Pablo Neruda’s 'The United Fruit Co.': A Powerful Critique of Corporate Exploitation 🍌

When the trumpet sounded, it was <br />all prepared on the earth, <br />the Jehovah parcelled out the earth <br />to Coca Cola, Inc., Anaconda, <br />Ford Motors, and other entities: <br />The Fruit Company, Inc. <br />reserved for itself the most succulent, <br />the central coast of my own land, <br />the delicate waist of America. <br />It rechristened its territories <br />as the ’Banana Republics’ <br />and over the sleeping dead, <br />over the restless heroes <br />who brought about the greatness, the liberty and the flags, <br />it established the comic opera: <br />abolished the independencies, <br />presented crowns of Caesar, <br />unsheathed envy, attracted <br />the dictatorship of the flies, <br />Trujillo flies, Tacho flies, <br />Carias flies, Martines flies, <br />Ubico flies, damp flies <br />of modest blood and marmalade, <br />drunken flies who zoom <br />over the ordinary graves, <br />circus flies, wise flies <br />well trained in tyranny. <br /> <br />Among the blood-thirsty flies <br />the Fruit Company lands its ships, <br />taking off the coffee and the fruit; <br />the treasure of our submerged <br />territories flow as though <br />on plates into the ships. <br /> <br />Meanwhile Indians are falling <br />into the sugared chasms <br />of the harbours, wrapped <br />for burials in the mist of the dawn: <br />a body rolls, a thing <br />that has no name, a fallen cipher, <br />a cluster of the dead fruit <br />thrown down on the dump.<br /><br />Pablo Neruda<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-united-fruit-co/