Elkin Calderón

Description: This piece by Elkin Calderón juxtaposes the image of an abandoned swimming pool with the main text, known as the Rolston letter, written in 1920 by Hillyer V. Rolston, then deputy of Samuel Zamurray, managing director of the United Fruit Company (UFCO), and addressed to the lawyer of the banana company’s enclave in Honduras, Luis Mesera. Within the letter Rolston describes in detail the plans of the UFCO to rise as a monopoly, seize the land at all costs, evade taxes and defraud and abuse the population. Both the politicians and the Honduran population are discussed in a derogatory manner. This document has become a key point of reference in the history of Honduras – and of all the countries that had a first-hand experience of the abuse on the banana plantations – as it exposes the interests and abuses of the UFCO. As for the background of the video, Calderón uses the image of the destroyed swimming pool at the United Fruit Company’s camp facilities in the Colombian Caribbean. The still image and the sound of the abundant tropics are interrupted every so often by falling tree branches and other debris that somebody, outside of the image, throws into the swimming pool. The video does not explain the source of the text that is shown until the very end, and as such something that is read in the present as fiction proves to be a historical document.