Agrochemical Exposure & Environmental Illness: Legal Repression of Latin American Banana Workers

ABSTRACT

Prior research on legal repression shows how elites use criminal law to demobilize collective challenges, yet social control efforts based in civil law have received inadequate attention. In this study, we develop the concept of elite legal framing to examine how corporations deploy “soft” forms of repression within the civil justice system. Drawing on court, government, and media documents, we analyze a series of transnational civil litigation cases over pesticide exposure on Dole-contracted banana plantations in Nicaragua. Results highlight how the corporate defendants promoted a corruption narrative that diffused through the media and legal system to successfully discredit farmworker claims.

KEYWORDS:

• Social movements
• legal repression
• legal framing
• chemical exposure
• environmental illness

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Cases Cited

Johnson v. Monsanto Co., No. CGC-16-550128 (2018).

Laguna v. Dole Food Co., No. B233497, WL 891268 (2014).

Mejia v. Dole Food Co., No. BC340049 (2009).

Osorio v. Dole Food Co., No. 07-22693-CIV, WL 48189 (2009).

Rivera v. Dole Food Co., No. BC379820 (2009)

Tellez v. Dole Food Co., No. BC312852, WL 744052 (2008), rev’d on other grounds, Coram Vobis Ruling (2011).

Notes

1. Historically, “personhood” has played a secondary role in securing corporate rights. More often, the Supreme Court has ruled that corporations are associations capable of claiming the rights of their members (Winkler 2018).

2. We focus on corporate and judicial actions in the US and include only English language documents. Spanish material would provide valuable insight into the Central American perspective and transnational dynamics of legal repression, but we lack the language skills needed to access the data.

3. The law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher (now Gibson Dunn) crafted the corruption defense for both Dole and Chevron and has been heavily involved in promoting narratives about “abusive foreign judgments” targeting US courts (Thomson and Jura 2011).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laura A. Bray

Laura A. Bray is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at North Carolina State University. Her research interests center on environmental sociology, environmental justice, and social movements, with the goal to understand how environmental inequalities are produced, maintained, and challenged. Her dissertation examines the historical formation of water inequality in the southwestern US, focused on the intersections of rurality, race, and Indigeneity.

Nicholas J. Membrez-Weiler

Nicholas J. Membrez-Weiler is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at North Carolina State University. His primary research interests lie at the intersection of the sociology of work and organizations, and the sociology of law and white-collar crime. Ongoing projects include research on workers’ experience with “gig-economy” platforms. In his dissertation, he examines the discursive dimensions of organizational wrongdoing in the case of wage theft among frontline workers in the US restaurant and retail industries.

Thomas E. Shriver

Thomas E. Shriver is Professor of Sociology at North Carolina State University. His primary research and teaching interests are related to environmental sociology, social movements, environmental health, and environmental justice. He is currently working on several projects related to energy, environment and social movements in the United States and the Czech Republic.