Angela Corrias spoke to local Dulwich author Peter Chapman about his book Jungle Capitalists, an in-depth look at globalisation and the banana trade.
Every era has its own buzzword, and in the contemporary world this is globalisation. The controversial relations between a globalised economy and domestic politics is explained in Peter Chapman’s last book, “Jungle Capitalists”, the enthralling and dirty fortunes of the powerful United Fruit Company.
The story kicks off with a suicide and the unhappy man is Eli Black, the head of United Brands, a huge food corporation. The press at that time praised the “exceptional morality” of Black in the awkward attempt to justify his extreme act that instead provoked Peter Chapman’s hilarity.
Chapman’s natural wit and searing language mercilessly sift globalisation’s initial pitfalls and the unscrupulous choices of United Fruit’s most powerful magnates, from the attempted coup in Fidel Castro’s Cuba in 1961 to the heinous massacre of striking workers in Colombia. “You know”, says Peter Chapman amused, “banana republics can make people laugh here, but in South and Central America the banana is a very serious business”.
The book was released in 2007 but the research started in the 1970s, when Chapman, who now lives in Dulwich with his family, was a correspondent for the BBC and the Guardian in Central America, the Caribbean and Mexico: “I didn’t even know I was doing the research for a book, but finally I realised I had collected so much interesting material during those years and so I started writing a book about the sadly famous banana corporation that actually caused coups, wars, invasions. When I was in Guatemala and Honduras I also talked to the people who worked in the plantations and got primary sources”.
The United Fruit Company can be considered to be one of the most symbolic actors that marked the birth of globalisation, but the questions are “whether or not transnational corporations act as primary agents of globalisation, and whether they shape globalisation in terms of causing political change?” “It’s like the chicken and the egg” says Peter Chapman, “which came first?
The facts surrounding the United Fruit Company are the best example of a transnational corporation interfering in a ruthless manner in the politics of Central American countries. And this is exactly as I see it, in other words multinational corporations today too have an important role in creating and shaping culture, they can create demand themselves. And this is what amazed me in the 1970s, that they could actually have a role in changing culture and politics, a central role in the society in general.”
In “Jungle Capitalists”, the author tackles the sinister events around the first Central American multinational corporation, from its heyday to its end, with a witty, entertaining and offbeat style, highlighting how years of wrong and brutal choices had turned against its interests. In Chapman’s own terms, “United Fruit’s anti-democratic tendencies in the past had done much to encourage death squad activities. Now events followed a familiar pattern”. As an ancestor of the contemporary multinational corporations, United Fruit was known as El Pulpo (the Octopus, in Spanish), referring to its greedy tentacles reaching a vast area of land damaging smaller farmers.
The book is finely written and intriguing, and it’s able to make a stunned reader aware of what unbelievable events can happen around a so common fruit such as the banana.
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