United Fruit

The Third World, remember, had a very definite role in that system. Its role was to fulfill its function as a source of raw materials and markets for this conservative, quasi-democratic order that we had reconstructed, by pressure and force in fact, in Europe and Japan. And it did that. When I mentioned Honduras, that is just a symbol. That is a symbol of US development policies everywhere. I mentioned Honduras because it was only one minute, but the point is not that Honduras is exporting snow peas, the point is that Honduras is not producing food. The effect of the Alliance for Progress policies in Honduras, in Costa Rica, in Nicaragua, everywhere was to lead to what American economists call an economic miracle. Gross national product went up, and so did child malnutrition, the death toll, misery and suffering. And the reason is, when you impose -- by force of course -- a development model, in which production for domestic used is replaced by agro-export for foreign use, people starve. And you make profits. So you take land that was used for subsistence agriculture, you turn it over to ranchers linked to American agro-business or the Hanover Company and so on, to produce specialized vegetables and flowers and beef for pet food for the American markets, GNP goes up. Profits go up. A small sector of the local economy profits and the population plummets into disaster. That is why there have been hundreds of thousands of people starving to death in Honduras in the last years, and in fact, pretty much the same story was true throughout most of Central America. Take Nicaragua. Nicaragua did have an economic miracle in the 1960s and 1970s. Similarly, child malnutrition doubled and general misery vastly increased. That laid the basis of the crisis of Central America. And similar things are true in much of the Third World, that is the effect of this development model.