Indigenous Guatemalans denounce exploitation on Mexican farms: ‘Bananas are worth more than us’

One afternoon, in mid-May, Nancy was eating with five of her coworkers. All of them are Indigenous Q’eqchi’ Maya women from the municipality of Cobán — located in Alta Verapaz, Northern Guatemala — and they work on a banana plantation in the Mexican state of Chiapas. All of them found jobs there after hearing an announcement: “ Get on the truck, you’re going to work in Mexico!”

They weren’t forced to come, but they were completely disoriented upon moving countries. In May of 2025, almost a month after their arrival, none of them were exactly sure of where they were.

“The truck arrived and they piled us all on. There are about 25 of us. Six of us are women and the rest are men,” Nancy says. She has long, thick hair, full eyebrows, an aquiline nose and almond-shaped eyes. She wears pink lipstick. And, when she sits, she pushes her buttocks and chest out, emphasizing her femininity.

Nancy is an Indigenous trans woman. Of all her coworkers, she’s the only one who speaks Spanish.

Like her, hundreds of Guatemalans work every day on the banana plantations of Chiapas. Many of them are Indigenous, mostly from the Q’eqchi’ Maya region that encompasses the Guatemalan departments (states) of Alta Verapaz, Baja Verapaz, Petén and Izabal. Most don’t speak a word of Spanish, or they speak very little: it’s difficult for them to understand the tasks assigned to them. Sometimes, they don’t even know exactly where they are, or how much they’re going to earn. “I don’t really care where [I am], but I know that I’m here so I can pay for my things back in my village,” Nancy explains.

Mexico is one of the leading banana producers and exporters in Latin America. According to data from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (SADER), the country produces around 2.5 million tons annually, primarily in the states of Chiapas, Tabasco, Veracruz and Colima, which together account for more than 80% of the national total. Chiapas alone contributes nearly 30% of that production, with municipalities like Tapachula, Mazatán and Suchiate being veritable banana-growing enclaves. The fruit produced in Chiapas not only supplies a large part of the domestic market, but also supports a significant export network to the United States, Europe and Asia.

The main buyer of bananas produced in Chiapas is Chiquita Brands International, formerly known as the United Fruit Company. The firm is responsible for some of the darkest chapters in Latin American agricultural history. Under its corporate umbrella, dozens of farms along Mexico’s southern border operate with strict quality standards. However, according to workers and organizations, it has an exploitative model and offers meager wages. The farm owners have opted to hire cheap labor, mostly from Guatemala.

EL PAÍS sought comment from Chiquita Brands International, but there was no response by the time of publication.

The practice of bringing Guatemalan laborers to work in Chiapas is a long-standing one. And there are two ways to do it. The first is through legal channels established in Article 52 of the Mexican Migration Law, which allows those living in Guatemalan border states to obtain temporary permits to work only in the southern states of Mexico. The other involves people known as “coyotes.” They drive to the Indigenous or peasant villages of northern Guatemala in trucks, recruiting manual laborers to work in southern Mexico for three or four months at a time. This is how Nancy and her coworkers arrived at the farm where they work.

In the Guatemalan village where Nancy lives, there’s a community radio station. Through it, she heard an announcement asking for labor. “The coyote arrived and told us to get on the truck, that we were going to Mexico,” she recalls.

A large number of the workers brought to the banana plantations by coyotes don’t stay long. They work for periods of three or four months and don’t usually return to Mexico again. This is according to Roberto, one of the plantation managers. The workdays are typically 10 to 14 hours long, while the pay is between 200 and 300 pesos per day ($11 to $16).

‘Only the wind can touch this plant’

The story goes that, in the year 1516, back when ships took months to cross the Atlantic to reach the New World, a Dominican friar named Tomás de Berlanga brought some small green shoots with him from Spain’s Canary Islands, off the western coast of Africa. The plants traveled as stowaways on his ship.

These plants — native to Asia and acclimatized in Africa — had enormous leaves: they resembled candles that were larger than their stems. Accompanying the man who would go on to become bishop of Panama, these seedlings arrived on Hispaniola, the island now shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic. After being planted, they soon began to produce clusters of elongated fruit. Arranged in bunches, they looked like hands with too many fingers.

For centuries, the banana was cultivated as a secondary crop. It grew in peasant gardens and was farmed on a smaller scale. But between the mid-19th and early-20th centuries, it became the main export product in Central America and soon spread to Mexico. The Soconusco region in Southern Chiapas became one of its main centers, due to the immense richness of the soil.

On the banks of the Suchiate River, a foreman walks through a 1,500-acre banana plantation that’s been operating for about 20 years. Banana plants stretch as far as the eye can see. And every 650 feet, a channel filled with a red liquid disinfects the soles of visitors’ shoes, preventing any fungus from reaching the plants. “We have a saying here: only the wind can touch this plant. Sometimes, I even talk to them,” the foreman says, explaining the delicate nature of the crop.

The situation is paradoxical: the banana is the sweet fruit of a plant that’s cultivated with extreme care. It’s almost pampered. But those who tend to it are despised and exploited. Nancy and her fellow Q’eqchi’ people arrived at the plantation less than a month ago to work as packers. Their daily task consists of selecting the previously-washed banana bunches and packing them into boxes. These then go into refrigerated containers, bearing the Chiquita logo.

Nancy tells EL PAÍS that she doesn’t want to stay on the plantation any longer. If it were up to her, she vows, she’d leave today. But something is stopping her: since she arrived, her employers have taken her passport. They’ve forbidden her from going anywhere, telling her she could get arrested by immigration authorities. Since arriving in Mexico, she’s been forced to sleep on the floor, with only a sheet for a mattress. She has to bathe naked in a barren courtyard.

Nancy says that being a trans woman makes everything harder. Every day, she suffers mockery, humiliation and aggression. But that’s not what bothers her most. “If only you could see it: the bathroom is so filthy that it’s infested with maggots. That really hurts me, because even though I’m poor, I’ve never lived in a place like this,” she laments. “Here, bananas are worth more than us.”

In southern Chiapas, the banana sector wields enormous economic and political power. In the Soconusco region, it’s been alleged that several large landowners have ties to organized crime. Hence, EL PAÍS chose to omit the name of the plantation discussed in this article for security reasons. The abuse of Guatemalan workers is a recurring practice across the region’s banana plantations.

The plantation foreman believes that banana growers hire people from Guatemala to cut costs. “The quality that Chiquita demands is so high that the [amount of] labor required is substantial,” he affirms. The company’s power in Chiapas is reminiscent of the old days when the United Fruit Company was referred to as “The Octopus,” because of the reach that its tentacles had into the highest echelons of power.

Back then, the conglomerate dictated the rules of the game in Central America. And even though it no longer controls armies or governments as it once did, it remains the most influential fruit giant on the continent, capable of setting prices, imposing certifications and shaping working conditions on plantations. The corporate leadership has distanced itself from the production process, leaving it in the hands of powerful local landowners who do the dirty work.

Without language and without documents

Domingo is 40 years old. He stands just over four feet. His eyes are deep-set, while the palms of his hands have become hard and rough like rock from more than 30 years working in the fields.

This morning, he moves bunches of bananas and washes them with water, in order to remove any debris. He removes the burrs from the bunches with polyethylene foam that was placed on them beforehand, to prevent them from rubbing against each other. Another worker pulls loads of 25 bunches, using the rails that crisscross the farm like arteries in a human body.

All the rails lead to the heart: the processing plant. Here, another 20 or so workers are in charge of selecting bananas from each of the 1,600 bunches. These fruits will fill 960 boxes in a shipping container.

If a banana on the bunch meets Chiquita’s size and thickness standards, they call it “first-grade.” If not, it’s classified as “second-grade.” All the second-grade products go to the local market. The first-grade ones go to the United States.

Domingo is a Q’eqchi’ man who arrived in Mexico less than a month ago with Nancy’s group. He doesn’t speak a word of Spanish, nor does he seem to need it for many of his tasks. All day long, he does the same thing: pick, wash, sort. He only stops for lunch. And, while it might not seem like it, that’s when things get complicated.

Domingo doesn’t understand when the foreman instructs the workers to go eat, nor does he understand when any other order is shouted out. Back in Guatemala, he also didn’t understand the details when the recruiters told him to get on the truck.

Domingo doesn’t know exactly how much he’s going to be paid, or why he sometimes isn’t paid at all. All of his communication with the farm managers, who only speak Spanish, is through his friend Carlos, another Q’eqchi’ man who, in addition to his native tongue, speaks a little Spanish.

With Carlos acting as translator, Domingo tells EL PAÍS that he works to support his wife and two daughters. They live back in the village, in Cobán, Guatemala. He explains that he spent more than a decade working on farms in his home region, but the pay was very low and the days were grueling. So, when he saw his neighbors getting on the truck, telling him in Q’eqchi’ that they were heading to Mexico, he thought it would be a good opportunity.

“He says what he doesn’t like about the job is sleeping on the floor and that he’s paid very little. Sometimes, only 200 pesos a day (less than $11). He said he didn’t expect that to be his pay,” Carlos translates.

Without knowing the language and without papers, Guatemalan workers like Domingo, Carlos and Nancy, who come to work on the plantations in Chiapas, are at the mercy of whatever a boss says. They never fully know what’s going on around them.

“And does Domingo know where he is?”

“In Mexico,” Carlos replies.

Through Carlos, Domingo is asked if he knows which part of Mexico.

“He says in Chiapas. Near the United States, right?”

Translated by Avik Jain Chatlani.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition