Events such as the Ciénaga massacre caused opinions about the tropical fruit industry to shift. Gone were the encomia published during the early 1900s. In their place were indictments consistent with the anti-corporate attitudes that gained wide circulation in the United States during the 1930s. Representative of the new literature was a frequently-quoted denunciation of United Fruit penned by Charles D. Kepner and Jay Soothill:
[This] powerful company has throttled competitors, dominated governments, manacled railroads, ruined planters, choked cooperatives, domineered over workers, fought organized labor, and exploited consumers. Such usage of power by a corporation of a strongly industrialized nation in relatively weak foreign countries constitutes a variety of economic imperialism.44
This denunciation, which did not even concede that cheap bananas were a boon to consumers, resonated in Latin America. Most famously, Chilean poet Pablo Neruda condemned El Pulpo (The Octopus) in his Canto General of 1950 for “reserving for itself the juiciest part” of the Western Hemisphere, staging an “opera buffa” in the banana republics it spawned, and making off with “the treasure of our sunken lands.”45
However, exercises of power by the company or its local allies did not cement the multinational’s hegemony over the tropical lands that were the source of its produce. To the contrary, opposing forces were often galvanized. As Marcelo Bucheli notes in his history of Colombia’s banana industry, public revulsion over the killings in Ciénaga helped bring down the conservative regime that had been in power since 1904 and had provided tax waivers, cheap land, and other inducements to foreign investors. President Enrique Olaya, the center-left victor in the 1930 election, disappointed his radical supporters by not instituting a tax on banana exports and by extending United Fruit’s lease on a railroad serving its zone of operations. However, President Alfonso López, who succeeded Olaya and was from the same political party, signed Colombia’s first agrarian reform law, which among other things strengthened the property rights of peasants who had occupied the uncultivated fringes of large estates. Unions received support as well, including in the banana sector.46
After World War II, multinationals’ prerogatives were even trimmed back in Central America, where national authorities formerly had spared no effort to propitiate foreign investors in the fruit industry. Costa Rica and Honduras modified old concession agreements, which had exempted foreign investors from taxes on their profits, in 1949. In 1943, Costa Rica instituted a labor code that established the rights of all workers, including in rural areas, to organize and strike; similar codes were adopted in Nicaragua in 1945 and in Guatemala in 1947.47 Honduras did not follow suit immediately, although a strike in 1954 resulted in the recognition by United Fruit and Standard Fruit of a single union representing all the employees of the two multinationals.48
During the late 1940s and early 1950s, regimes preoccupied with communist influence, especially within the labor movement, came to power in most of Central America. The leading exception was Guatemala, where Jacobo Arbenz, a former army officer with leftist sympathies, was elected president in 1951. Not content with raising duties on fruit exports and introducing taxes on industry profits, as was happening in neighboring countries, Arbenz’s government opted for “a head-on clash with [United Fruit] over land reform and financial compensation for expropriated land.”49 To be specific, an order was issued in 1952 that uncultivated areas in holdings larger than 269 hectares be redistributed to rural households with little or no land. The previous owners of confiscated properties, including United Fruit, were to be paid off with bonds valued according to those owners’ tax declarations (which invariably amounted to a small fraction of the market value of real estate), paying annual interest of 3 percent, and maturing in twenty-five years.50
All told, Arbenz’s agrarian reform redistributed 600,000 idle hectares to 100,000 rural families. Of those 600,000 hectares, 160,000 were taken from United Fruit, which formerly had possessed 220,000 hectares in Guatemala but kept 85 percent of its holdings in reserve. Even though the company insisted that its land was worth $185 per hectare or more, it only received bonds with a face value of approximately $7.50 per hectare in compensation.51 In response, The Octopus mounted an aggressive publicity campaign aimed at convincing U.S. leaders that Guatemala had become a hotbed of communist subversion.52 Whether or not the campaign was as influential as some writers claim, the U.S. government grew much more antagonistic toward Arbenz after the inauguration of President Dwight Eisenhower in 1953. The following year, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) engineered a coup d’état that drove the Guatemalan leader into permanent exile.53
Enter the Ecuadorians
Despite close collaboration between United Fruit and the U.S. government before and during the Guatemalan coup, antitrust charges were filed against the company a few months after Arbenz’s overthrow. Four years of litigation ensued, finally culminating in a consent decree signed in 1958 that obliged United Fruit to spin off railroads in Central America and marketing operations in the United States. The decree also required the divestiture of one-third of the industry leader’s agricultural holdings.54
United Fruit had to deal with the antitrust lawsuit and other challenges without Samuel Zemurray. Seventy-seven years old and suffering from Parkinson’s disease, the last of the banana industry’s pioneers had no choice but to step down in 1954, this time never to resume the career he had embarked on at eighteen. McCann served under Sam the Banana Man, as he fondly refers to his former boss, and makes clear that Zemurray put his stamp on United Fruit: “His company and his character were almost exactly matched: … tough, no-nonsense, quick to act.” McCann’s employment continued after Zemurray’s departure, which in his eyes diminished the company—causing it to become “forceful one minute, indecisive the next, living as much off its own past as for its future.”55
The years following Zemurray’s retirement were no time for indecisive management given the stiff competition The Octopus was encountering, from U.S. firms and South American entrepreneurs alike. Certainly, Noboa and other Ecuadorians were not to be taken lightly. Their environmental advantages were undeniable: a tropical setting ideally suited to tropical fruit production that admittedly was farther from leading markets in Europe and the eastern United States but that also was free of hurricanes, which were (and remain) a constant menace in the Caribbean Basin. The Ecuadorians had nonenvironmental advantages as well: being located in a port city with a long tradition of international commerce, complete with the business services needed to win over customers throughout the world. As is documented in the pages that follow, the skills and capacities of exporters based in Guayaquil exactly matched the entrepreneurial requirements for success in the international banana business.
Whether or not creative destruction has occurred in Ecuador can be debated. Defined narrowly, this process, which economist Joseph Schumpeter examined during the early 1900s,56 involves major strides in productive technology, which Ecuadorians have never undertaken. However, entrepreneurs such as Noboa were creative in that they established something that did not exist before: a tropical fruit industry in Latin America that was not controlled by major corporations headquartered in the United States. This development was also destructive: the emergence after World War II of a large and independent source of bananas south of the Panama Canal directly undermined the monopoly The Octopus had enjoyed previously thanks to the control of agricultural resources farther north, in the Caribbean Basin. Thus, the commercial rivalry coming out of Ecuador did not confine itself to the remote margins of United Fruit’s