“Mamita Yunai” is about the United Fruit Company

Fallas, Carlos Luis. Mamita Yunai (San José, C.R.: Editorial Costa Rica, 1941, 2019), pp. 267. [See Spanish below] The author was a unionized banana plantation worker in Costa Rica in the 1930s who learned to read and write despite conditions to the contrary. Mamita became his best known work. It is an excellent piece of literature, on its own, yet it also accomplishes what the author most wanted: to unveil the unquestionably villainous working conditions that made it possible for Americans to consume their bananas in those years. Have these conditions changed today?

Mamita Yunai is the ironic nickname that Spanish speaking workers used to refer to the company that employed them and which dominated the banana industry: The United Fruit Company. Yunai was the closest they could come to saying “united,” and they regarded the American firm as a wicked mother, which she apparently was. Apt title.

This is Fallas’ fictionalized memoir of the years he worked in the banana fields of Costa Rica, on the Caribbean coast, first as a liniero or line man and later as a labor union representative. In the novel he calls himself Sibajitas and describes himself as a member of a squad of laborers opening the dense jungle to install the narrow-gage rail lines that would help extract the elongated perishable fruit. Sweating from insufferable humidity and heat, swamps, snakes and swarming mosquitos, the author convinced me of the improbability of human survival especially with little or no medical services. He writes that countless men died as a result, most of them left to rot in the muddy morass, as in the case of a close friend. Local government officials are described as enablers of this situation because they were in the company pay.

The north coast of Central America is the home of many African-origin folks who appear here as United Fruit workers, alongside their Hispanic-origin co-workers. They speak pidgin English and Spanish and reside in Costa Rica or are passing through from Honduras headed to Panama looking for canal jobs there. Aboriginals from Talamanca also appear in the story because the banana fields intruded into their long-guarded territory. They’re regarded as proud enemies of Spanish conquerors but their condition, in the 1930’s, had been reduced to wretched survival.

By the way, the Prologue’s author scorns Fallas’ many critiques for suppressing this book because of his membership in the local Communist Party, crushed long ago.  The book has been translated into English.

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El autor fue un trabajador sindicalizado en las plantaciones bananeras de Costa Rica en la década de los 1930’s y aprendió a leer y escribir a pesar de tener todas las condiciones a su contra. Mamita Yunai es su obra mayor y la más conocida. La considero un trabajo literario excelente y pienso también que el autor logró lo que más quería: dejar ver las condiciones de trabajo incuestionablemente desgraciadas, que hicieron posible que los estadounidenses pudieran disfrutar de sus bananas en esos años. Han cambiado las condiciones en estos días?

“Mamita Yunai” es el apodo mordaz que los trabajadores de habla hispana usaban para referirse a la United Fruit Company, la empresa que los empleaba y que dominaba la industria bananera. “Yunai” era lo más cerca que podían llegar a decir “united,” y consideraban a la empresa norteamericana como una madre malvada, lo que aparentemente era. Título apto.

Esta es una memoria novelizada del propio Fallas cuando trabajó en los campos bananeros de Costa Rica, en la costa del Caribe, primero como “liniero” y luego como representante de un sindicato. En la novela se auto llama Sibajitas y nos dice que fue miembro de un pelotón de obreros que abría la espesa jungla para instalar las líneas ferroviarias que ayudarían a extraer la fruta amarilla y perecedera. Sudar a chorros a causa de la humedad y el calor insufrible, caminar en pantanos, aguantar serpientes y enjambres de mosquitos, el autor me convenció de la improbabilidad de la supervivencia humana, especialmente con poco o ningún servicio médico. Escribe que incontables hombres murieron como resultado, la mayoría de ellos pudriéndose en el fango, como en el caso de un amigo cercano. Describe a los oficiales de gobierno como achichinques por estar al pago de la empresa.

Gente de origen africano reside en la costa norte de Centro América y por eso aparecen aquí muchos de ellos como trabajadores de la United Fruit, al lado de sus compañeros hispanos. Hablan inglés pidgin y español y residen en Costa Rica o los describe el autor como emigrantes de Honduras dirigiéndose a Panamá en busca de trabajo. Los aborígenes de Talamanca también aparecen en esta historia porque los campos bananeros invadieron en su territorio, el que habían protegido durante la época colonial. Se les considera orgullosos enemigos de los conquistadores españoles, pero su condición en los 1930’s se había reducido a una resistencia miserable.

Por cierto, el autor del Prólogo rechaza a los críticos de Fallas porque suprimieron este libro debido a su membresía en el Partido Comunista, desbaratado ya hace mucho tiempo.

MY THOUGHTS ABOUT PRESIDENT TRUMP ON THE EVE OF HIS MID TERM ELECTIONS

Is there anything good to say about Donald Trump’s administration on the eve of the November 6^th elections?

 Short answer:

No. I must confess I’m bending backward in trying to answer this question. But, I can say the following, in trying to be honest with myself and with you and be as fair as possible with this man that we have in the White House:

Yes, there are a couple of things to which I give a reluctant but very limited endorsement. One, is the issue of trade, and the other is immigration.

Beyond these two issues I cannot find anything positive in Trump’s administration. I conclude below that he is a danger to America and to the world.

Longer answer:

Regarding trade with China

On this topic I endorse the direction of his thinking. I say “thinking” because, as you know, he is unable to explain anything intelligently. He can’t say more than 5 meaningful words about any idea or policy. So, I can only refer to the actions executed in his name by his top officials. Knowing, or guessing at the direction of his thinking, they assemble the facts, he nods in approval, barely reading a page or more of what they write, and they produce a Trump action or policy. I think that’s the way his administration is running.

His nod, in this case, recognizes that our trade relationship with China is not right. I agree. The Chinese governments makes demands of American companies wanting to do business there that our government generally does not require of foreign companies wanting to do business in the U.S. In some cases, our firms are prodded to share critically important internal information with local Chinese officials. Apple, Google and Amazon are cases at the top of an iceberg there.

This puts our American firms in jeopardy. The fact that the Chinese practice a form socialism is very much involved here, and that fact changes the playing field, but that’s a huge and separate topic. Chinese muscling American companies is unfair in any case. (Curiously, Mr. Trump hardly ever complains that almost everything we buy at the store is made in China.) There are many other one-sided situations that put our companies and our country against the wall there.

For those of you following these matters you may agree that Obama didn’t push very hard in trying to find a balanced relationship with the Chinese and Bush didn’t either.

So, what is my beef? Why do I give Mr. Trump a failing grade? The answer is that while I support his facing off with the Chinese about trade matters, his approach has been to throw the baby out with the bath water. To use a different metaphor, instead of fixing the house he is wrecking it with a giant backhoe. The tariffs (import taxes) he has ordered on Chinese goods arriving at our ports have the effect of a wrecking machine.

And, how have the Chinese answered? With more tariffs against things we sell to them, in other words, more wrecking machines. It’s the Hatfield’s versus the McCoys. Shoot them before they shoot you. Is that smart? Ask an American farmer about this and he’ll/she’ll tell you how they’re hurting.

If you’ve done some homework on Mr. Trump, you’ll agree with me that he is doing to the Chinese what he used to do when selling real estate in New York and New Jersey. He didn’t negotiate with his business partners, he’d try to cheat them or threaten to sue, or find ways not to pay his due if he didn’t get his way. He left a string of unpaid business partners and employees before campaigning for the presidency, and he paid only if a judge ordered it, settled quietly. That’s who the guy is. (See my book review, The Making of Donald Trump at https://carlosbgil.wordpress.com/2017/11/14/a-book-review-about-donald-trump/).

So, I give him an F for failure on trade with the Chinese even though I recognize he is looking in the right direction.

Regarding trade with Mexico

The other trade-related comment has to do with NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. We’ve had this pact with Mexico and Canada since 1994. Mr. Trump swore up and down he was going to tear it up because it was “worst trade deal the U.S. ever signed.” Now that the negotiations are done we discover he didn’t tear up anything, but claims he has. Lying and posturing is what he does. The truth is that his trade officials badgered Mexico and Canada to sweeten the agreement a bit, but not much.

We now have a NAFTA 2.0. The biggest changes have to do with all those cars we buy, made in Mexico and Canada–that they will now have more parts made in the three countries than before, 75% up from 62.5%. Another big change is that workers, mostly Americans, will begin earning $16 an hour beginning 5 years from now, but only some of them, less than half. Five years from now, did you get that? So, big deal. Amazon is paying employees $15 an hour now. American NAFTA 2.0 workers will have to wait five years to get a raise! And, NAFTA products and merchandise will cost us more money too.

So, has Mr. Trump resolved the “worst ever trade deal?” Of course not. He deserves an F for failure here too and a U for unsatisfactory in lying about it. That’s what I give him, and you should too.

Regarding immigration.

Here, again, as I read and hear about the “Central American caravan,” I bend over backwards in trying to assess this issue as honestly as possible. I theorize that when he decided to run for office, Mr. Trump discovered that our immigration program needed major repairs, but only then. Even so, I agree that it needs major work; I’ve been saying as much for a long time.

However, I am convinced that when he discovered immigration to be a hot button issue he also decided he would handle it in a red neck fashion in order to gain voter support. And, he did, and he got it. Bless our blind-sided folks, right?

You know the dismal story about Trump’s views of immigrants and immigration. Referring to people like us, and the people we’ve known all our lives in San Fernando CA, where I grew up, he called us “drug traffickers” and “rapists,” and has refused to explain or apologize so far. He doubted the efficacy of a Mexican American judge who made a decision that he didn’t like, just because the judge was Mexican American—like me! My daughter is a judge! He may as well have said that about her too! That made me so angry!

His comments about Muslims and Muslims immigrants to the U.S. tell us that he doggedly refuses to separate the few bad ones from the rest. His comments about Africans and Africa reveal his crude and abysmal ignorance of that part of the world. The fact is that all Americans of color are suspect in his juvenile brain. He is a bigot.

Our immigration program (the sum of all our immigration policies) needs fixing, for sure. Having to witness the “Central American caravan,” plodding northward as I write these words, underlines this fact. (By the way, Mexico has prevented more non-documented northward crossings than we have.) There is no doubt that our country possesses the right to control its borders, like all other countries. But, the men and women who are responsible for our immigration policies, including Mr. Trump, insist on overlooking the fact that migrants from Mexico and Central America (the biggest portion of Latin American immigrants at this time) come for jobs, primarily. They are economic migrants, for the most part. They want a better economic life, like my ancestors did, and possibly yours too. They come here because our economy attracts them, like bits of metal to a gigantic magnet and this means nothing to our government leaders. This magnetic attraction has been going on for a hundred years.

If we had recognized the economic pull decades ago and assisted Central American leaders in the creation of more jobs there, we wouldn’t have to be fretting about these Central Americans knocking at our southern door today. Have we addressed this option in a forceful and intelligent manner? No, we haven’t. The fact that Mexican illegal immigration has diminished to historic lows while Mexico’s economy has grown, is testimony to what I’m saying.

Instead of helping El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras strengthen their economies in order to create more jobs and assist them in the way the govern their countries, we’ve directed most of our efforts at the eradication of illegal drugs. It hasn’t worked a bit; money misspent.

Migrants crossing our southern border have gained more attention lately because drug gangs have taken advantage of many of them, forcing some of them to transport drugs into the U.S. While recognizing that there is a whole lot more to say about this, I cut to the core directly:

It is our demand for marijuana, methamphetamines, cocaine and other such drugs that lies at the bottom of this Trumpian scare about immigrants posing as security threats. Drug gangs in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras are endangering ordinary citizens there and further corrupting local government officials with the piles of cash they get from selling drugs to us, and now to their own people. What has Mr. Trump said about this? Besides flashing the idea of a death penalty for drug traffickers. He’s said nothing.

So, what are his flagship answers to fixing our immigration program?

Build a wall! Bar all Muslims! Separate immigrant children from their parents at the border to stop the flow of Central Americans! These simple-Simon proposals further show his incompetent leadership.

So, I give Mr. Trump an absolute failure for the way he has handled our immigration problem.

Other reasons why Mr. Trump is a total failure:

• Russian interference in our 2016 elections: everything indicates that he accepted, at the least, their interference placing him a hairline away from treasonous; illegitimate in my view;
• Global warming: he refuses to accept that our Mother Earth is being choked by industrial fumes. He doesn’t care that these gases are causing us to endure ever increasing wild weather, like the more recent hurricanes, and the end of many forms of animal and plant life. How to understand this colossal disregard? He’s not a reader to begin with, and he is protecting his business supporters who stand to lose money with earth-friendly policies;
• Good health for Americans. Mr. Trump does not seem to care that far too many Americans, especially those who support him (can you believe this?) lack health insurance and they lack health care (something he’s never been without) . He tried to kill President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, but Americans have fought back because healthcare is important for them and it appears Mr. Trump can’t stop them.
• Hatred for woman. He has no qualms in disrespecting women, all the way from Hillary Clinton to Stormy Daniels and now it’ll be Senator Elizabeth Warren. Has he ever talked about his mother? She must have done something to him to make him a misogynist when he was a child.
•  Disregard for NATO and our most important allies. Being the ignoramus that he is, he has brushed aside our vital relationships with Europe. He ignores their past internal wars and Russia’s expansionary designs on them. Mr. Trump is weakening the peace-oriented system we helped build after World War II.
• Safe and honest college education for young Americans. Mr. Trump’s education secretary has been looking for ways to protect the fake universities that cheated many young Americans. Trump University is the best example of the fraudulent institutions that preyed on American families eager to higher-educate their children. Let us not forget that he paid $25 million to keep Trump University details from being exposed in court. What shame!
• The list of Trump’s incompetent and disastrous decisions is long. Don’t you get it by now? He’s a danger to America and to the world. 

 

TAKING A LOOK AT HONDURAN GANGS

This is a portrayal of criminal gangs in Honduras and how the government there responds to them. Alberto Arce, a Spanish reporter, gathered the pertinent information sometime between 2012 and 2014 which he poured into his book (Honduras a ras de suelo, 2016) and which I reviewed on Amazon.com, separately. This is not the review. There is no English version of Arce’s book so far.

Alberto Arce

I decided the paragraphs below helped me understand why Central Americans are seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexican border in 2018. They might help you understand too. (The Spanish language title is a play on the word “honduras,” which means the hollows or deepest parts, so the title could be translated as: the depths closest to the ground).

The Associated Press assigned Arce to work and live in Honduras during the years mentioned. I am familiar with Honduras because I lived there too, many years ago; one of my children was born in Tegucigalpa, and so I have some affection for and familiarity with the country.

I believe the information below, which I’ve translated, offers a background to the petitions for asylum that Central American migrants are making at present to our federal officers stationed at our southern border. It sheds light on the dilemmas our officials must face in granting or denying asylum. The main question they must answer is, does the asylum seeker really have a “credible fear” of harm or loss of life? A positive answer may lead to asylum. This is a controversial matter today.

Honduras a ras de suelo

The text below (see citation below-my words appear in brackets) I believe is a composite of information which Arce gathered from different Honduran citizens including a taxi driver whom he mentions. It supplements what I know about Honduras (I taught the history of Central America for many years at the University of Washington). Read on.

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Gangs have existed in Tegucigalpa since the 1970’s. In the beginning they were no more than groups of youngsters from different schools who differentiated themselves according to the music they listened to, the way the dressed, or the haircuts they used, and they would fight with sticks and fists over the parks they preferred. ‘The tops,’ ‘the bottoms’ or the ‘associated wanderers’ were their names. They didn’t sell drugs nor extort people. The society to which they belonged hadn’t broken down yet.

Everything changed around the mid-1990’s. The United States, which did have a problem with violence and drugs in the suburbs, began to deport Central American immigrants back to their countries of origin. Many of them were teen agers who barely spoke Spanish and didn’t have relatives in Honduras who could help them. They began to congregate in the city parks and take care of each other. There was no interest nor capacity to deal with the new arrivees, and soon arms and drugs began to spread. My taxi cab driver Mairena, remembers it well.

At the beginning they were just deportees who wandered the streets asking for a few pennies to buy a soda while they looked after your parked car. People felt sorry for them. No one gave it much thought. No one looked ahead, and no one tried to find a solution. The police, even less, because they are under paid, ill-trained, and half-literate and, in many cases, are cousins or neighbors of the deportees themselves. They share the food they get on credit from the local stores and live in the same card-board dwellings.

The gangs are generally known as maras, a word used in the local Honduran jargon to refer to a friend. That’s the way they see each other, insecure youngsters from dysfunctional families beaten down by domestic violence.

In 1998 Hurricane Mitch destroyed a portion of the national infrastructure leaving thousands of orphans and displaced families in its wake forced to live in temporary housing. This became a recipe for the recruitment of new mareros, young maras. If you’re nobody, if you feel you don’t have anywhere to go, you have no future, no way to study something, and you’re tired of going hungry, or your step father beats you all the time, then you get into the maras.

Barrio 18 and the Salvatrucha Mara, also known as “13,” named according to the areas they originally controlled in Los Angeles, began to fight over barrios or districts in Tegucigalpa, toward the end of the 1990’s. Later, smaller groups, like the Chirizos or the Combo That Doesn’t Give Up, began taking over parts of inner city.

A large part of violence in Honduras is connected to drug trafficking. The gangs serve as transporters and sicarios [mobile assassins] for the drug cartels. Their services are often paid in kind, merchandise, which must then be monetized on the street, by peddling drugs in small amounts. They also charge a “war tax,” classic “protection” extortion. Most taxi cabs and city buses as well as businesses find themselves obligated to pay. Most of the time they must pay two gangs. If you don’t pay, you die. Recently, some home owners have been charged a tax. In Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula entire neighborhoods stand vacant for this reason because the owners moved away, refusing to pay or be killed.

It’s hard to find a gang member older than 30 because they’re either dead or in jail but also because gangs recruit children. First, they serve as look outs, then as couriers, peddlers, then extortionists. The highest position is a sicario. Gangs order ever younger kids to kill someone because they’re easier to manipulate, and because penal law applies only to someone over 18.

Women, mothers and children have specific but secondary roles within the organization. When a gang controls a neighborhood most everyone feels compelled to submit. The least expected of you is to stay silent. You don’t see, you don’t hear, you don’t speak. When someone [a gang member] has to hide, these organizations require full compliance [from the neighborhood], full support or cover up, voluntarily or out of fear.

There are no official statistics of gang responsibility in the overall violence picture. Experts assign them as the primary perpetrators of violent acts in the country. It’s not possible to know how many gang members there are. Perhaps 10,000. They control practically all the districts in the city. In those they don’t control they can go in and commit a crime anyway. This access gives them impunity.

Honduras approved an anti-gang law at the beginning of the century that penalized gang membership. It has been a total failure. The application of the mano dura [iron fist] has only triggered a war between the maras and the security forces. On the other hand, gangs are becoming more discreet. Identity rules for such things as clothing or tattoos are now only visible in prison or on the bodies of the most important and oldest members, people who got tattooed long ago. Nowadays, they’re sending their smartest kids to the university. They need administrators to move the money they accumulate. They even have doctors on their lists and secret clinics, allowing them to avoid having to go to a hospital when they’re wounded in action.

If during the civil wars and the revolutionary upheavals that afflicted Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Honduras on a smaller scale, there were groups of soldiers and police who summarily executed people just because they were leftists, since the early 2000’s human rights organizations have been denouncing the existence of social cleansing policies against gang members. [Arce’s book is a case by case report of how these policies are applied]. Officials have always attributed the deaths of gang members to their own internal conflicts. [This means that] Every so often the death squads return [meaning Honduran security forces].

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This is an excerpt from Alberto Arce, Honduras a ras de suelo: Crónicas desde el país más violento del mundo, Ariel 2016), pages 148-151, translated by Carlos B. Gil. A permission to translate was submitted to Arce by Gil via LinkIn.