Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
the poquiteros they undermined the Truxillo Railroad Company's efforts
to evict the cultivators. Although the company eventually reclaimed the
land, its effort to cast the poquiteros as criminals largely failed. The per-
sistence of La Paz, then, can be attributed in large part to its geographical
location: in contrast to the abandoned farms occupied by squatters along
the coast of Atlántida, the La Paz settlement straddled the active produc-
tion zones of two fruit companies. However, this condition was far from
permanent. The rapid spread of Panama disease compelled the Truxillo
Railroad Company to abandon dozens of farms in the lower Aguán valley.
In 1942 the company made its final purchase of fruit before shutting down
itsrailserviceforgood.
The fragmentary portraits of North Coast people and communities
offered in this chapter reveal the cross-cutting effects of the fruit com-
panies' shifting plantation agriculture. Local economies all but collapsed
due to massive layoffs, outmigrations, the drying up of government tax
revenues, and a slowdown in commercial activity. The companies often
addedinsulttoinjurybyremovingbranchrailroads.InplaceslikeMezapa
andSanFrancisco,residentschallengedfruitcompanypowerthroughcol-
lective, direct protests over the removal of transportation infrastructure.
But not everyone lost in the cycle of shifting production. As towns along
the Caribbean littoral entered a period of acute economic crisis and out-
migration, inland communities situated in the region's major river valleys
experienced an expansion of agricultural production and immigration.
Thefruitcompanies'responsetoPanamaDiseasecontributedtoaprocess
of ''uneven development'' along the North Coast that did not bring about
the extinction of non-company banana farmers, but it exposed the limits
of their autonomy.The power that the fruit companies wielded over non-
company growers would become all the more apparent when a second
fungal pathogen appeared without warning on the North Coast.
