This chapter begins by comparing the developmental ecologies of bananas and coffee, showing how banana production for export has tended to arise on capital-intensive and fully proletarianized plantations dominated by vertically integrated transnational fruit companies. The spread of proletarianized and peripheralized banana regimes in the early part of the twentieth century generated local labor unrest throughout the banana-producing regions of Latin America, but this unrest was largely quelled by partnerships between authoritarian governments and the banana companies. This partnership unraveled as British world hegemony collapsed in the 1930s and 1940s. However, the world banana market was reconstructed under US world hegemony through a process of vertical disintegration that transformed banana transnationals into buyers/distributors and created spaces for the formation of local banana exporters through domestic development initiatives. In Colombia, this process transformed Urabá’s banana zone into a key site of development, but it only permitted entrance into a peripheral niche of the market. Collective action strategies akin to the ICA for coffee failed to generate opportunities for upgrading, pressuring Colombia’s banana planter-exporters to become heavily reliant upon the authoritarian practices of the National Front regime to quell worker unrest and maintain labor control on Urabá’s banana plantations.

This chapter analyzes how Urabá’s despotic labor regime shifted to a deep crisis of labor control in the 1980s and then returned to despotism in the 1990s. It argues that that shift to crisis was not due to any significant changes to the international banana market, as was the case for Colombia’s coffee regime of Viejo Caldas. Instead, it was caused by the democratization of Colombia’s political system, which opened up new spaces for labor mobilization and worker’s political participation. In Urabá, however, this democratization process undermined Augura authoritative power over the region’s banana plantations and local political offices and therefore threatened to undermine their capacity to adapt to their peripheral niche in the international banana market. By the 1990s, Augura was able to regain control of the banana labor regime facilitating the paramilitarization of the region. I conclude with a discussion of how the rise of paramilitarism in Urabá was not the result of Colombia’s adoption of neoliberal reforms, but was instead a regional solution to peripheralization in the context of political democratization.