Banana Massacre

The Banana Massacre (Spanish: Matanza/Masacre de las bananeras) was a massacre of workers of the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) that occurred between December 5 and 6, 1928, in the town of Ciénaga near Santa Marta, Colombia. A strike began on November 12, 1928, when the workers ceased to work until the company would reach an agreement with them to grant them dignified working conditions. After several weeks with no agreement, in which the United Fruit Company refused to negotiate with the workers, the government of Miguel Abadía Méndez assigned Cortés Vargas as military chief in the Magdalena department and sent 700 men from the Colombian Army to quell the strikers, resulting in the massacre of 47–2000 people (the range owing to the insufficiency of detailed historical records).

U.S. officials in Colombia and United Fruit representatives portrayed the workers' strike as "communist" with a "subversive tendency" in telegrams to Frank B. Kellogg, the United States Secretary of State. The Colombian government was also compelled to work for the interests of the company, considering they could cut off trade of Colombian bananas with significant markets such as the United States and Europe.

Gabriel García Márquez depicted a fictional version of the massacre in his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, as did Álvaro Cepeda Samudio in his La Casa Grande. Although García Márquez references the number of dead as around three thousand, the actual number of dead workers is unknown.