Podcast: Chiquita Banana Strike Leaders Arrested in Panama

The following is a transcript of episode 33 of the weekly El Faro English podcast, Central America in Minutes, published in the morning of Friday, June 20.

SMITH: There are many in Congress that don’t understand the banana industry. They don’t understand the intense conditions in which we work, under chemicals and harsh climates. 

GRESSIER, HOST: On June 13, Panama Banana Industry Workers’ Union leader Francisco Smith delivered a biting critique of working conditions in a nationally significant export industry as the National Assembly debated big reforms. They got those reforms signed into law — and then Smith was arrested.

Renewed unrest, ongoing burnout

In Panama, country-wide strikes against the Chiquita Brands banana company reignited this week as the government arrested a series of prominent figures of a broad national protest movement, including Banana Industry Workers’ Union leaders Francisco Smith and Gilberto Guerra.

The unionists stand accused of orchestrating blockades in Panama’s western Bocas del Toro province, a hub of banana production, for the last six weeks. They face charges including crimes against public administration, disrupting public transportation services, and criminal conspiracy.

In Panama, bananas are no chump change: They account for 17.5 percent of exports, per the Ministry of Commerce and Industry.

But the protests are much broader: A state of emergency was declared in response to a movement combining teachers, banana industry and construction union workers, Indigenous groups, and students angered by the government’s expanded military cooperation with the United States, the potential reopening of a Canadian-owned copper mine, and the overhaul of the nation’s pensions.

In April, Panama reached an agreement with the Trump administration to allow the U.S. military to operate from three air and naval facilities in Panama. This came two months after the February announcement, under intense pressure from the Trump White House, that Panama will not renew its participation in China’s Belt and Road Initiative, after being the first country in the region to sign on in 2017.

The Canadian-owned open-pit copper mine is no less controversial: Mulino announced on Thursday afternoon that the possible reopening, which sparked months of protest and deployments of riot police in 2023, will not happen in the near future. The cancellation of the Quantum Minerals concession, which used to account for one percent of global copper, hit elite business interests with a national credit downgrading.

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Meanwhile, the banana union arrests were particularly striking given that, only four days prior, a settlement mediated by Catholic and Jewish religious leaders had been reached to halt the protests. But it wasn’t wholly surprising: As El Faro English reported last year, President José Raúl Mulino cut his teeth as a minister of public security unafraid to repress protests, an image that appealed to parts of a disaffected conservative electorate.

On June 11, an end to the strike was announced after union leaders presented a list of demands to the National Assembly. Smith, in turn, promised to clear roads. The agreement was even cemented with Mulino’s signing of Special Law 471 which offers labor protections previously threatened by the government’s social security reforms.

According to the Tico Times, clashes this weekend between police and protesters led to over two-dozen arrests. Smith will face courts again on Monday to appeal his charges and is currently being held at La Joya Penitentiary Center, according to Panamanian outlet La Prensa.

Panamanian authorities have also discouraged continued protests by withholding the pay of 15,000 teachers, according to the Associated Press. But the AP notes that blockades still dot roads of Darién and Bocas del Toro.

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During the strike, the company released a statement announcing the termination of 5,000 jobs, close to 80 percent of its work force in the region. Mulino called them illegal, blaming union leaders for 75 million dollars in losses for Chiquita, formerly known as the United Fruit Company.

In June 2024 a U.S. court ordered Chiquita to pay $38 million dollars to the families of victims of death squads in neighboring Colombia, after finding the transnational company guilty of financing the squads. That’s not a good look for a firm that used to not only control big business, but also had ironclad power over governments in Central America.

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Paradoxically, last year’s elections occurred after months of protest that put the country’s deep disaffection with democracy and public institutions on international display. Yet voters turned to Mulino, an old-guard face. Daniel Zovatto, former Latin America Director at International IDEA, told El Faro English at the time that “this is an election of generalized burnout.”

The renewed unrest makes clear that the burnout is not going anywhere anytime soon.

Dictatorial throughlines

This week, we want to highlight the second issue of Central America Monthly, which we just published on Sunday, June 15. The cover story is titled, Silencing Dissent: The Return of Political Prisoners in El Salvador.

This month, we dedicated our new digital magazine to the throughlines of political repression under the dictatorships in El Salvador and Nicaragua: their total power, their unconstitutional reelection, their police states, their foreign-agents laws, their exiles, and their political prisoners, to name only a few pages.

This also includes a mini audio profile of Nicaraguan co-dictator Rosario Murillo, an academic essay on a secret list of enemies of former Salvadoran dictator Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, and a chronicle from 2018 in Nicaragua, when student dissidents snuck between safehouses to evade government death squads and the prying ears of informant neighbors.

Roman Gressier wrote today’s episode, with production and original soundtrack by Omnionn. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, and iHeart podcast platforms