Chinandega about four years ago and set up a miserable little tent camp outside Congress to demand support in their fight against the Dole food company.
In a range of lawsuits in the U.S. and abroad, the banana workers allege that banana companies used the toxic pesticide known as dbcp in the ’70s and ’80s, after they were aware of the chemical’s harmful effects. Workers claim health defects from kidney failure to sterility, the cause being pesticide contamination. Dole denies causal links between pesticide use and worker health problems.
For four years, these squatters in Managua have been waiting for a response. So far, they’ve been able to get the Sandinista government to supply their makeshift settlement with water, electricity and basic food rations. That’s probably all they’ll get.
The struggle of former banana workers around the world suffering from chemical contamination has taken a major blow in the highly-publicized case in which Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Victoria Chaney presided. These banana workers in Nicaragua are among thousands worldwide with similar claims against Dole. But Chaney ruled in April that the case of two purported Nicaraguan banana-plantation workers was so clouded by a corrupt scheme by lawyers and Nicaraguan judges to bilk Dole for billions, that we’ll never know whether Nicaraguans were actually victims in those cases. Secret witnesses testified that lawyers and judges committed fraud by recruiting Nicaraguans who would claim they were left sterile by exposure to a pesticide in the 1970s.
I visited the Nicaraguan Hoovervilles as witnesses were giving their testimonies in Los Angeles and met some former banana-plantation workers. Waves of dust swept through the camp, where families live in makeshift shanties made out of old garbage bags and recycled ad posters. Raw sewage ran freely throughout the place, which began as a temporary encampment but has become a de-facto sprawling settlement for some of Latin America’s most miserable.
After showing me their rashes and deformities, the banana workers said they wanted to seek revenge upon the lawyers who betrayed them.
“Lawyers in the U.S. have made it rich off of our efforts,” said one of the group’s leaders, Guillermo Vivas, sitting in a dirt-floor encampment. “We haven’t received a dime.”
Slum dwellers here suffer from an array of maladies, from sterility to chronic kidney disease, skin deformities to mental illness.
The worst part of that betrayal is that the fraud was so “pervasive” that no one will ever know whether the workers were actually injured by Dole’s pesticides in Nicaragua, Judge Chaney said.
U.S. banana companies are the proverbial boogeyman in Latin America, particularly in Central America, birthplace of the Banana Republic. As Stephen Kinzer and Stephen Schlesinger documented in their epic work Bitter Fruit, banana companies have been the driving force behind countless coups in Central America and were behind the CIA’s first overthrow of a democratically elected President in Guatemala. That book, by the way, is a must read not only for Latin American history buffs but for anyone even vaguely interested in how the United States plies its power abroad.
The company formerly known as the Standard Fruit Company, or Dole, has a past too. Hence, many believe, the name change. Nicaragua’s leaders, meantime, have turned its democracy into a backroom parlor where everything is negotiable. Which is why it strikes me as funny that the decadent government of President Daniel Ortega has gone so far as to declare itself free of corruption.
Back in the states, the controversy as of late has been focused on a feature film called “BANANAS!,” which Dole’s lawyer Scott Edelman said in an e-mail is a “totally false story based on a fabricated case.” Now Juan Dominguez, the lawyer of Nicaraguan plaintiffs who was accused by Chaney as having masterminded this alleged scheme to dupe Dole, faces contempt charges.
If you read Kinzer’s Bitter Fruit, you understand that the United States has never held its citizens responsible for crimes committed abroad, particularly those that make big profits. Indeed, Kinzer focuses on how lobbyists hired by banana companies persuaded the U.S. government to act on their behalf to overthrow the democratically elected president of Guatemala. So why do we start now? And what makes us think our judges are capable of comprehending justice in a place like Nicaragua? Chaney’s response was to basically throw out the case because there was too much corruption involved. Is that the best way to deal with this? Is there no form of justice in a place rife with corruption?
