A Poet Reflects on Economic Exploitation

The Chilean poet, politician, and Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) was a champion of left-wing political and social causes. He became politically active during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and worked on behalf of the Chilean government to assist Spanish émigrés to Chile fleeing fascism in their native country. His membership in the Chilean Communist Party and his support for Soviet leader Joseph Stalin (which he later recanted) won him as many enemies as supporters. Similarly, his support for the 1970 election of Marxist Salvador Allende as president of Chile earned him political persecution when Allende died in a coup d’état supported by the U.S. government and corporate interests. The two poems here, taken from his epic collection Canto General, present his attack on the multinational corporations that, along with U.S. government policy, played a major role in modern Latin American history.

1. Standard Oil Co.: A major U.S. oil and energy company at the end of the nineteenth century, considered a prime example of monopoly capitalism.

When the drill bored down

toward the stony fissures

and plunged its implacable intestine

into the subterranean estates,

and dead years, eyes

of the ages, imprisoned

plants’ roots

and scaly systems

became strata of water,

fire shot up through the tubes

transformed into cold liquid,

in the customs house of the heights,

issuing from its world

of sinister depth,

it encountered a pale engineer

and a title deed.

However entangled the petroleum’s

arteries may be, however the layers

may change their silent site

and move their sovereignty

amid the earth’s bowels,

when the fountain gushes

its paraffin foliage,

Standard Oil arrived beforehand

with its checks and its guns,

with its governments and its prisoners.

Their obese emperors

from New York are suave

smiling assassins

who buy silk, nylon, cigars,

petty tyrants and dictators.

They buy countries, people, seas,

police, county councils,

distant regions where

the poor hoard their corn

like misers their gold:

Standard Oil awakens them,

clothes them in uniforms, designates

which brother is the enemy.

The Paraguayan fights its war,

and the Bolivian wastes away2

in the jungle with its machine gun.

A President assassinated

for a drop of petroleum,

a million-acre

mortgage, a swift

execution on a morning

mortal with light, petrified,

a new prison camp for

subversives, in Patagonia,

a betrayal, scattered shots

beneath a petroliferous moon,

a subtle change of ministers

in the capital, a whisper

like an oil tide,

and zap, you’ll see

how Standard Oil’s letters

shine above the clouds,

above the seas, in your home,

illuminating their dominions.

3. United Fruit Co.: An American producer of bananas, founded in 1899, that became a massive commercial and political presence in Central and South America. The company’s influence on host governments — sometimes in cooperation with the U.S. government — inspired American author H. L. Mencken to coin the term “banana republic.”

When the trumpet blared everything

on earth was prepared

and Jehovah [God] distributed the world

to Coca-Cola Inc., Anaconda,

Ford Motors and other entities:

United Fruit Inc.

reserved for itself the juiciest,

the central seaboard of my land,

America’s sweet waist.

It rebaptized its lands

the “Banana Republics,”4

and upon the slumbering corpses,

upon the restless heroes

who conquered renown,

freedom and flags,

it established the comic opera:

it alienated self-destiny,

regaled Caesar’s crowns,

unsheathed envy, drew

the dictatorship of flies:

Trujillo flies, Tacho flies,

Carías flies, Martínez flies,

Ubico flies,5 flies soaked

in humble blood and jam,

drunk flies that drone

over the common graves,

circus flies, clever flies

versed in tyranny.

Among the bloodthirsty flies

the Fruit Co. disembarks,

ravaging coffee and fruits

for its ships that spirit away

our submerged lands’ treasures

like serving trays.

Meanwhile, in the seaports’

sugary abysses,

Indians collapsed, buried

in the morning mist:

a body rolls down, a nameless

thing, a fallen number,

a bunch of lifeless fruit

dumped in the rubbish heap.

READING AND DISCUSSION QUESTIONS