You probably never heard of Ciénaga, but it played an important role in the history of the cultivation of bananas. Forgotten by time and often bypassed by tourists, it’s fifteen minutes of fame seem forever tied to a blood bath and the man who dared to write about it: García Márquez.
Ciénaga lies on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, between Barranquilla and Santa Marta. It has a lovely beach and is home to about 100 000 inhabitants. Arriving in the little town on a public bus at the exact 94th anniversary of the tragic event, I was transported back in time. A twenty-minute, 4000 Peso bus ride from Bello Horizonte, the fashionable suburb of Santa Marta with its shiny white high-rise apartment towers and modern Zazué mall, but a world apart, got me there. The bus dropped me off at a plaza with a towering sculpture called Prometheus of a muscular man on top of a machine gun marking the site of the atrocity.
I was astonished to learn that what at first looked like a traditional colonial city was actually constructed in the 1920s, financed with banana money in a deceptive, faux neoclassical style. At the time, the US-owned Banana Company started a banana fever sweeping over northern Colombia. Subsequently, the company was renamed The United Fruit Company, and today is called Chiquita.
The greed to extract large profits at the lowest possible cost led to indenturing a large workforce subjected to subhuman working conditions. On December 5th/6th, 1928, several thousand workers gathered for a strike in Ciénaga. They were shot by the Colombian military as the government felt pressured to act to preserve its US export markets.
At record speed, the authorities had the bodies gathered and unceremoniously dumped into the sea. García Márquez recalled the gaslighting that followed in his Nobel prize-winning fictional novel: One hundred Years of Solitude. He wrote of 3000 dead when there were probably less than 2000 bodies.
Unfortunately, the efforts to keep the workforce from unionizing became more sophisticated and hands-off in the later part of the 20th century. Chiquita paid more than $1.7 million to paramilitary death squads in the United Self-Defense Groups of Colombia (AUC), designated by the U.S. Government as a terrorist organization to squash efforts to unionize. A U.S. court has already convicted Chiquita of committing a federal crime, paying a $25 million fine to the U.S. Government. I wonder if any of that money ever made it to the murdered victims’ families in the region.
Walking around the quaint place, being greeted everywhere with a friendly: “Buenas Dias,” I felt this laid-back town deserved to be remembered for something more positive than an atrocity. It was a challenge, however. Regrettably, the second story of the city also has a sad ending. Local legend says that Tomasita, a local girl, was swallowed up by a giant crocodile. A large sculpture on the Malecon- the beach boardwalk reminds us of the event, memorialized in songs and an annual festival.
I held out some small coins to a man in exchange for some Bananas. Cheerful Gabi sold me a bottle of water.
A man approached me on the main square, the Parque Plaza del Centenario, offering his guide services. I later learned that he was called Yeiner Alberto Mendoza. Seeing my lack of enthusiasm for a guide, he offered to take me to the García Márquez house. A once handsome but now unloved two-story building stood on a corner with only a small memorial plaque. Márquez’s brother Luis Enrique had lived there, and while staying with him, the author had used it to describe the Buendia family house in his literary masterpiece ‘One hundred years of Solitude.’ The building, locally called the blue palace, seemed to scream: ‘Take care of me! I could be the finest tourist attraction in town.’ But it was clear from the dilapidated state of the surrounding buildings that this would be some time off.
Yeiner directed me towards what seemed like a makeshift tourism office in one of the historic houses lining the plaza, which doubled as a gallery. His 74-year-old father, Pedro Mendoza Olivera, was in attendance. A self-taught painter in a charming folkloric style which he himself called primitivist, showed me his work in a well-worn folder of photos as most of his paintings were already sold. Newspaper clippings and invitations from gallery openings attested to his fame as a local painter.
Later, back in Santa Marta, I was delighted to recognize some of his work on the wall of the fancy restaurant Casa Magdalena. I sat in the gallery and chatted with the two men in my broken Spanish.
Somehow the discussion turned political. Well-dressed, handsome Yeiner was a Conservative and felt nothing was good about the recently elected exguerrillero president Gustavo Petro and his vice president Francia Márquez, the second African-descent woman to hold such a position in the world after Camilla Harris. I gathered that his biggest fear was that the country would descend into chaos and lawlessness. His father, Pedro, was a Liberal who expressed the hope that with the new government, good things might come to those who have had so little in the past. The division between the traditional Conservatives and progressive Liberals is deep-rooted in Colombian society to this day. Different parties have replaced the two old ones, but as I was observing that the ideological differences even ran through families. It has been at the root of La Violencia, which started a vicious cycle of armed conflicts. Passionately Pedro gesticulated with his expressive hands as he spoke faster and faster, advocating for social justice. I did not understand a word anymore and felt it was not my place to have a political opinion in a country not my own, whose complex, brutal history I had not lived through. My thoughts drifted off. I wondered if those buying bananas at a super market in the US would ever give some thought to the true cost of the fruit and the armies of impoverished laborers in South America who, to this day, pay the actual price for it.
Sources:
https://www.cienaga-magdalena.gov.co
https://earthrights.org
https://visualizingtheamericas.utm.utoronto.ca/key-moments/1928-massacre