How Dole Got Away with Poisoning Banana Workers

This is how a former laborer for Dole Food Company described the campaign to get the company to take care of poisoned banana workers:

“They’re just waiting for all of us to die off.  Because they know once that happens, they won’t have to fight anymore and they will have gotten away with it.  We refuse to let that happen.”

As the confident but somehow fragile-seeming man spoke in the warm accent characteristic of Nicaraguan Spanish, a spark of passionate anger coursed through me... How dare a company treat its former employees so horribly!

Dole Food Company first poisoned the workers on its banana plantations outside of Managua, Nicaragua in the 1970’s, and then refused to provide them with adequate medical coverage.  Fully aware of the health problems the use of the pesticide dibromochloropropane (DBCP) causes in humans (particularly sterility in males, which led to the chemical being banned in the US) Dole continued to require its application on banana plantations without providing proper training or handling equipment for its employees.

Workers exposed to the chemical are now living in temporary housing provided by the Nicaraguan government.  The houses were built after the bananeros spent years living in refugee-style housing in front of the National Assembly in Managua as a means of protesting their former employer’s behavior. While the group still suffers from cancers of their internal organs, sterility, and high rates of birth defects in their children, they have yet to receive a penny of medical compensation from Dole.

In 2009 Dole Food Company, Inc. (Dole) "persuaded" Los Angeles Judge Victoria Chaney to issue secret orders that allowed anonymous witnesses to commit perjury, color all of the legal cases as fraudulent, and deprive the Nicaraguan plantation workers of the justice sought in the United States.  Several of Dole's "anonymous" witnesses have publicly confessed to the Nicaraguan media of being bribed by Dole agents to commit perjury.

Dole Food Company has been able to avoid the consequences of their behavior for entirely too long.  They are a multimillion-dollar multinational corporation who have benefited at the expense of the impoverished and they need to be brought to justice for engaging in such exploitation. The legal proceedings of the case have shown that the company was able to expose the weaknesses of the US justice system and use them to their advantage. Now it’s up to the informed citizens of the world, many of whom are Dole’s consumers, to make up for the system’s failure and make “corporate social responsibility” mean something - before more innocent people die.

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