What happened in the banana massacre at Ciénaga, Colombia?

The banana massacre at Ciénaga

La masacre de las bananeras

6 December 1928. In November 1928 the workers of the United Fruit Company's banana plantations in Magdalena, on Colombia's Caribbean coast, struck for written contracts, a…

Draft: not yet checked against its sources.

Where: The Spanish Caribbean, Colombia

What happened

In November 1928 the workers of the United Fruit Company's banana plantations in Magdalena, on Colombia's Caribbean coast, struck for written contracts, a six-day week and pay in money rather than company coupons. The government declared a state of siege. Before dawn on 6 December the army, under General Carlos Cortés Vargas, fired on strikers and their families gathered in the main square of Ciénaga. The number of dead has never been established: the army said nine; the young liberal Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, who denounced the government in Congress the next year, spoke of hundreds. The massacre became a founding memory of the Colombian labour movement and, through Gabriel García Márquez's Cien años de soledad, where three thousand die and the town forgets, a story the whole world knows.

Say it

En diciembre de 1928 el ejército disparó contra los trabajadores bananeros en Ciénaga.

In December 1928 the army fired on the banana workers in Ciénaga.

Why it matters

The bananeras made 'United Fruit' a byword across Central America and the Caribbean for foreign companies that ran countries, and gave Spanish-language literature its most famous scene of political forgetting.

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Connected

Sources

  1. La Masacre de las Bananeras — Señal Memoria (RTVC, Colombia)