Toxic Injustice: A Transnational History of Exposure and Struggle

Abstract

A history of the pesticide DBCP in the United States and Central America, Toxic Injustice explores the production of both health inequalities and resistance in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century globalization. In the 1950s and 1980s, DBCP production, regulation, and use created disproportionate risk for Central American banana workers and their—often immigrant—U.S. farmworker counterparts. Despite toxicological evidence of DBCP’s dangers, transnational fruit and chemical corporations produced, used, and sold the pesticide for nearly three decades. Exposed workers developed experiential knowledge of DBCP but had little protection and limited power over working conditions. Beginning in the 1980s, workers in Costa Rica and Nicaragua demanded compensation for sterility and for cancer and other diseases they attributed to DBCP exposure. They demanded justice at the national and transnational scales, bringing lawsuits in the United States and organizing movements at home. Throughout DBCP’s history, corporations and workers alike engaged the state in legal and scientific processes shaped by national borders and domestic democratic traditions, as well as by interstate power dynamics and an ascendant neoliberalism. The successes of the Nicaraguan and Costa Rican movements—though transitory and partial—suggest the state remains an important site of struggle over health and environment on the national and transnational scales.