Peter Chapman, journalist and author of Jungle Capitalists: A Story of Globalisation, Greed and Revolution, abandoned the excesses of the London Book Fair last week to talk about his book to Edinburgh’s West End Waterstone’s. The story of the United Fruit Company, which engineered violent regime changes in Central and South America throughout the twentieth century, is a mind-boggling exposé of how corporate interests can wield an extraordinary amount of sway over governments, in countries from tiny Costa Rica to the American CIA itself. Peter’s talk fired up the audience and got a surprising number of laughs, considering that the subjects at hand included oppression, suicide, a sinister propaganda machine and the total death of the banana (generations of plants have been cloned for so long now that they haven’t evolved to fight the constantly-evolving banana diseases).
After the Q&A, when Peter had tied up his talk with a couple of fascinating stories about encounters with Cuban guerrillas and Nick Cave, I headed home with the realisation that I would never again look at a Chiquita banana without thinking of its bloody, ‘complex’ history.
But now the story of United Fruit seems to be everywhere I look; or maybe what I mean is that the murky spin-machine of corporate social responsibility and the corporate lobby in government have been scandalising people for a lot longer than I’d guessed. A few days after the reading, I was sitting in London’s National Theatre, enthralled by Simon Russell Beale’s satanic munitions millionaire in GB Shaw’s Major Barbara. Beale’s character, Andrew Undershaft, is eventually provoked by his wimpish, naïve son Stephen, who protests when his father mocks the British political leaders of the time (around 1905):
UNDERSHAFT (with a touch of brutality). The government of your country! I am the government of your country [. . .] Do you suppose that you and half a dozen amateurs like you, sitting in a row in that foolish gabble shop, can govern Undershaft and Lazarus? No, my friend: you will do what pays us. You will make war when it suits us, and keep peace when it doesn’t [. . .] you will discover that my want is a national need.
Like a menacing, fictional precursor of the wily United Fruit bosses, Undershaft is happy to make money from something directly connected to violence and evil. He and business partner Lazarus have their eyes on the prize – financial gain above all else, and a definite lack of interest in by-the-book politics.
In Shaw’s version of events, the idealistic, fiercely religious daughter Barbara is finally won over to the dark side, ruled by her father. She gives up her Salvation Army work to throw herself into life as the mistress of a factory town, as if to say there isn’t any way to influence the machine other than becoming part of it.
Today United Fruit’s irreversible legacy in Latin America, like the concept of Shaw’s imaginary corporation, is undoubtedly being reincarnated into contemporary business models. Corporate social action is a much more powerful engineer of change than individual campaigning – whether it results in Sir Peter Vardy’s Emmanuel schools, Shell’s Flower Valley or Marks & Spencer’s fair trade guarantee. If, like me, you are uneasy at the thought of schoolkids being taught that creationism is right and the supermarket is a better choice than the local street market, it also remains ambiguously positive, and a troubling reminder of how totally we are governed by money.
