Behind Ecuador’s booming banana industry—the world’s largest exporter—lies a hidden reality of modern slavery, where workers endure brutal exploitation, toxic pesticides, and systemic neglect, while profits flow to a powerful few. A searing exposé of the human and environmental cost of the fruit we take for granted.
Esclavitud moderna: Vidas Tras el Banano
Since the 1950s, bananas have been consolidated as one of Ecuador's main export products, a symbol of agricultural modernization along with sugar, rice and milk. It was hoped that its production would eliminate the old hacienda system, promote labor rights and improve workers' living conditions. However, seventy years later, those promises remain unfulfilled: the wealth generated is concentrated in a few hands, while workers face poverty and abuses.
Recently, the Banana Workers Union Association (ASTAC) denounced to the European Union that the State is not complying with the Multiparty Trade Agreement, pointing out violations of labor and environmental rights. The banana sector, which directly employs more than 200,000 people, is based on practices such as informal contracts, unfair wages, overexploitation, and labor harassment, which the ILO has described as “modern slavery.
In addition, there are serious impacts on health and the environment due to the indiscriminate use of toxic agrochemicals. Since the 1980s, workers and communities near the plantations have been suffering from untreated diseases, while the State and the companies ignore the problem. Thus, bananas, a pillar of the Ecuadorian economy, continue to be synonymous with inequality and exploitation.
Ficha Técnica / Technical Details
Título en español: Esclavitud moderna: Vidas Tras el Banano
Título en inglés: Modern Slavery: Lives Behind the Banana productión
Produccion general / General Production: Cooperativa Audiovisual CoopDocs
Dirección / Directed: Luis Herrera R.
Dirección de Fotografía / Cinematography: Luis Herrera R.
Asistencia de Dirección / Assistant Direction: Esteban Coloma
Guión / Screenplay: Luis Herrera R.
Sonido Directo / Direct Sound: Esteban Coloma
Producción de Campo / Field Production: Luis Herrera R.
Edición / Editing: Luis Herrera R.
Colorización / Color Grading: Cooperativa Audiovisual CoopDocs
Mezcla de sonido / Sound Mixing: Cooperativa Audiovisual CoopDocs
Musicalización / Musical Score: Edgar Granda
Genero / Genre: Documental / Documentary
Formato / Format: HD 16:9
In the banana fields of Ecuador, where exploitation and abuse have reigned for decades, a courageous movement emerges. Workers, unions and communities unite to challenge an unjust system, fighting for dignity, health and a better future. This is the story of their resistance and hope to change an industry that feeds the world.
Videos
Banana: Dispossession of water
The faces of the plantation workers tell a silent story. Their hands, tanned by the sun and the effort, carry the weight of a job that not only wears out their bodies, but slowly poisons them. Headaches, dizziness, skin rashes and respiratory problems. These are common symptoms, but no one talks about them out loud. The big banana companies, owners of this green empire, operate in the shadows, far from the eyes of those who might question their methods. The inhabitants of the surrounding communities live in constant fear that the air they breathe, the water they drink, is contaminated. But silence is their only ally, because to denounce means losing one's job, means being left with nothing.
Banana: Dispossession of land, water and life
The sun rises over the horizon of the province of El Oro, Ecuador, illuminating a landscape that looks like something out of a dream. But this dream is a nightmare. Banana plantations stretch as far as the eye can see, an endless sea of green that hides a toxic secret. The planes fly overhead, leaving behind a white trail that falls on the crops like a poisonous rain. The fumigations do not discriminate: the chemical is spread on the banana leaves, but also on the zinc roofs of the houses, the patios where the children play, the dusty streets where the inhabitants walk.
Banana: Social Implications of a successful business model
The vast tracts of land dedicated to banana cultivation are a monument to man's power over nature. But this power is not one of creation, but of destruction. Entire forests have been cleared to make way for an endless sea of bananas. Soils, relentlessly exploited, have become barren, incapable of sustaining any life other than monoculture. The ecosystems that once flourished here - with their diversity of plants, animals and microorganisms - have been sacrificed on the altar of agro-industrial production.
From the air, the picture is bleak. Aerial cameras capture a patchwork of monocultures stretching as far as the eye can see. What was once a diverse landscape, full of colors and textures, is now a green desert. A desert that, although it looks alive, is dead inside. Biodiversity has been replaced by endless rows of banana trees, all the same, all dependent on chemicals to survive. The land, exhausted and sick, cries out in silence. But its voice is drowned out by the roar of the machines that plow the fields and the constant whistle of the planes that spray, without pause, without compassion.
For the director, this project transcends the audiovisual: it is a necessary denunciation and a tribute to invisible resistance. With each frame, it exposes the crudest paradox of global capitalism: how a symbol of life and nutrition - the banana - is grown under conditions of systemic exploitation that erase human dignity.
But what really drives this series of videos is the light in the midst of the darkness: the workers' organizations challenging corporate power, the mothers documenting pesticide illnesses, the day laborers demanding fair contracts. The director not only shows the problem; he amplifies the voices of those who are already changing history, because he believes in film as a tool for social transformation.
By bridging the gap between the ignorant consumer and the exploited worker, the documentary becomes an uncomfortable mirror. But it is also a call to action: that every banana in a supermarket carries with it the memory of this struggle. Here, the camera is not neutral - it is a witness committed to a future where labor and environmental justice are not a privilege, but a right harvested by all.
Because filming this reality is not just telling a story: it is planting seeds of change.
