Globalization and Violence in Colombian History

Many aspects of today's neoliberal globalization are anything but new to Latin America. Neoliberal globalization has meant a return to aspects of Latin America's liberal era of export-led growth in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries: an economy based on foreign investment and exports, and a state committed to promoting the export sector through alliance with foreign capital, creating financial structures that promote profits and social and political structures that allow the harsh exploitation of labor. The transition to export-oriented manufacturing since the 1970s as part of a global economic restructuring is in some ways a restoration of some very old patterns of production and labor in Latin America.Footnote ¹

But today's globalization is also new in important ways. Labor management has taken some new forms in the current neoliberal era. As the formal sector has failed to provide enough jobs and the state has withdrawn its safety net, workers fear that any gains they make in the workplace will be quickly undermined by enterprises shifting production to places with lower labor costs. In some cases, this has turned workers and their unions into employers' greatest allies. In others, workers' organizations have advocated a “globalization from below” that would incorporate cross-border solidarity and organizing to reverse the race to the bottom. The Colombian banana industry offers examples of both labor responses to globalization, with the added twist that they have been promoted by the same union.

Part of the explanation of this paradox lies in the high degree of violence in Colombia in general and in the Urabá banana zone in particular. Colombia has long been notorious for its violence, which exploded into a decade-long civil war known as La Violencia in the late 1940s in which some 200,000 people died. Historians have traditionally portrayed La Violencia as a partisan battle between Colombia's dominant Liberal and Conservative parties. The two parties had their origins in regional and ideological divisions among nineteenth-century elites, and evolved in ways that cut across class, regional, and even ideological boundaries in the twentieth. Recent research suggests that La Violencia is better understood in social and economic terms, and notes that in Urabá (as in other regions), landlord-sponsored militias drove peasants off the land during the conflict, making way for the spread of ranching and export agriculture.Footnote ²

Both today's right-wing paramilitary “self-defense” groups and Colombia's oldest and largest guerrilla organization, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which played central roles in Urabá's violence in the 1980s and 90s, had their origins in La Violencia. The landlord and rancher militias went through several incarnations, emerging as the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) in the 1990s. The FARC was founded in 1964 with close links to the Colombian Communist Party, in part to defend peasant-occupied territories. A second guerrilla organization, the Popular Liberation Army (EPL), founded in 1967 by a Maoist splinter group, also emerged as an important player in Urabá in the 1980s.

For the first two decades of banana production in Urabá, unions were simply repressed with violence. In the 1980s, the FARC and the EPL moved into the region and began intensive work with two small labor unions there. By the end of the decade a strong union had emerged, but the guerrillas and an array of right-wing paramilitary groups had unleashed an orgy of bloodletting in which banana workers and union members were the primary victims. Out of the carnage emerged a region dominated by rightist paramilitaries—and a new union that seemed able to find a modus vivendi with the far right, the military, and the banana growers' association.

In addition to violence, global economic conditions and new forms of labor internationalism shaped the unusual trajectory of Colombia's banana unions. Colombia has appeared high on the radar of unions worldwide seeking to challenge the global management strategy of downward pressure on wages and working conditions. With some 3000 unionists killed in the past twenty years, Colombia consistently leads human rights organizations' lists of labor-rights violators. For these reasons, US, Canadian, and European unions have all developed programs in solidarity with their Colombian counterparts.

With management's blessing, Colombia's banana union helped to form a regional alliance of banana workers, pressed one of the major banana multinationals to sign an agreement on international labor standards, and worked to strengthen Colombia's position in international banana markets. The Colombian case suggests that labor internationalism and globalization from below can benefit corporations, which may even promote these, if challenging the exploitation of labor elsewhere helps their own competitive position internationally.

International labor solidarity groups have offered their support to a union under siege and hailed the historic regional union coalition. At the same time, they have cringed at the union's accommodation of the right-wing paramilitaries and its open support of Colombian president Uribe's neoliberal economic agenda.

This article traces the events in Urabá from the establishment of the banana industry there in the 1960s through the violence of the 1980s and 90s and into the precarious peace of the 2000s. It seeks to explain the causes and the nature of the violence, its relationship to globalization, and the unusual alliances it engendered and entailed. It asks, first, how and why a union shifted from far left to right, and second, how and why a union known domestically for its accommodation with the right and with management has taken a leading role in labor internationalism.

Urabá's history reveals aspects of today's neoliberal globalization that have deep historical roots in Latin America. It also suggests the nightmares that can result when the neoliberal dream is implemented. Urabá's unions have experimented with a wide array of strategies and alliances while operating under the constraint of severe repression. The ways that they have engaged with the neoliberal order, at home and abroad, show the formidable obstacles facing workers, their search for new strategies, and the ability of the neoliberal order to undermine and circumvent even the boldest of these strategies.

Bananas Come to Urabá

The banana industry has historically exemplified many characteristics associated with contemporary globalization: extreme capital mobility among dispersed production sites, subcontracting, use of migrant labor, privatization of most state functions in the regions, and little regulation. The United Fruit Company's predecessors established the first plantations in the Santa Marta region on Colombia's northern coast in the 1890s, as they were also setting up operations along Central America's Atlantic coast. When the company consolidated in 1899, it incorporated a vast and dispersed banana plantation region in coastal areas remote from the centers of political power.

Urabá's late-twentieth-century banana industry has been no exception to this pattern. When the United Fruit Company entered the Urabá region in western Antioquia province in the early 1960s, it recapitulated systems and patterns that it had developed almost a century earlier; systems and patterns that have much in common with those of today's neoliberal globalization. The company entered a lightly-populated area, isolated from the centers of government and power, with little state presence. It was able to ally with sectors of the local and national elite, and convince the state to offer economic, fiscal, police and military support for its project. And the United Fruit Company had invented its own race to the bottom long before late twentieth-century activists gave it a name: from the very beginning of the century it hedged its bets and spread its risks by maintaining production in various regions and playing national governments off against each other to achieve optimal conditions, always with the threat of pulling out if its wishes were not granted.

Two basic patterns characterized United Fruit operations in the relatively remote areas it colonized throughout Latin America starting over a century ago. In some contexts, like its older Colombian operations in Santa Marta, the company directly controlled land, employed workers, and ran plantations. In others, managers chose a method often associated with today's industrial restructuring: they contracted out the control of land and labor, and confined the firm primarily to purchasing and marketing the fruit.Footnote ³

In Urabá the latter pattern prevailed. United Fruit created a Colombian subsidiary, Banadex, that produced about ten percent of the region's bananas, but it relied primarily on contractors. The company extended credit and loans to Colombian investors on the condition that they acquire and title land, and fulfill the company's requirements as far as improvements, drainage, roads, etc.Footnote ⁴ Peasant migrants who had cleared the land without title generally lost it during this process in the 1960s, and small banana farms were gradually swallowed up by larger ones through the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote ⁵ In a direct continuation of the pattern established during La Violencia, “violent pressure and death threats” contributed to “the massive expulsion of peasants” as banana producers contracted to the company expanded their holdings.Footnote ⁶

Employment in Urabá's banana industry attracted waves of migrants; from 1951 to 1964 the population grew 204% to 149,850, and by 1985, to 249,239.Footnote ⁷ Most of these migrants came from the neighboring, primarily Afro-Colombian province of Chocó.Footnote ⁸ By 1984 Urabá was producing 92% of Colombia's banana exports, and Colombia had gone from providing 4.5% of the world's banana production in 1974 to 11.5% in 1985, making it one of the world's four largest exporters.Footnote ⁹ With the expansion of the banana industry came the army, radical unions, and peasant organizations. At the end of the 1970s, these were joined by armed guerrillas, and in the mid-1980s, paramilitaries.

By 1995, Urabá had a population of 350,000, with 29,000 hectares planted in bananas, in 409 farms belonging to 310 owners. 16,000 people worked on these farms, many of them newcomers to the region.Footnote ¹⁰ Two thirds of the workers were Afro-Colombians who had previously been peasants, small miners, or fishermen. According to an authoritative source, many of the migrants were veterans of the peasant and armed struggles of the 1950s and 60s, and were either already involved, or primed to be sympathetic to, guerrilla movements.Footnote ¹¹ Poverty, violence, and the spread of ranching continued to push migrants from neighboring provinces into Urabá during the 1990s, while the expansion of ranching and of violence in rural Urabá has pushed migrants into its inadequate urban centers.Footnote ¹²

Conditions on the banana plantations in the 1960s and 70s were widely acknowledged to be horrendous. The workday lasted up to 18 or even 20 hours; workers lived in camps on company property, with no water or electricity, sometimes sleeping in cardboard boxes.Footnote ¹³ In the 1960s, seventy-two percent of workers lived in these camps; in 1979, eighty-nine did.Footnote ¹⁴ Even in 1979, very few of these barracks had running water, electricity, or latrines.Footnote ¹⁵ Urban centers were practically nonexistent, and housing and public services were scarce.Footnote ¹⁶ Housing conditions in the banana city of Apartadó were even worse than on the plantations in 1979, and even in 1993 only thirty-one percent of houses had access to running water.Footnote ¹⁷ Nevertheless, in part because of violence on the plantations, by 1987 seventy-five percent of Urabá's banana workers lived off the plantation, in urban centers.Footnote ¹⁸

A 1997 study concluded that the combination of workers' peasant origins, the exploitative working conditions on the plantations, the region's history of popular organizations and guerrilla activism, and the growth of marginal barrios where workers increasingly lived, made the banana proletariat “an actor that is socially and culturally divided by heterogeneous and even contradictory tensions, and by an uneven and rocky political evolution.” The base of Urabá's early social movements consisted of “small farmers who became wage-workers either temporarily or permanently, the landless poor who moved around the region in search of lands, expanding the agricultural frontier, and smallholders who lost their parcels and ended up in minuscule suburban lots.”Footnote ¹⁹

In 1969, when their first contracts with United Fruit expired, Urabá's private contractors—mostly members of the Antioquia coffee and textile elite—formed the Association of Banana Growers of Urabá (Augura) and their own export company.Footnote ²⁰ Augura members affiliated with the Liberal Party dominated the region's politics until they were challenged by the left in the late 1980s.Footnote ²¹ That challenge brought forth an orgy of violence, and a tenuous balance at the end of the 1990s that drew some elements of the workers and former guerrillas into a new rightist alliance.

Banana Workers Organize

Labor organizing in Urabá began on a very small scale, and followed the Colombian pattern of close alliance between unions and political parties. As in other banana regions earlier in the century, leftist organizations saw Urabá as a fertile potential ground for organizing. The Colombian Communist Party was active in labor organizing among Santa Marta's banana workers, and the 1928 strike against the United Fruit Company there, which mobilized local peasants and small business people in support of the workers' demands and ended with the massacre of somewhere between fifty and 2000 workers and their families by the Colombian army, has acquired almost mythical status in Colombian labor history. Liberal politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, whose assassination in 1948 set off La Violencia, began his career by denouncing the company and the massacre on the floor of the Colombian Senate, and Gabriel García Márquez's description of the massacre in One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) brought it before the eyes of the international public.

Urabá's first union, Sintrabanano, was founded by Communist Party sympathizers in 1964 among United Fruit's construction workers, and affiliated with the Communist confederation.Footnote ²² In what was to become an established pattern, the Company quickly fired organized workers and succeeded in having them, as well as Communist leaders in the region, jailed.Footnote ²³ Local arrest records from the 1960s show waves of arrests for such crimes as “posting Communist flyers” and “having foreign and subversive literature.”Footnote ²⁴ In 1967 Sintrabanano regrouped, this time primarily among banana workers.Footnote ²⁵

A second union, Sintagro, was founded in 1972 among workers for contractors for the Dutch-owned African palm producer Coldesa, S.A.Footnote ²⁶ Sintagro affiliated with a national Catholic union confederation that many Colombian employers saw as a desirable alternative to more radical unions. The growers, though, called in the army and had the union's president and its lawyer exiled when it presented its first bargaining proposal in 1976. The union was crushed, but a response came from outside the workforce: the tiny EPL guerrilla movement assassinated Coldesa's director of Industrial Relations.Footnote ²⁷ It was the first, but decidedly not the last, direct guerrilla involvement in a labor conflict.

During the 1970s, militarization, assassination, and the enforcement of “collective pacts” between owners and workers that excluded the union were the response to repeated efforts at union organization on the banana plantations.Footnote ²⁸ Firings and assassinations continued to follow every attempt at organization.Footnote ²⁹ “The army presence was ubiquitous in worker assemblies, raids, and in the occupation of banana estates” in the 1970s.Footnote ³⁰

A typical sequence of events occurred at the Revancha Gaolfre plantation in 1979. When the union presented its bargaining proposal, the owner first offered its president 50,000 pesos to withdraw it. He refused, and a few days later was assassinated. When the workers called a strike, the plantation was occupied by the army, which forced them to return.Footnote ³¹

A lawyer who worked with Sintagro wrote that in 1980 he was repeatedly “summoned, harassed and temporarily detained by the Voltígeros military battalion. The arbitrary detention of workers became common practice, as did the presence of soldiers at union meetings.” Soldiers captured those attending a Sintagro meeting in December 1981, taking several workers to the Voltígeros battalion headquarters and torturing them. Despite official attacks, Sintagro continued to negotiate and sign agreements with the banana companies.Footnote ³²

In 1979, forty-six percent of the region's farms had some kind of agreement governing labor relations, but most of these, eighty percent, were “collective pacts” between management and labor that excluded any union. In addition to the “collective terror” imposed by the military, union organizing was hampered by workers' dispersal on different farms.Footnote ³³ The dispersal was social and cultural as well as geographical. New migrant workers tended to settle close to others from their region “where they conserve their customs, traditions [and] eating habits.”Footnote ³⁴ Plantation owners may have, purposefully or unconsciously, fomented these divisions, as the UFCO certainly did deliberately on other plantations. The 1979 study found a “regional division of labor” in Urabá in which Afro-Colombians from the Chocó region predominated in the most difficult, dangerous, and physically demanding jobs.Footnote ³⁵ In addition, workers were highly mobile: in 1979 28.5% had been in Urabá for less than a year, and the average length of time in the zone was six years.Footnote ³⁶

The fragmentation of the workforce, the privatization of power, and the levels of repression in Urabá are far from unfamiliar to historians of Latin America. Even during the mid-twentieth-century ISI period, when unions gained strength in new industrial sectors like Brazil's auto industry, the export sector continued to be characterized by repression. The nature of labor in El Salvador's new export-oriented industries, which attracted investors with their low wages, drew on long-established patterns in export agriculture.Footnote ³⁷

A Neoliberal Paradise?

The weakness of Colombia's central state is legendary, and has been seen as a major factor contributing to peculiarities of the country's history, ranging from political violence, to the strength of the drug trade, to the fragmentation of the country's unions.Footnote ³⁸ In part because of repression against more radical organizations, Colombia's unions have historically relied on close ties with one of the two mainstream (Liberal and Conservative) parties for their survival. It was corporatism with a Colombian twist: rather than the state, it was the parties that offered patronage to organized labor in return for collaboration.

The current global neoliberal drive to privatize, deregulate, and in general reduce the state's role in society (at least as a provider of public services), in some ways mirrors the historical nature of the Colombian state. But the Urabá case also suggests two further conclusions about contemporary neoliberalism as an aspect of globalization. First, Urabá's recent economic development is typical of how the banana industry has operated elsewhere in the Americas for over a century, rather than simply being a manifestation of contemporary globalization. Second, a closer look at the role of the state in Urabá reveals that repression, rather than weakness, has been its defining characteristic.

Urabá's recent history might seem to support the traditional view of the weakness of the Colombian state. Botero explains that “economic development [there] was abandoned to the free play of market forces, [and] the State has played a very restricted role.” Urban areas like Apartadó were established through a series of squatter invasions and settlements; public services were virtually nonexistent.Footnote ³⁹ The absence, or selective presence, of the state had advantages for the banana growers: Low or uncollected taxes, nonexistent environmental and labor regulations, and subsidized credit.Footnote ⁴⁰ In 1991 Urabá was declared a free trade zone, eliminating all state controls on rents, food prices, energy, and telephone rates. Rents quadrupled, and energy and phone costs became the highest in the country.Footnote ⁴¹ Globalization had its costs.

By the mid-1990s, even the banana companies were decrying the lack of state support for the region. The absence of public services exacerbated social conflicts and contributed, the growers protested, to the allure of armed movements, private justice, and general lawlessness.Footnote ⁴²

However, the state was not absent altogether; it was omnipresent in its military arm. In 1976 the national government imposed military mayors in the four major municipalities of the region. Several battalions stationed in the region maintained the heavy militarization even after civilian power was restored in 1986.Footnote ⁴³ Rather than “absence,” Colombian political scientist William Ramírez Tobón argues, the state in Urabá was characterized by “a partial presence” that dispensed with the state's social obligations and served only the interests of the banana oligarchy. “The infrastructure network, the credit and monetary support for invested capital, the friendly tax structure, and the pro-export tilt of macro-economic policies have been the main forms of state presence in Urabá.”Footnote ⁴⁴

Human rights investigators agreed: State intervention was primarily “geared towards programs of military pacification to provide security to the businessmen and latifundistas, rather than programs for social development… The national government has opted to emphasize pacification over social programs.” The state presence in Urabá consisted of police and military intelligence units and six military battalions comprising seven thousand troops.Footnote ⁴⁵

Leftist Guerrillas and the Unions

Two leftist guerrilla groups established a small presence in Urabá in the 1970s: the FARC had about thirty or forty men under arms, divided among three fronts, and the EPL boasted even fewer militants.Footnote ⁴⁶ However, in the 1980s Urabá's labor struggles became a venue for growing guerrilla activism. The longstanding relationship between the Communist Party and the FARC underlay the latter's ties with Sintrabanano. After a 1980 reorientation inside the EPL, the organization began to focus on labor organizing, recruiting, and infiltrating Sintagro.Footnote ⁴⁷

According to political scientist Mauricio Romero, the continuing relationship between unions in Urabá and the armed sectors since the end of the 1970s brought mixed results to the unarmed opposition. Guerrilla activity inevitably spurred increased official repression. But it also had some benefits: “In effect, the guerrillas forced the banana companies to accept unions and collective bargaining in the region.”Footnote ⁴⁸

As the FARC and the EPL tightened their relationships with Sintrabanano and Sintagro, respectively, during the first half of the 1980s, their alliances sharpened divisions between the two unions. In mid-decade, events at the national level shifted the terrain. On one hand, government overtures opened a peace process with both guerrilla groups. On the other, for the first time since the 1930s, Colombia's labor unions were able to put labor unity above partisan alliances and form a nonpartisan national confederation. These events played out somewhat differently from elsewhere in the country in the remote Urabá region. The peace process seemed to exacerbate competition between the two guerrilla groups in Urabá, while labor unity was undermined by the same divisions. And the right-wing response to these developments was unleashed with greater force in Urabá than elsewhere in the country.

At the national level, a unitary union confederation was encouraged by the growth in independent unions, especially in the public sector, as well as growing grassroots independence among the unions affiliated with the Liberal and Conservative parties. Independent unions grew from representing twenty-five percent of the organized labor force in 1967 to thirty-five percent in 1974, and over fifty percent in 1984, and they tended to be stronger and more active than those in the partisan confederations.Footnote ⁴⁹

The push for independence and unification grew in the 1980s. The peace process that opened the political system to third parties helped to create a political space for independent unions as well. “Three unity processes got underway—within the independent sector itself, between the independents and the Communist Party, and between these and the dissidents of the traditional union confederations.” In 1986 seventeen federations from the Conservative and three from the Liberal groupings broke with their organizations and joined the Communist confederation and the independents to found the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores de Colombia (CUT).Footnote ⁵⁰

The CUT vigorously rejected affiliation with any political party or international labor body, but also made its political orientation clear:

Meanwhile, negotiations between the FARC and then- President Belisario Betancur (1982-1986) led to an agreement in May 1984 that opened the country's political structures to the left, inviting the armed left to demobilize. The agreement allowed for direct election of Colombia's mayors, and provided amnesty for FARC members who agreed to demobilize. Out of this accord emerged the Patriotic Union (Unión Patriótica), a new unarmed leftist party which, despite increasing military pressure, participated in elections from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. In August 1984 the government signed a similar agreement with the EPL.Footnote ⁵²

A Colombian analyst argues that the peace process contributed to both reorienting and strengthening the guerrilla presence in Urabá:

In interviews in Urabá in the early 1990s, a human-rights commission found two schools of thought regarding the impact of the guerrilla presence on social movements. Some informants argued that guerrilla presence weakened the social movements, as people were afraid of becoming involved because they would be accused of supporting the guerrillas. Others believed that the armed guerrilla actions in the 1960s and 70s forced the growers to open their “feudal hacienda regime” and negotiate with their workers. The commission concluded that, despite their involvement in the unions, the guerrillas had little in the way of social goals. Their political work in the unions aimed primarily at creating support for their military actions rather than using military action to achieve social goals. It was only the ceasefire in 1984, argued the commission, that created the space for the union movement and alternative political parties to flourish. With the threat of armed pressure reduced, the banana growers' association was more willing to negotiate, and workers were more able to channel their actions towards political and union organizations.Footnote ⁵⁴

At first, the political openings at the national level provided space in which Urabá's workers made significant gains. The end of 1984 saw the first industry-wide strike in the banana zone—1500 workers at eighteen plantations—resulting in a joint accord between the banana companies' association Augura and the two unions, to be enforced by the government. The truce created a political space for open union activism for the first time, and both unions grew astronomically. In 1985 127 contracts were signed, covering sixty percent of the land planted in bananas and sixty percent of the workers in the industry (forty-three percent by Sintagro and fourteen percent by Sintrabanano), a total of 4000 workers.Footnote ⁵⁵

However, the highly militarized (and paramilitarized) Urabá region proved to be a weak link in the national truce with the guerrillas. Violence against unions barely receded there: 1985 also saw the first bomb attack against Sintagro's offices and the assassination of EPL spokesperson Oscar William Calvo, which ended EPL participation in the ceasefire.Footnote ⁵⁶

Just as disturbingly, the opening of political space to the guerrilla movements contributed to what came to be termed a “union war” that grew starting in mid-1985. The two guerrilla groups stepped up their work in the unions and competed for workers' loyalties and territorial control, forming “EPL farms” and “FARC farms.” Farm owners were able to take advantage of these divisions, “signing agreements with one union to try to weaken the other, taking advantage of the conflict and inflaming it further.”Footnote ⁵⁷

Sintagro—with EPL influence—clearly represented the majority of workers, but the Patriotic Union, the political party organized by demobilized FARC members, dominated the political sphere. The EPL accused the FARC of a series of assassinations of Sintagro members, and of using violence to try to establish its political influence in the union movement. The FARC accused the EPL of ideological rigidity, refusal to engage in the political opening or dialogue; the EPL countered that the FARC was inciting official violence against it by its accusations.Footnote ⁵⁸ Public denunciations of paramilitary activity in Urabá also began in 1985. Rancher and paramilitary founder Fidel Castaño's “Death to Revolutionaries—Northeast” appeared in northeast Antioquia and Urabá in 1986, and its threats and assassinations of Patriotic Union leaders began in earnest.Footnote ⁵⁹

Despite their divisions, both Sintagro and Sintrabanano affiliated with the new national labor federation, the CUT, when it was founded in 1986.Footnote ⁶⁰ 1986 also saw the replacement of the conservative president Betancur by the liberal Virgilio Barco, who ended the peace process with the guerrillas and the shaky cease-fire with the FARC. If the peace process led to increased violence on the part of the recalcitrant right that had opposed Betancur's initiatives, its end increased those levels still further.Footnote ⁶¹ The army established military governance in Urabá in 1987, taking over political and civil authority.Footnote ⁶² Observers testified that by 1987 there was a clear link between Fidel Castaño and other drug traffickers, the paramilitaries, and the police in the banana zone. Some mentioned a paramilitary training school in Carepa, where Israeli mercenary Yair Klein provided military instruction.Footnote ⁶³

That same year, twenty-four union leaders were assassinated during contract negotiations (February to April) and Sintagro's headquarters was destroyed a second time by a bomb. By September, another sixteen unionists were killed.Footnote ⁶⁴ There were 200 political killings in Urabá by the end of the year, with the majority of victims banana workers and unionists. Most of the founders of Sintagro and Sintrabanano were dead by the end of 1987.Footnote ⁶⁵

Nevertheless, the April 1987 agreements were a milestone in labor relations in Urabá. The Ministry of Labor agreed to mediate and achieved an industry-wide accord, signed by Sintagro and Sintrabanano, and the growers' association.Footnote ⁶⁶ The accord covered far more workers than previous contracts—6,730 represented by Sintagro (54.8% of banana workers in the region) and 13.7% or 1,685 by Sintrabanano. Thus 85% of workers were members of a union, and 87% of the 20,400 hectares of banana farms were covered by a collective bargaining agreement.Footnote ⁶⁷ The agreements also brought significant advances in workers' rights, including the eight-hour day, wage increases, the dismantling of the company barracks system of housing, and the financing of urban housing for workers.

A general strike in September 1987, following the murders of the Secretary General of Sintagro, a member of the National Workers Association, a Patriotic Union municipal councilor and the president of Sintrabanano, ended with an agreement by the national government to create a Regional Labor Office in Urabá, investigate the murders, guarantee no reprisals against workers who participated in the strike, and guarantee the free participation of all parties in the upcoming popular mayoral elections.Footnote ⁶⁸

In 1987 the EPL's political wing and the Patriotic Union reached an accord in Urabá, which also contributed to Sintagro and Sintrabanano uniting in Sintrainagro in 1988.Footnote ⁶⁹ (Both Sintagro and Sintrabanano had lost their legal status earlier that year after they refused to abandon a strike that the government declared illegal.Footnote ⁷⁰) The uniting of unions of diverse tendencies in the CUT in 1986 finally seemed to be reaching Urabá. The new Sintrainagro, representing some 14,000 banana workers, also affiliated to the CUT.Footnote ⁷¹

A contradictory process ensued in which the union negotiated strong contracts while violence against union members increased. From 1982 to 1988, 699 people, mostly banana workers, had been killed in Urabá; from 1986–1989, sixty leaders and activists from Sintrainagro were murdered.Footnote ⁷² Attacks on the union and the left continued in 1989. The different factions in Sintrainagro worked together to prepare a bargaining proposal covering three areas: securing the union's legal recognition, social issues including housing, health, education and transportation, and salary protections.Footnote ⁷³ As contract negotiations began in September, two unionists—one of them a member of the negotiating committee—were murdered; in late October, a Communist Party member who was also a member of Sintrainagro's board, and a negotiating committee member and Patriotic Union leader, were gunned down in Apartadó.Footnote ⁷⁴ 14,000 workers began a strike on November 1, along with a two-day civic strike demanding investigation of the extraordinarily high number of political murders in the area.Footnote ⁷⁵ Three workers and a farm administrator were killed on the first day of the strike. While the initial purpose of the strike was to protest the recent murders, it extended through the month of November, as Augura, the banana growers' association, refused to bend on the union's demand for a thirty-percent increase in their $165 monthly wage. At the end of the month, a reporter found the region under heavy military control, and many strikers living in a makeshift camp in the center of Apartadó, where they had fled from official harassment on the plantations. The strike ended in early December with a death toll of nine unionists, and an agreement granting a twenty-nine percent wage increase in the first year and twenty-seven percent the following year, recognition of agreements previously signed with Sintagro and Sintrabanano, and attention to the housing problem.Footnote ⁷⁶

Although the coincidence of the series of union victories with increasing violence against the unions at the end of the 1980s may appear paradoxical, it in fact makes perfect sense in the Colombian context. The peace accords and the growing strength of the unarmed left in the political sphere provoked a ferocious response from the armed right throughout the country. Nowhere was this response as violent as in Urabá, where the paramilitaries already had strong roots and both foreign and domestic capital were accustomed to wielding uncontested authority over labor. It was the success of nonviolent labor organizing that fueled the grower-paramilitary violence at the end of the 1980s.

EPL Demobilization, the New Social Unionism, and Paramilitarism

Between 1992 and 1993, the EPL underwent a radical swing to the right and succeeded in bringing Sintrainagro with it. How did one of the unions most closely associated with the left in Colombia become a partner to the banana industry and the paramilitaries? One possible explanation is simply that the right's military victory in Urabá allowed it to take control of the union. But given the global nature of the banana industry, events in Urabá were intertwined with global developments as well, revealing how the race to the bottom in the banana industry, and attempts to confront the downward spiral, had inexorable and sometimes unexpected effects throughout the planet. Like in El Salvador, a domestic peace process occurred in dialogue with global economic developments that drastically affected local economies and politics. Footnote ⁷⁷

Despite the better-known bloodbath unleashed against the Patriotic Union, the much smaller EPL, whose presence was concentrated in Urabá, was in some ways more devastated by the violence of the late 1980s. Outside observers concluded that by 1990, the EPL had been close to decimated due to attacks by the army and paramilitaries, as well as internal divisions.Footnote ⁷⁸

The unremitting violence against the union and demobilized members of the FARC and EPL had some important effects on the reorientation of all three organizations. The union lost many of its strongest, most active, and most radical leaders, as well as many members. With the 1984 peace accords, many of the FARC's most optimistic and idealistic activists demobilized to form the Patriotic Union; and many of them were also killed. This left the FARC in the hands of those who saw little alternative to a military solution. What remained of the EPL split irrevocably. Some EPL leaders concluded that survival lay in rapprochement with the far right, while others—the “dissidents”—joined with elements of the FARC for whom armed struggle had increasingly become an end in itself. It seemed that the right-wing campaign of assassination and terror had succeeded in eliminating the unarmed left, inside and outside of the union. What remained were two guerrilla groups shorn of their political wings, and a union and a new political party increasingly in the hands of those who saw collaboration with the far right as the only viable option.

In addition to its military strategy, Augura was also able to use global developments in the banana trade to prod Sintrainagro into a more conciliatory position. Banana multinationals anticipated a growth in European markets with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, and increased production accordingly. When the Eastern European markets failed to materialize, prices crashed. This context, along with the European Community's decision to favor its members' former colonies contributed to a 1992–1993 “banana crisis” of overproduction in Colombia.Footnote ⁷⁹ The decline in export prices affected every aspect of Urabá society: thirty percent of local businesses were closed, unemployment skyrocketed, and the mayor of Turbo noted that the number of street peddlers in the city seemingly doubled overnight.Footnote ⁸⁰

Augura, meanwhile, announced $80 million in losses in 1992, and pleaded inability to honor the salary gains previously agreed upon in the upcoming union contract. At the same time, the association emphasized labor and management's common interest in protecting Colombia's place in the global banana trade. Augura's president offered to send Sintrainagro representatives on a European tour to press for more favorable treatment for Colombian imports.Footnote ⁸¹ Could labor and management collaborate in the face of the race to the bottom?

Some EPL leaders believed that they could, and must. They proposed that only a radical change in direction could save the organization and the union in which it played such an important role. EPL leader Mario Agudelo was one who came to believe that an accord with the paramilitaries was the only viable alternative for the organization:

In 1991 2,100 EPL members (592 in Urabá) accepted a new government amnesty, this time supported by Fidel Castaño and the paramilitaries, who agreed to likewise turn in their arms, and to donate land, money, and cattle to hundreds of demobilized guerrillas.Footnote ⁸³ (The paramilitary demobilization was short-lived: the Castaño brothers soon revived their army.) Demobilized EPL guerrillas formed a new party with the same initials, Esperanza, Paz y Libertad (Hope, Peace, and Liberty), and in May 1991 signed an agreement with Sintrainagro and Augura to collaborate in a “social pact” aimed at regional development.Footnote ⁸⁴ The pact was signed by “the different economic sectors in Uraba who, committed to a joint project, will link capital and labor to promote the project of peace and development.”Footnote ⁸⁵ The banana industry also agreed to provide 23 million pesos for the reinsertion process.Footnote ⁸⁶

Agudelo described the social pact in the following terms: “It was a first step to link the entire society to the process … We proposed to transcend individual interests in order to strengthen a process of democratic coexistence in the zone … We received a positive response from the banana growers association. It created a new atmosphere in labor relations, in which these problems were dealt with in new ways, not with the characteristics of the past.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Esperanza called its new approach “sociopolitical unionism.”Footnote ⁸⁸ By early 1994, this stance had become the dominant position in the union. The Presidential Advisor for Peace in Urabá announced that “worker-management relations are no longer the main source of violence as they were between 1987 and 1989. This type of violence has been transcended.”Footnote ⁸⁹

Some workers were dubious about the union's new-found accommodation with the paramilitaries and Augura. In its 1993 investigation, the Andean Commission noted a deep division between surviving members of the left who believed the union's focus should be on improved working conditions, and those linked to the EPL who felt the union should minimize its demands, given the crisis facing the growers and the threat of the flight of the industry.Footnote ⁹⁰

If Esperanza's and Sintrainagro's relations with the banana growers and the paramilitaries eased, the violence did not. The FARC, Communist Party and the UP rejected the “social pact,” accusing the EPL leadership of “renouncing the class struggle and of selling out the interests of the workers.”Footnote ⁹¹ In the early 1990s “the divide between the left that defends its traditional positions and those who have adopted a shift to a policy of dialogue and national agreement, became quite clear,” wrote two EPL analysts.Footnote ⁹²

Violence from the right did not diminish either. The paramilitaries contributed enthusiastically to the effort to encourage Esperanza's shift to the right. Their systematic campaign of violence zeroed in on the more radical, unarmed members of the organization. Unionists and political activists testified to the Andean Commission that most of those assassinated in the early 1990s were “outspoken members of union negotiating committees.”Footnote ⁹³ As was the case in the 1980s, right-wing violence overwhelmingly targeted the unarmed, civic opposition, rather than the guerrillas.

Because factions of both guerrilla groups remained under arms, the right publicly blamed them for many of the attacks on union leaders. But the drastic increase in antiunion violence that accompanied the paramilitary takeover of the area made this theory somewhat dubious. The split in the EPL provided further space for paramilitary action, by allowing the paramilitaries to “assassinate the most radical unionists who were causing them the most trouble” and blame the deaths on other armed actors.Footnote ⁹⁴ Although the authorship of these assassinations could not always be documented, the political identity of the victims was clear. It was the most outspoken members of the left within Sintrainagro and the EPL who were targeted.

Among the EPL members who demobilized, many simply chose to reject their former leaders and withdraw from their organization's new incarnation and alliance with the right. One study, based on interviews with former EPL combatants, noted with surprise the extent to which “ex-combatants totally discredited their own political party”Footnote ⁹⁵

The government's weak social and financial commitment to the reinsertion process, and the armed attacks coming from the remaining guerrillas under arms, led reinserted EPL members to form their own self-defense organization, the Comandos Populares. Agudelo describes the Comandos as groups made up of workers and ex-combatants who armed themselves purely in self-defense against EPL dissidents. He distinguished the Comandos from the paramilitaries, who took up arms in pursuit of political and economic goals: The Comandos, he explained, “are more of an informal expression, without a common political project … They have engaged in this type of response because they have suffered attacks by the dissidents, not for any other reason.”Footnote ⁹⁶

By 1995 the Comandos were operating throughout the banana zone. Despite Agudelo's protestations, human rights organizations saw little to distinguish this new armed group from the paramilitaries. Although they may have initially organized in self-defense, they evolved into a “true paramilitary group” targeting union leaders and leftist political activists, especially on plantations where the Communist Party and the Patriotic Union were strong.Footnote ⁹⁷ The Andean Commission also recorded many accusations that the Comandos were “acting as paramilitaries, armed and supported by the Army and the national government.”Footnote ⁹⁸ The Fact-finding Commission found clear links between the Comandos and plantation owners, as well as the Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad (DAS—comparable to the FBI). Some plantations seemed to maintain members of the Comandos—who were not workers—on their payrolls.Footnote ⁹⁹

The violence continued to plague union and workers even as the “social pact” was consolidated. Sintrainagro's vice president—a reinserted EPL member—was killed by EPL dissidents in January 1993, and its Secretary General murdered a month later by the Comandos.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In April, EPL dissidents killed an overseer and three workers on a banana plantation, claiming that the three had been working openly with the Comandos.Footnote ¹⁰¹ After forty workers were killed in a single week in April, 3500 workers spent six days occupying the Apartadó sports coliseum.Footnote ¹⁰² To outsiders, the violence appeared inexplicable: leftist organizations and guerrilla groups turning on each other and on unionized workers. This interpretation, though, discounts several crucial elements: the violent imposition of paramilitary control, the purging of the left from the EPL and Sintrainagro, and the warming of relations between the latter two and Augura.

The divisions inside the union, as well as the violence from outside, severely hampered its effectiveness. The Andean Commission observed in 1994 that the community could no longer turn to the union as an ally in protesting human rights violations. On one occasion, Sintrainagro's new leaders refused to join a civic strike called in response to the killing of a union activist, and the strike had to be called off.Footnote ¹⁰³

The “social pact” however, advanced. The 1991 agreement had established a social security fund, and in 1993 the state social security system began to offer medical services to workers, shifting this out of the hands of the banana companies. The companies also agreed on a levy on each box of bananas exported to support a housing fund, contributing to the elimination of the plantation barracks system.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Yet the violence only increased. Paramilitary forces took complete control of the banana zone in the beginning of 1995.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ While there had been paramilitary activity in Urabá from the mid-1980s, they became a permanent, controlling presence in the northern towns of Urabá in 1993, and in the banana towns in 1995. The level of violence, and displacement, increased sharply in late 1994 through early 1995, provoking a veritable flood of displacement; over 20,000 between November 1994 and May 1995.

The banana growers appear to have been deeply implicated in the entrance of the paramilitaries in Urabá. Officials of United Fruit subsidiary Banadex met with paramilitary leader Carlos Castaño in 1997 and arranged to provide monthly support payments that totaled close to $2 million before the multinational sold its Colombian subsidiary in 2004, in part because it feared prosecution after the US government declared the paramilitaries to be a foreign terrorist organization.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Hundreds of deaths followed in the wake of paramilitary takeovers of Turbo, Carepa, and other cities in the banana region.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Both the police and the army worked openly with the paramilitaries, and the DAS, made up partly of reinserted EPL members, worked closely with the Esperanza-affiliated Comandos Populares.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Although there was violence on all sides, the results were lopsided. By the end of the 1990s, the right was in control of Urabá. The remaining leftists were sytematically purged, assassinated, and displaced from Sintrainagro, from local governments, and from the region.

The transformation of the union and of local politics thus occurred in the context of the paramilitary takeover and the banana industry's insistence on militarization and regional unity to support its international competitiveness. Subsequent events confirmed the interrelated nature of these developments. In June of 1997, Esperanzados demanded that Apartadó's independent mayor, Gloria Cuartas, step down. Couching their position in terms of defense of the banana industry upon which the region depended, they argued that her opposition to military and paramilitary control constituted an unacceptable threat, “endangering Colombia's presence in international markets.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The now Esperanzado-led Sintrainagro joined the Army in an anti-Cuartas “peace march,” while the growers gave workers the day off and provided transportation to the Apartadó stadium for the event.Footnote ¹¹⁰ When army general Rito Alejo del Río was removed from Urabá in 1998—and then forced into retirement in 1999—because of his links with the paramilitaries, Sintrainagro president Guillermo Rivera was a featured speaker at a May, 1999 event organized in his honor by Augura and at the Hotel Tequendama in Bogotá.Footnote ¹¹¹

The two-year contract signed in May 2002 included bonuses, company contributions to a housing fund and an education fund, to be managed by representatives of the union and Augura. Oswaldo Cuadrado Simanca, president of Sintrainagro, “emphasized the harmony and good will in which the negotiations took place, and declared that the agreement benefited both parties.”Footnote ¹¹²

The deep divisions between Sintrainagro and the Colombian left—including the majority of the trade-union movement—were palpable in the union's stance on national issues. When Colombian president Álvaro Uribe Vélez visited Urabá in 2002, Mario Agudelo lauded his “contribution to the pacification of Antioquia” when he was governor.Footnote ¹¹³ In September 2003, when President Uribe presented a referendum supporting his neoliberal economic package to Colombian voters, the CUT and the left campaigned actively against the referendum, while Sintrainagro supported it. Oswaldo Cuadrado Simanca, Sintrainagro's president, appeared on the presidential news agency on September 25 to publicize his union's stand.Footnote ¹¹⁴ (The referendum did not pass.)

Sintrainagro reaffirmed its identification with the Uribe government and the army after a February, 2005 massacre in the Urabá Peace Community of San José de Apartadó. The community is one of several in Colombia's war zones, established with the help of the Catholic church, to create a space that rejects the presence of all armed actors. Echoing President Uribe's comments in the wake of the massacre, a Sintrainagro press release derided the concept of Peace Communities, insinuating that they collaborated with the FARC, that they were subversive by virtue of rejecting the presence of the Army, and emphasizing that the international NGOs that supported them, including Amnesty International and Peace Brigades International, were also suspect.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Sintrainagro and Global Solidarity

Globalization may have contributed to Sintrainagro's rapprochement with management, the political far right, and the paramilitaries on the domestic front, but the banana industry's multinational nature also offered the union an avenue for a different kind of innovative organizing internationally. In 1993, Latin-American banana workers responded to the relentless downward pressure that the companies were exerting on their wages and working conditions by uniting in a region-wide confederation aimed at challenging corporate strategies of pitting workers against each other in the proverbial “race to the bottom.” Just as Sintrainagro was cementing its ties with the far right and the banana growers at home, its leaders joined banana unions from Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Panama in Costa Rica to form the Latin-American Coordinating Committee of Banana Workers Unions (COLSIBA). “COLSIBA is itself an unprecedented achievement,” writes historian Dana Frank, “the product of new global strategic thinking on the part of trade unions … In all of Latin America, COLSIBA is the only organization that joins unions in the same sector across national lines in an autonomous regional coalition.”Footnote ¹¹⁶

In 2001 COLSIBA signed a historic agreement with Chiquita—by far the largest banana producer in Latin America, although not in Colombia—guaranteeing labor standards and worker rights.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Labor organizations and their supporters worldwide hailed the agreement as a pathbreaking achievement with a historically notorious union-busting company, and a landmark for cross-border solidarity among workers in multinational corporations.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Solidarity organizations from the US/Labor Education in the Americas Project (US/LEAP) to the European Banana Action Network (EUROBAN) and BananaLink (UK) have acclaimed COLSIBA, and Sintrainagro's role, but have remained rather silent on the context that created today's Sintrainagro.Footnote ¹¹⁹

As unions worldwide are confronting global corporations like Chiquita, and groping for new ways to confront the rapidly-evolving global economy, Sintrainagro and COLSIBA's transnational work truly seems to develop a potential model for global labor solidarity. Yet, paradoxically, Sintrainagro's transnational initiatives have not challenged the local social order, and Augura has looked benignly on Sintrainagro's international activism. Because wages and costs for Colombian banana producers are high with respect to those in Ecuador and some Central American countries, Colombian producers actually stood to benefit from international bodies' focus on addressing the dreadful conditions in Ecuador. Improved conditions in Ecuador and Central America, and on Chiquita plantations, would increase the costs paid by Augura's rivals in the global banana trade, and make Colombia's bananas more internationally competitive.

Although voluntary standards agreements like those signed by Chiquita may appear to be an innovative alternative to (or expansion on) traditional forms of labor organizing, practical experience with the Chiquita agreement reveals the continued importance of unions. Because no real enforcement mechanisms exist, the agreement has only really been meaningful on those plantations where there is a strong union to enforce it. Otherwise, it is up to the company itself to evaluate its compliance. Even as COLSIBA and Chiquita signed their agreement, and labor solidarity organizations applauded Chiquita for taking the “high road,” the company was maintaining its version of labor peace in Urabá by funneling money to the paramilitaries.Footnote ¹²⁰

A COLSIBA study five years after the 2001 Chiquita agreement concluded rather gloomily that the company had sold off its Colombia operations (in 2004), was threatening to abandon its Panama and Honduras holdings as well if workers there refused to renounce their collective bargaining agreements, was shifting its Guatemala production to nonunionized Pacific coast plantations, and was exploring expansion in nonunionized Angola. “A company can be certified in one country and benefit from the publicity of this certification in consuming countries for all its range of produce, while they misbehave in a neighboring plantation or shift plantations to non-unionized areas.” Such an agreement, COLSIBA concluded, “only works effectively in countries where unions are (still) strong enough to come to the negotiating table.”Footnote ¹²¹

Assessing the New Sintrainagro

Under extraordinarily adverse conditions, Colombian banana workers have pressed the boundaries and sought the weak points in the system. Despite severe repression and losses, they have found ways to organize. Nevertheless, they have also suffered untold violence and been forced into uncomfortable and dangerous alliances in order to survive.

For those unions that have decided to confront the challenge of the global race to the bottom and the repression of unions worldwide as part of a global management strategy to increase profits by finding—or creating—ever-cheaper sources of labor, Colombia, with the world's highest rate of violence against unionists, is an obvious place to work. Solidarity activists are understandably reluctant to become involved in disputes internal to Colombia's labor movement. However, a Canadian trade-union delegation reported significant concern when members visited Urabá in 1997. The members noted a marked contrast between Sintrainagro and the rest of Colombia's union movement, as well as between Sintrainagro and the other social organizations in the region.

Everywhere in Colombia, unions were under siege by right-wing paramilitary groups, yet showed “incredible determination to carry forward the struggle against virtually impossible odds.” In Urabá, however, Sintrainagro was alienated from the labor movement's traditional allies on the left. All political tendencies except for the EPL had been eliminated from the union. Union leaders expressed sharp disagreement with local peace and human rights organizations and offered a benign view of the paramilitaries. Union leaders “never acknowledged the abuses committed by the military in the region nor the links between the military and paramilitary forces,” the Canadians reported. The military commander in the region Rito Alejo del Río “had only words of praise” for Sintrainagro, describing it as “the model of models.” Finally, the group noted that “there are hundreds of former members of this union who are now displaced in other regions of the country who would undoubtedly have a very different story to tell regarding the particular leadership that currently heads Sintrainagro. In our view, their testimonies should form part of the final assessment of the role this union is now playing in the Urabá region.”Footnote ¹²²

Other outside observers take a more positive view. Alistair Smith of the New Internationalist had only praise for the “experiment in peace” in Urabá. “Genocidal massacres have given way to an inspiring process of peaceful reconstruction,” he writes. He applauds positive social relations between workers and managers and excellent contracts, arguing that the union has successfully moved beyond old ideological divisions.Footnote ¹²³

Sintrainagro has developed particularly strong links with European unions. It joined the Geneva-based International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers' Associations (IUF) around 1998. The Federation of Danish Workers and the Danish government began a thee-year joint training program with Sintrainagro in 1997, and extended it for six more years in 2000. The Finnish Center for Union Solidarity runs a similar program, while a Spanish union is funding the building of a 450-student elementary school for the union in La Chinita, the Esperanza-dominated neighborhood of Apartadó.Footnote ¹²⁴

The high level of violence in Urabá has clearly played a role in forcing the region's banana workers into the contradictory alliances of the past three decades. Romero suggests that Urabá's banana workers were “most likely not really as revolutionary, before, as the authorities accused them of being, and that today they are not really as reactionary as their opponents claim. Rather, they have had to adjust according to changes in the relational contexts in which they have had to act.”Footnote ¹²⁵ However, Romero may exaggerate when he suggests that “the last decade's revolutionaries have today opted for citizenship.”Footnote ¹²⁶ As the Canadian Trade Union Delegation point out, the “last decade's revolutionaries” may have been killed and displaced, and replaced by a very different leadership and base. Nevertheless, under rapidly-changing conditions, extreme political violence, and little room for maneuver, Colombia's banana workers and their union have continued their evolving struggle for better working conditions, and for solidarity and a decent life.

The study of Urabá's unions suggests a number of troubling conclusions about the possibilities open to labor under a regime of neoliberal globalization. First, although the particular historical juncture led governments and employers in Latin America (as well as other parts of the world) to expand worker rights in the mid-twentieth century, at least in certain (urban and manufacturing) sectors, older management strategies for the control of labor, including overt violence, were revived and expanded at the end of the century. Tactics often associated with contemporary globalization, like increased corporate power through the diminution of the state's social role, and dispersal of production sites to exert downward pressure on wages and conditions, may be new to the manufacturing sector, but they have long been the norm in colonial and neocolonial export agriculture.

Nor is the Urabá case anomalous. On the contrary, for some corporate and state powerbrokers, Urabá suggests the wave of the future. As the Houston Chronicle reported, “The paramilitary rampage in Urabá had implications far beyond the banana fields. According to a recent Colombian government report, the paramilitaries' strategy and tactics in Uraba served as their ‘modus operandi’ when the militias took their anti-guerrilla campaign to new areas of Colombia. ‘It became a national model and many people applauded,’ said León Valencia, a political analyst in Bogotá.”Footnote ¹²⁷ The United States considers Colombian president Álvaro Uribe its closest regional ally, continues to pour money into Colombia's military, and declared the Colombian case a “good model” for US efforts elsewhere in the world.Footnote ¹²⁸

A combination of extraordinary repression against the left, and a management appeal for collaboration for regional salvation, created the context for Sintrainagro's political transformation from one of Colombia's most radical unions to one allied with the right. But while Sintrainagro was forced into accommodation with the right locally, it maintained and even took a leadership role in cross-border solidarity and organizing—one of labor's most innovative responses to the challenges posed by corporations' global reach, and one typically associated with the left.

Sintrainagro's experience suggests that internationalism may be a strategy for a union that has little leverage on the home front, even one that has been forced into a cozy relationship with management. Internationalism can tend uncomfortably towards protectionism, especially when management joins or leads the struggle against labor violations elsewhere. As globalization undermines the capacity of individual unions to confront challenges locally, it consequently weakens the links in any international alliance. Although banana unions are in some ways at the forefront of creative cross-border strategies, they, like other unions, are still searching for ways to realize their potential collective strength.

While many of the world's workers are only now beginning to recognize and confront the challenges of neoliberal globalization, banana workers have been confronting its precursors for over a century. Sintrainagro's current configuration of labor-management collaboration at home and labor internationalism abroad may be unusual, but the spectrum of responses that the banana companies have used to increase their profits at the expense of labor and human rights may become more characteristic than exceptional as the neoliberal world order consolidates. The experience of Colombia's banana workers and their unions is indeed a sobering one.