“When the trumpet sounded everything was prepared on earth, and Jehovah gave the world to Coca-Cola Inc., Anaconda, Ford Motors, and other corporations. The United Fruit Company reserved for itself the most juicy piece, the central coast of my world, the delicate waist of America.”
–Pablo Neruda, “United Fruit Co.,” 1950
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Puerto Barrios may be Guatemala’s biggest port, but it is an unassuming and squalid place, a hot concrete town comprised of a thousand or so low-slung homes crowding a gridiron of unpaved roads. From Guatemala City, you reach it by a seven-hour bus ride through the Sierra de las Minas, the final stretch of which features mile upon mile of Dole and Chiquita cargo trucks backed up along a one-lane highway that coils its way from the haciendas of the interior to the Caribbean coast.
Each shipping container bears a refrigeration system and is emblazoned with a mattress-sized replica of that small sticker found on the bananas at your local supermarket; some may also contain cocaine, or so you’re informed by many Guatemalans you meet. Where the highway meets the sea, at Puerto Barrios’ waterfront, no more than a mile or two long, you encounter port workers whiling away the last of the sweaty afternoon sipping on bottles of Gallo beer. Iguanas sun themselves on wooden docks extending out over a porcelain-blue sea splotched with brown runoff that might be sewage. Mangy stray dogs sniff outsiders and chase them for sport.
Puerto Barrios exists because of the banana. Or, better put, Puerto Barrios exists because just over a hundred years ago Americans became obsessed with eating bananas. As late as the 1880s, few Americans had ever seen the fruit. Yet by century’s end, tariffs on its importation from Central America and the Caribbean had been slashed and the fruit had turned into a national craze. A chaotic scramble began to ship it north. In 1901, a Boston-based firm called United Fruit Company homed in on the opportunity offered by Guatemala. Previously, US merchant ships had mostly sailed to Central America and purchased bananas by the crate from dockside merchants. United Fruit Company struck upon a different idea. It decided to set up its own plantations in Guatemala and raise the crop itself.
The port…would be built to receive something from the United States. And that something was toxic sewage sludge.
Guatemala possessed almost none of the infrastructure needed to support United Fruit Company’s novel scheme, though. And so, in exchange for sprawling land concessions from Guatemala’s ruling class, the company agreed to finance and construct most of that infrastructure. Roosevelt’s Army Corps of Engineers, United Fruit Company connected Guatemala City to the shipping lanes of the Atlantic with a 180-mile-long railway. It built suspension bridges. It dug mines. It founded Guatemala’s first postal service and set up its first major radio and telegraph services.
Before long, United Fruit amounted to, as one Guatemalan observer noted, a “country within a country.” The biggest landowner in Central America’s largest nation, it employed more workers than almost any other company in the Western Hemisphere. And as for Puerto Barrios, by 1930 it had blossomed into the biggest port in Guatemala, though it would be hard to say it was Guatemalan in any true sense. A company headquartered three thousand miles away owned its wharves. It owned its warehouses. It owned its lone hotel, where scenes of The New Adventures of Tarzan would be filmed in 1934. And United Fruit of course owned the fleets of refrigerated steamers that chugged out of Puerto Barrios’ harbor bearing more than five million bunches of bananas to the United States every year.
Puerto Barrios is a set piece in how a certain type of colonialism worked in the twentieth century. Even in their apparent willingness to help bestow the tools of development and progress upon poorer countries, countries like the United States were typically only ever rigging up a system of exploitation, extraction, and exportation whose beneficiaries proved to be their own financiers, industrialists, and consumers.
Go to Puerto Barrios today and it’s hard not to get the sense that suspiciously little has changed. There is still no train in Guatemala that can transport anything other than bananas or coffee beans from the country’s interior to its coast; for Guatemalans, there is the bus. And a town still lacking any reliable sewage system, consistent electricity supply, or clean drinking water continues to huddle in the shadow of the monstrous scaffolding of six-story industrial cranes that spend all hours of the day and night plucking up cargo containers of bananas—now the most consumed fruit in the United States—and stacking them atop bulk carrier ships bound for Delaware and New Jersey. The banana bosses, needless to say, still reign. For United Fruit Company never really ceased to exist. In 1984, it just renamed itself: Chiquita Brands International.
Puerto Barrios may be one example of colonialism at work. But I endured the seven-hour bus ride to the port to behold a bewildering, latter-day attempt at another.
In 1992, ninety years after United Fruit Company first arrived in Guatemala, the country’s newly democratic government made plans to construct a separate port twenty miles farther up the Caribbean coast. It was designed to do the exact opposite of what United Fruit had undertaken at the beginning of the century in Puerto Barrios. The port, which was to be zoned at a section of seaside jungle known as Cocoli, would be built to receive something from the United States. And that something was toxic sewage sludge.
Guatemalan bananas were heading north. Now American shit was to head south.
By 1992, Guatemala could already boast a bleak history as the serial target of toxic waste dumping by US cities and corporations. “Our heads were spinning with all the incoming allegations and rumors,” Erwin Garzona, who tracked hazardous waste shipments into Central America for Greenpeace in the early 1990s, told me. In 1985, a firm out of Miami had attempted to offload wastewater on a section of coastline not far from Puerto Barrios; it was to be dried on concrete platforms near the port and turned into powder, then used as crop fertilizer. A year later, a decrepit Liberia-flagged vessel called the Khian Sea approached Guatemala with unsolicited plans to dump along its beaches more than 30,000 pounds of Philadelphia’s incinerated garbage—the sooty remnants of “cigarette butts, old shoes, dead batteries,” according to the Associated Press.
In 1987, the city of Los Angeles propositioned the opposite, western coast of the country to take in 125,000 tons of its sewage sludge, to be strewn across Pacific swamplands that US taxpayers would “rent” in exchange for $14 million a year. “We have reviewed the proposal and have no objections,” the US Embassy in Guatemala City claimed at the time. “One can imagine that shipping sewage sludge…will incite some unfavorable press in Guatemala. With this caveat, we have no problem.” Even by the early 1990s it was not uncommon for well-to-do Guatemalan families with large coastal estates to be propositioned by US waste management firms with contracts to import trash and bury it on their land.
Cocoli was to be something else. The sludge entrepot-to-be was to take the name of a beautiful local waterfall, Las Escobas (“The Brooms”), so called for the limestone grooves through which its waters tumble. It was to receive shipments of waste not sporadically but regularly, with the sewage originating from a handful of US cities, including Miami and Galveston, which had arranged to pay Guatemala’s government handsomely to accept it. From Las Escobas, the sewage was to be pumped inland, parallel to the Rio Dulce, before getting deposited along the shores of Lake Izabal, a preserve for endangered manatees.
Already by the spring of 1992, according to Prensa Libre, Guatemala’s largest-circulating newspaper at the time, plans were afoot. Five caballerías, or about a thousand acres, had been cordoned off for Las Escobas’ construction. Two hundred Garifuna families—members of an Afro-Caribbean minority—who could trace their roots in Cocoli back “more than sixty years,” had been asked to relocate from four surrounding villages, “losing their homes and the farms they need to survive,” and were herded to Puerto Barrios to start new lives; as compensation for the loss of their property, the families had been promised monthly public-sector salaries in cash, which had already begun arriving at the port in state helicopters. All the same, reported the investigative Guatemalan magazine Crónica, “the peasants claim to have been subjected to harassment and request an investigation.”
There is no road to Cocoli; it can only be reached by sea. On a steamy May morning I hired a boat from one of Puerto Barrios’ fishermen and motored north toward the border of Belize. You would be hard put to locate a more gorgeous place on Earth. The shoreline of Izabal Department, the swampy region of Guatemala that abuts the Atlantic, leaves an impression on all who see it. You could be on the set of one of those Corona beer commercials. Find Your Beach. Howler monkeys skip across the tops of palm trees that form a curtain-like backdrop to a miles-long ribbon of sand so pristine it looks like it must have been imported from a golf course.
After about an hour, I nosed my boat into the small triangle of jungly headland known as Cocoli. At the shore, several shirtless Garifuna men were hacking away at brush with machetes. They agreed to let me disembark in exchange for a few quetzals, though claimed to know nothing about a curious plan dating back thirty years to convert the ground beneath their feet into an American septic tank. I spent the last of the morning walking around the coast, meandering through acres of palms, contemplating the land’s near-miss fate.
That the port of Las Escobas was never constructed is largely the result of one improbable figure. In June 1992, the then-governor of Izabal Department, a former social worker named Lilian Vasquez de Guzman, leaked the details of the waste importation scheme to the Guatemalan press. In a staggering litany of allegations, De Guzman pointed her finger at the very top of Guatemala’s new democracy. The mastermind and greatest potential profiteer of Las Escobas, she claimed, was Jorge Serrano Elias, who had been elected president of Guatemala eighteen months earlier on pledges to bring human rights to a country that had spent the greater part of the previous half century waging war on its own indigenous populations. Serrano had agreed to build the port at Cocoli because he stood to personally pocket tens of millions of dollars, or so claimed Governor De Guzman.
The allegations triggered months of reputational crossfire in the pages of Guatemala’s newspapers, with Serrano in turn shooting accusations of corruption and backhanders back at De Guzman. Eventually plans for Las Escobas’ construction were cancelled—though not before the governor, fearing for her life after men began tailing her around Puerto Barrios, was forced to flee Guatemala. Three months after De Guzman was running one of her country’s most important provinces, she was working the afternoon shift at a pharmacy in New Jersey.
Thirty years later, by the time I met De Guzman, she felt safe enough to be back in Guatemala, in no small part because Serrano himself now sat in exile in Panama City, barred from returning to the country he once presided over, owing to allegations of titanic corruption—unrelated to Las Escobas—while serving as president. Now seventy-six, De Guzman was frail. At a modest house in the outskirts of Zacapa, a dusty agricultural town under the thumb of the cocaine cartels that sits a hundred miles inland from Puerto Barrios, small dogs jumped in and out of her lap as we chatted next to a swimming pool filled with stagnant green water. De Guzman stood by her claims with undiminished alacrity. Las Escobas was a double crime, she insisted to me, shuffling yellowed newspaper clippings with wrinkled fingers. A small clique of Guatemala’s richest men had planned on getting richer by poisoning their own land and people.
“Wouldn’t you have tried to stop it?”
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Better Things for Better Living…Through Chemistry.
–DuPont advertising slogan, 1935 to 1982
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The story of the international waste trade starts thirty years before plans were concocted to dump US sewage sludge along the gorgeous coastlines of Guatemala. It starts far from scheming businessmen in Western cities and purchasable elites in the Global South.
It starts with a remarkable woman and the publication of her shocking book. And it starts with the most admirable of intentions: to create a cleaner world for future generations.
In 1960, journalist Vance Packard offered an analytical rebuke of the artificially stimulated consumption driving US postwar economic growth. But two years following the publication of The Waste Makers came a more disturbing critique of American prosperity. In 1962, a marine biologist named Rachel Carson peeled back the cover on the astonishing extent to which lethal toxins had infiltrated modern society. Silent Spring plunged deeper than The Waste Makers. It didn’t criticize American consumption; it performed a chemical autopsy of it.
In nearly three hundred pages of eloquent prose, Carson introduced the average American to the boggling array of substances that had been concocted in laboratories since the 1940s, then poured, sprayed, and dumped into their farms and gardens and rivers. There was dichlorodiphenyl-trichloroethane, or DDT, a carcinogenic insecticide that had been used during the Second World War to limit the spread of malaria among troops, only to be resold thereafter as a household mosquito repellent. There was 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid, or 2,4-D, a deadly herbicide routinely sprayed across farms, from which it then infiltrated the cell systems of grazing animals, before eventually making its way into humans. Some two hundred chemicals in all—the bulk of them invented and mass-produced with little or no understanding of their consequences on public health—had saturated American society, and Americans themselves.
Vance Packard’s “throwaway society” was, it turned out, one in which very little actually went “away.” Deadly chemicals invented and mass-produced in the space of less than twenty years—the “synthetic creations of man’s inventive mind,” as Carson put it, “hurled against the fabric of life”—were bound to invisibly course through our water systems and soils for the rest of time.
The US environmental movement of the 1960s was a complex mass of disparate interests. But it would be difficult to overestimate what the publication of Silent Spring almost single-handedly brought about. Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace cite it as an inspiration behind their founding. Joni Mitchell and Glenn Frey sang songs about it. After reading an advance excerpt of the book, John F. Kennedy proceeded to appoint a presidential science advisory committee to probe its claims, which were promptly confirmed. “We need a Bill of Rights against the twentieth-century poisoners of the human race,” declared Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas after reading it for himself.
In the 1950s, chemicals were widely deemed “miracles” of modern American life; in the 1960s, they were increasingly recognized as its quiet killers. By 1964, Silent Spring had sold more than a million copies, a milestone Rachel Carson just barely lived to see. In April of that year, after a long struggle with breast cancer, possibly contracted through the very toxins she had spent years investigating, she died.
During the fifteen years following the publication of Silent Spring, and in great part because of it, the United States would drastically overhaul its relationship with the environment. At the heart of the legislation was the matter of not just what chemicals should be allowed to be produced but also where those that could be produced should be allowed to end up. In other words, in recalibrating its relationship with the environment, the United States was just as directly addressing its relationship with waste.
For the purposes of the garbage trade, the most crucial piece of legislation passed in the direct wake of Silent Spring was one you might not suspect: the Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act of 1972, which banned dozens of the chemicals, including the notorious DDT insecticide that had featured so prominently in Rachel Carson’s account. Admirable in aspiration, the act’s legacy was to prove problematic and, ultimately, undermined the exact problem it attempted to address. For the FEPCA turned the United States into a country that, legally speaking, was full of thousands of tons of toxic materials that could no longer be used—and that Congress had rendered increasingly difficult and expensive to get rid of.
To grasp what follows, it’s important to understand that America’s newfound commitment to environmentalism came with a little secret: It didn’t extend to other countries. In the 1970s, an uneven geography of ecological regulation was placed atop a preexisting geography of unequal power and economic dependency. Nothing stood in the way of crafty American companies looking beyond the United States to sell stockpiles of chemicals whose use had been outlawed at home. The short-term legacy of the FEPCA? Americans were safer. The longer term one? Residents of many poorer countries were not. In the decade that followed the act’s passage, more than five hundred million dollars’ worth of highly dangerous chemicals would be shipped south, occasionally by the US government itself, and sometimes to the enrichment of the unlikeliest figures.
It’s important to understand that America’s newfound commitment to environmentalism came with a little secret: It didn’t extend to other countries.
In 1973, two brothers from New Jersey began renting warehouses across the United States. Jack and Charles Colbert had briefly worked in the small-arms trade. But the environmental movement afforded them the chance to become, in their own words, “middlemen” for corporate America. Over the late 1970s, the Colbert brothers began amassing recently banned chemicals and other dangerous substances from signature US companies. The Colberts acquired material from Ford, Exxon, General Motors, DuPont; their biggest supplier was the government, with the Colberts sourcing huge quantities of pesticides, paint thinners, asbestos, and even plutonium from the State Department, Pentagon, and US Navy. From some, the Colberts offered to purchase the stuff for a dollar or less per ton. From others, they were handed it for free.
The Colberts weren’t mere collectors. They were also salesmen. Shortly after amassing their stockpiles, the brothers began contacting government after government across the developing world, claiming to possess “good products.” The Colberts approached countries in Africa, offering industrial quantities of toilet paper at bargain rates; what they were really selling were rolls of lead-tainted engraving paper they had picked up off the US Treasury Department’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing. The brothers approached countries across Central America, offering cut-rate deals on DDT, recently outlawed by the FEPCA; it worked fine, they insisted to potential buyers. Indeed, to distant clients the Colberts didn’t appear to be selling dangerous or banned chemicals at all. They seemed to be in possession of good products at great prices. By the early 1980s, the brothers had earned $180 million from buyers across more than a hundred nations.
The Colbert brothers would probably remain unknown today were it not for a shipment they sent to a company in Zimbabwe in 1984. That spring the Colberts purchased several hundred drums of hazardous waste from a Cleveland-based industrial garbage collector. At 60￠ a gallon, the toxic chemicals cost the Colberts slightly more than $12,000. Several weeks later, after spotting an advertisement for “dry cleaning and fluid solvents” in a US trade catalog, a company in Zimbabwe agreed to buy the material off the Colberts for $54,000.
Only it wasn’t technically the company’s own money that would be used to purchase the several hundred drums of solvents that left Ohio that summer. To finance the deal, the Zimbabwean firm had secured tens of thousands of dollars in funding from the United States’ own Agency for International Development. The Colberts, in other words, hadn’t just duped an unsuspecting dry-cleaning company in distant Zimbabwe; they’d managed to get US taxpayers to front a small fortune for the steel drums—each bearing a label that read poison along with a sticker that read United States of America—which began corroding at their bottoms shortly after touching down at Harare International Airport.
What happened to the waste? No one knows. Yet complaints filed by the Zimbabwean company to Washington ultimately resulted in an audit of the Colberts’ finances—and the jaw-dropping realization that over the previous fifteen years, thousands of tons of chemicals and toxins outlawed within the United States had been sold and shipped to the poorest and most desperate nations of the world by two criminal bottom-feeders from New Jersey. US suburbs might have emerged from the 1970s blighted by less and less toxic residue, but the transformation was owed in no small part to anyone canny enough to hawk hazardous materials to buyers overseas.
How commonplace were charlatans like the Colberts? Also unclear. The EPA kept dismal track of such shipments, which fell largely to recipient countries to monitor, and periodically destroyed its own records. The US Agency for International Development is nevertheless known to have itself dispatched large stockpiles of DDT to India, Ethiopia, Nepal, Indonesia, and Haiti, while in 1973 the World Health Organization estimated that 250,000 residents of the Global South were poisoned every year by pesticides imported—by transparent means or otherwise—from countries like the United States.
“We were, in a sense, innovators ahead of the times because what you had was a whole definition in the environmental area that isn’t really defined yet,” Charles Colbert would tell a reporter years later during an interview at a federal correctional institution in Otisville, New York.
“You are asking me a question: am I sorry that I sold chemicals to the Third World? No. Let me ask you a question, OK, all right, so now you have 2,000 tons of pesticide that’s been produced in America, OK, still on sale in the rest of the world,” added Jack Colbert. “Now what do you want it to do? Do you want it to be buried in America or do you want it to be sold in a Third World country, which would you prefer?”
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Excerpted from Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash by Alexander Clapp. Copyright © 2025 by Alexander Clapp. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group. All rights reserved.
