Human Rights Violations in Literature
Several authors have denounced human rights violations committed by the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita). The most important ones are One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, Green Pope by Miguel Ángel Asturias, La Casa Grande by Alvaro Cepeda Samudio, and the poem United Fruit Company by Pablo Neruda, included in his epic work Canto General. Garcia Marquez, Asturias, and Neruda were awarded with the Nobel Prize in Literature. According to some studies, the work Nostromo by Joseph Conrad was also inspired by the United Fruit Company. Another author in Costa Rica, Carlos Luis Fallas, wrote Mamita Yunai (Yunai is a deformation of the word "united").
The movie "Life & Debt" describes a modern instance of the company, or it's sub-managers, killing strikers.
Read more about this topic: Chiquita Brands International
Famous quotes containing the words human rights, human, rights, violations and/or literature:
“Life is not a matter of place, things or comfort; rather, it concerns the basic human rights of family, country, justice and human dignity.”
—Imelda Marcos (b. 1929)
“Royalty is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting actions. A Republic is a government in which that attention is divided between many, who are all doing uninteresting actions. Accordingly, so long as the human heart is strong and the human reason weak, Royalty will be strong because it appeals to diffused feeling, and Republics weak because they appeal to the understanding.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“I argued that the chastity of women was of much more consequence than that of men, as the property and rights of families depend upon it.”
—James Boswell (1740–1795)
“Stories of law violations are weighed on a different set of scales in the Black mind than in the white. Petty crimes embarrass the community and many people wistfully wonder why Negroes don’t rob more banks, embezzle more funds and employ graft in the unions.... This ... appeals particularly to one who is unable to compete legally with his fellow citizens.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“...I have come to make distinctions between what I call the academy and literature, the moral equivalents of church and God. The academy may lie, but literature tries to tell the truth.”
—Dorothy Allison (b. 1949)