NOT TAUGHT IN HIGH SCHOOL HISTORY CLASS

(Bogota   Fun With Fruit Review   December 10, 2016)

In 1928 The United Fruit Company (fruit company from Louisiana) had banana plantation in Colombia; and the workers organized a strike against them. They demanded written contracts, eight-hour work days, six-day work weeks and the elimination of food coupons. The strike was one of the biggest strikes in Colombian history, and many communistic and Liberal parties participated.

U.S. officials in Colombia, along with United Fruit representatives, portrayed the worker’s strike as “communist” with “subversive tendency”. In telegrams to the U.S. Secretary of the government, the United States of America threatened to invade with the U.S. Marine Corps if the Colombian government did not act to protect United Fruit’s interests.

An unknown number of workers died after the conservative government of Miguel Méndez sent the Colombian army to end the union. An army regiment from Bogotá was dispatched by the government to deal with the strikers, which it deemed to be subversive. Whether these troops were sent in at the behest of the United Fruit Company did not clearly emerge.

The troops set up their machine guns on the roofs of the low buildings at the corners of the main square, closed off the access streets, and after a five-minute warning opened fire into a dense Sunday crowd of workers and their wives and children who had gathered, after Sunday Mass, to wait for an anticipated address from the governor.

General Cortés Vargas, who commanded the troops during the massacre, took responsibility for 47 casualties. In reality, the exact number of casualties has never been confirmed. Herrera Soto, co-author of a comprehensive and detailed study of the 1928 strike, has put together various estimates given by contemporaries and historians, ranging from 47 to as high as 2,000. Survivors, popular oral histories and written documents give figures 800-3000 killed, adding that the killers threw them into the sea.