‘Bananas!’: Making History

Bananas! begins with a funeral… and a pitch. A pickup truck makes its way along a small back road in Nicaragua, bearing a coffin and followed by somber, slow-moving mourners. As the camera observes from a distance, a bike vendor veers into frame. His bell rings, once.

“Pesticides have cast a shadow over all of the Western Nicaragua,” a voiceover asserts. “To increase profits and production, without considering the consequences for the people in the area, the plantations do provide work, but they are also the source of slow death.” The scene cuts from the funeral to Los Angeles, specifically, the Hollywood sign. A standard long shot of city traffic gives way to a closer one, a placard on a bus, advertising Juan J. Dominguez, personal injury lawyer.

With this sequence of images, the documentary lays out its complicated premise, that truths may be elusive, but consequences are hard and real. Bananas! — which screening Monday, 9 May at Maysles Cinema, followed by a Q&A with director Fredrik Gertten — shows consequences of pesticide use, including workers afflicted and killed. In this case the primary cause is DBCP (Dibromo chloropropane), a key poison in pesticides used by Dole. When 13 banana plantation workers sue Dole for injuries, they’re represented by Dominguez, who declares himself “your best choice” on the bus placard. “I do not like when people are exploited,” he says by way of self-introduction. “I’ve never liked it since I was a little kid, I never liked the big guy picking the little guy.”

Dominguez — who recognizes his own position as a Cuban-born, Spanish-speaking lawyer in LA, where there is a “huge disproportionate number of Anglos in law firms” — describes a familiar opposition between a big bad U.S. corporation and third world workers. At the same moment, the film raises questions as to who’s exploiting whom. Early images of his offices showcase Dominguez’s success and especially, his display of same: top-floor windows look out on the city, and the camera cuts repeatedly to close-ups of a classic Roman bust. He

as he speaks into the phone: “I want a verdict,” he tells Duane Miller, a Sacramento environmental attorney he’s brought in to argue the case in court. “We need to speak from a position of strength,” Dominguez insists, as they hope to set a precedent for future litigation against U.S. corporations. They aim not to settle, but to win a judgment, to insure that Dole must take public responsibility.

As Dominguez describes his pursuit of justice, he also notes that, as a personal injury lawyer, he explains, he doesn’t charge his clients unless they win. The film follows his initial trip to Nicaragua and his team’s interviews with clients: one assistant reports the results of medical tests to a former worker, the fact that he has ogliospermia. “You are completely sterile,” the assistant says, at which point the worker looks stricken. The camera looking after him as he walks away. “These are real poor people,” says Dominguez in voiceover. “Disadvantaged, very poorly educated, against corporations that are very powerful, wealthy, knowledgeable, and the odds are just really against these clients.”

Repeatedly, the film makes these disadvantages visible: one set of interviews feature Byron Rosales Romero and his mother Mercedes, as they discuss his father, dead after years of exposure to DBCP. Mercedes, who met her husband when she was just 17 and he was her supervisor at a Dole plant, recalls the pain of two miscarriages before she gave birth (following months of bed rest, “Byron came out healthy, thank God”). She sits in a rocking chair, her pink skirt bright in a room full of high-contrast shadows. A framed photo shows her with her husband: “We spent 36 years together,” she says. Following, Byron’s face is especially pained as he remembers spending long hours at the plantation with his parents, watching them work, “since there was nobody to look after us.” His father told him to get an education, he says, “Don’t ever try to get a job here. It’s like a minefield here, it’s dangerous… All this pest irrigation, we are absorbing it.”

As moving as Byron’s story is, it’s not clear when his father came to understand the cause of his and his coworkers’ illnesses. What’s crucial in the courtroom is when Dole knew. When CEO David DeLorenzo is on the stand, Miller offers evidence that he and the company had word from Dow Chemical that its product, DBCP, was unsafe during the 1970s, and continued to use it in third world locations despite such knowledge. The broad argument here is that Dole, like other companies its size, presumed it might weight risk and reward, assuming that workers in South America would be unable to bring legal action in the U.S. Legal arguments during the case include questions of what sorts of images jurists can see. As Miller says, Dole “didn’t like the shots that showed men walking without shoes… They didn’t like the shots that show humans being used as beasts of burden to pull bananas on a cable.” He goes on,

They didn’t like the amount of water that’s used, the puddles, the muddy conditions, which involves a greater potential for exposure to the pesticides, because of the puddles don’t go into the ground they’re above he ground where human beings are.

This is the thrust of the case against Dole, that the corporation perceived “human beings” as expendable. By contrast, sort of, Dole’s attorney, Rick McKnight, argues that the plaintiffs are liars, that their conditions are prior or at least not caused by exposure at Dole facilities.

While the film’s footage ends with what seems a triumph for at least some of the plaintiffs, the arguments become even more complex when Bananas! ends. An epigraph notes that in April 2009, Judge Victoria Chaney dismissed other cases, based on evidence of fraud by Dominguez. Her judgment damns various aspects of the case: “We’ll never know if anybody in Nicaragua was actually injured or harmed by the alleged wrongful conduct of the defendants,” she writes, “and people will never have the opportunity to learn, since this fraud is so pervasive and extensive that it has forever contaminated even our own ability to ever know the truth.”

This is the sort of nightmare you imagine corporations like Dole welcome, so that cases become so tainted that none can be proved. The tainting is complicated and ongoing, as Dole tried to shut down Bananas! per se, sending cease and desist letters to the film’s makers and trying to persuade the Los Angeles Film Festival from screening it in 2009. As BNet describes the problem, Dole went on to claim in court documents that the film is presenting “known falsehoods,” this despite the film’s acknowledgment of fraud charges brought against Dominguez and its representation of facts, such as Dole’s use of pesticides. (The claim against the film was soon after dismssed by the Los Angeles Superior Court.)

From its first moments, Bananas! aligns with the workers, not Dominguez, and points out repeatedly how workers are at the mercy of American lawyers as much as companies. And this is indeed the point. The documentary asks what’s at stake in truth, for whom, from plaintiffs to lawyers to corporate executives. If courtrooms aren’t built to reveal truths or deliver justice for “little people,” they are all too often where consequences become clear.