The general strike of 1954 was a watershed political and economic event in the history of Honduras that ushered in widespread change.
When former United Fruit Company lawyer Juan Manuel Gálvez became president in 1954, following the contested election of 1953, he surprised everyone by adopting a pro-labor stance, introducing, among other things, an 8-hour work day, including extra pay for work on holidays. This has been widely interpreted as an attempt by Gálvez to build a larger electoral base.
In April 1954, banana workers employed by United Fruit began a wildcat strike in the northern town of Tela, primarily over pay issues. In May, dockworkers in Puerto Cortés demanded double pay for holiday work, in accordance with the law. They went out on strike when their leader was dismissed by United Fruit, and subsequently all the United Fruit workers, some 25,000, and also workers for the rival banana exporter Standard Fruit, another 15,000, also joined the strike. [1] In addition to the fruit company workers, industrial workers at the manufacturing town of San Pedro Sula joined, making the strike a remarkable event in labor mobilization. The strike attracted attention from the role played by the still illegal but increasingly active Communist party, which is sometimes blamed for its influence, both now and at the time. U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles suggested that Communists from Guatemala had infiltrated Honduras and were ultimately behind the strike. [2]
In fact, modern scholars have presented evidence that the Communist party was as much born of the strike, out of dissident left-wing members of the Honduran Revolutionary Democratic Party as the cause of it, and that many left-leaning groups, including even the center-right Liberal party, were supportive of the strike. Local businessmen, while reluctant to support the strike publicly, did provide undercover financial backing. The United Fruit Company and the government moved to satisfy the strikers in large measure because the United States was concerned with what they thought were Communist leanings by Jacobo Árbenz in neighboring Guatemala, and as a result pressured both to resolve the strike. [3]
The strike was resolved in July after 69 days, and as a result workers' pay increased substantially and the banana workers syndicalist labor union was recognized. The Communist party also gained stature, and the government moved to incorporate some of the demands of the workers into reform programs that continued until the 1970s. [4]
Honduras was inhabited by many indigenous peoples when the Spanish arrived in the 16th century. The western-central part of Honduras was inhabited by the Lencas, the central north coast by the Tol, the area east and west of Trujillo by the Pech, the Maya and Sumo. These autonomous groups traded with each other and with other populations as distant as Panama and Mexico. Honduras has ruins of several cities dating from the Mesoamerican pre-classic period that show the pre-Columbian past of the country.
The United Fruit Company was an American multinational corporation that traded in tropical fruit grown on Latin American plantations and sold in the United States and Europe. The company was formed in 1899 from the merger of the Boston Fruit Company with Minor C. Keith's banana-trading enterprises. It flourished in the early and mid-20th century, and it came to control vast territories and transportation networks in Central America, the Caribbean coast of Colombia, and the West Indies. Although it competed with the Standard Fruit Company for dominance in the international banana trade, it maintained a virtual monopoly in certain regions, some of which came to be called banana republics – such as Costa Rica, Honduras, and Guatemala.
The Standard Fruit Company was established in the United States in 1924 by the Vaccaro brothers. Its forerunner was started in 1899, when Sicilian Arberesh immigrants Joseph, Luca and Felix Vaccaro, together with Salvador D'Antoni, began importing bananas to New Orleans from La Ceiba, Honduras. By 1915, the business had grown so large that it bought most of the ice factories in New Orleans in order to refrigerate its banana ships, leading to its president, Joseph Vaccaro, becoming known as the "Ice King".
Tiburcio Carías Andino was a Honduran politician and military officer with the rank of major general. He served as the 38th president of Honduras, briefly in 1924 as constitutional president and later in the form of a dictatorial regime from 1933 until 1949. He was elected president of Honduras in the midst of the Great Depression. He strengthened the Armed Forces, maintained the support of the banana companies by opposing strikes, strongly aligned its government with that of the United States, and kept the country in strict adherence to debt payments.
Juan Manuel Gálvez Durón was President of Honduras from 1 January 1949 until 5 December 1954. His election, for the National Party of Honduras (PNH), ended the 16-year dictatorship of Tiburcio Carías Andino.
The history of Communism in Colombia goes back as far as the 1920s and has its roots in the ideas of the Russian October Revolution. Today guerrilla groups, self-proclaimed communists, state that they want to seize state power in Colombia by violent means, and organizations such as the National Liberation Army (ELN) continue their four decades old war with the United States-backed Colombian government.
The Banana Massacre was a massacre of workers of the United Fruit Company 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 Magdalena department and sent 700 from the Colombian Army in against the strikers, resulting in the massacre of 47 to 2,000 people.
In political science, the term banana republic describes a politically and economically unstable country with an economy dependent upon the export of natural resources. In 1904, American author O. Henry coined the term to describe Guatemala and Honduras under economic exploitation by U.S. corporations, such as the United Fruit Company. Typically, a banana republic has a society of extremely stratified social classes, usually a large impoverished working class and a ruling class plutocracy, composed of the business, political, and military elites. The ruling class controls the primary sector of the economy by way of exploitation of labour. Therefore, the term banana republic is a pejorative descriptor for a servile oligarchy that abets and supports, for kickbacks, the exploitation of large-scale plantation agriculture, especially banana cultivation.
Honduras is a republic in Central America, at times referred to as Spanish Honduras to differentiate it from British Honduras, which became the modern-day state of Belize.
Authoritarian General Tiburcio Carías Andino controlled Honduras during the Great Depression, until 1948. In 1955—after two authoritarian administrations and a general strike initiated by banana workers—young military reformists staged a coup that installed a provisional junta and paved the way for constituent assembly elections in 1957. This assembly appointed Ramón Villeda Morales as president and transformed itself into a national legislature with a 6-year term.
Direct popular general elections were scheduled in Honduras for 13 October 1963.
General elections were held in Honduras on 10 October 1954. The elections were relatively honest. and saw Ramón Villeda Morales of the Liberal Party emerge as the most popular presidential candidate with 48% of the vote. However, the constitution required Congress to confirm the president if no candidate received a majority in the popular vote. The Liberals did not have a majority in Congress, and the National Party and National Reformist Movement (MNR) agreed to block Villeda's candidacy, although they were unable to agree on a candidate of their own. The two parties boycotted the confirmation session in November – an idea proposed by US Ambassador Whitting Willauer – meaning those present did not form a quorum.
The western Caribbean zone is a region consisting of the Caribbean coasts of Central America and Colombia, from the Yucatán Peninsula in southern Mexico to the Caribbean region in northern Colombia, and the islands west of Jamaica are also included. The zone emerged in the late sixteenth century as the Spanish failed to completely conquer many sections of the coast, and northern European powers supported opposition to Spain, sometimes through alliances with local powers.
The 1963 Honduran coup d'état was a military takeover of the Honduran government on 3 October 1963, ten days before a scheduled election. Oswaldo López Arellano replaced Ramón Villeda Morales as president and initiated two decades of military rule.
The Revolutionary Democratic Party of Honduras was a political party in Honduras. It was formed by members of the short lived Partido Democratico Revolucionario and non-Marxist but left leaning members of the Honduran Liberal Party in San Pedro Sula in 1948. It was one of the prime supporters of the General Strike in 1954, and during the strike its more leftist members formed the Communist Party of Honduras.
The period in the history of Guatemala between the coups against Jorge Ubico in 1944 and Jacobo Árbenz in 1954 is known locally as the Revolution. It has also been called the Ten Years of Spring, highlighting the peak years of representative democracy in Guatemala from 1944 until the end of the civil war in 1996. It saw the implementation of social, political, and especially agrarian reforms that were influential across Latin America.
Trade unions in Costa Rica advocate for the rights of workers in Costa Rica. Dating back to the late 1800s, labor unions in the country have been a political force. They remain active in political and social life for many Costa Ricans.
As of 2014, the New Orleans metropolitan area has the largest Honduran American community in the United States. As of that year, over 103,049 persons of Honduran origin reside in the New Orleans area.
Graciela Amaya de García was a Central American feminist and labor organizer. Born in El Salvador and trained as a teacher, she moved to Honduras at the age of twenty. Joining the socialist movement, she became a party operative, founding trade unions to resist the labor practices of the industrialists operating in the country. She formed the first feminist organization of Honduras, the Society of Feminist Culture, in 1923 and organized night schools for working women to teach them about their rights. Expelled from Honduras for leading demonstrations against the government in 1944, she fled home to El Salvador but remained only a few months because a coup d'etat brought in a dictatorship. Relocating to Guatemala, García continued with her activities organizing labor and educating working-class people, until she was expelled by the president in 1946. Moving to Mexico, she worked for the Secretariate of Education and wrote articles in support of leftist politics and women.
Anarchism in Guatemala emerged from the country's labor movement in the late 19th century. Anarcho-syndicalism rose to prominence in the early 20th century, reaching its peak during the 1920s, before being suppressed by the right-wing dictatorship of Jorge Ubico.