Marcelo Bucheli Enforcing Business Contracts in South America: The United Fruit Company and Colombian Banana Planters in the Twentieth Century In the first half of the twentieth century, the United Fruit Company, based in Boston, Massachusetts, created an impressive network that produced bananas in Colombia for distribution to the U.S. market. The company grew its own fruit but relied as well on local entrepreneurs. United Fruit imposed draconian contracts on the growers, forcing them to trade on terms that were very favorable to the company. These practices set the standards for other exporters operating in the country, even those based in Colombia. I n 1899, the towns in the region of Magdalena, located on the Colom- bian Caribbean shore, witnessed the arrival of the Boston-based American multinational corporation, United Fruit Company (now Chi- quita). Its arrival represented the start of a process that changed Mag- dalena forever. Government neglect had made it one of Colombia's most economically backward regions, but it underwent dramatic changes with the arrival of United Fruit, which developed an infrastructure for pro- ducing bananas and exporting them to the United States. Over a short period, the sleepy towns of Magdalena became dynamic urban centers that attracted thousands of workers from all over the country. In a pro- cess that the novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who hailed from that re- gion, called the "Leaf Storm," all remnants of the past were destroyed, and the region was propelled into the global economy. 1 The company MARCELO BUCHELI is the 2004-5 Harvard-Newcomen Postdoctoral Fellow in Busi- ness History at Harvard Business School and professor of economic history at Universidad de los Andes in Bogota. 1 Several works of Garcia Marquez were inspired by the operations of United Fruit in Co- lombia. The best examples are One Hundred Years of Solitude (New York, 1992) and Leaf Storm (New York, 1972). Business History Review 78 (Summer 2004): 181-212. © 2004 by The Pres- ident and Fellows of Harvard College.