Banana Massacre  The Banana Massacre ( "or" ) was a massacre of United Fruit Company workers that occurred between December 5 and 6, 1928 in the town of Ciénaga near Santa Marta, Colombia. The strike began on November 12, 1928, when the workers ceased to work until the company would reach an agreement with them to grant them dignified working conditions. After several weeks with no agreement and no work, costing the company severe financial losses, the conservative government of Miguel Abadía Méndez sent the Colombian army in against the strikers, resulting in the massacre. After U.S. officials in Colombia and United Fruit representatives portrayed the workers' strike as "communist" with a "subversive tendency" in telegrams to Frank B. Kellogg, the United States Secretary of State, the United States government threatened to invade with the U.S. Marine Corps if the Colombian government did not act to protect United Fruit’s interests. The Colombian government was also compelled to work for the interests of the company, considering they could cut off trade of Colombian bananas with significant markets such as the United States and Europe. Gabriel García Márquez depicted a fictional version of the massacre in his novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude", as did Álvaro Cepeda Samudio in his "La Casa Grande". Although García Márquez references the number of dead as around three thousand, the actual number of dead workers is unknown. The workers of the banana plantations in Colombia went on strike on November 12, 1928. The workers made nine demands from the United Fruit Company:   The strike turned into the largest labor movement ever witnessed in the country until then. Radical members of the Liberal Party, as well as members of the Socialist and Communist Parties, participated. The workers wanted to be recognized as employees, and demanded the implementation of the Colombian legal framework of the 1920s. An army regiment from Bogotá was dispatched by the government to deal with the strikers, which it deemed to be subversive. Whether these troops were sent in at the behest of the United Fruit Company did not at first clearly emerge. Three hundred soldiers were sent from Antioquia to Magdalena. There were no soldiers from Magdalena involved because General Cortes Vargas, the army-appointed military chief of the banana zone in charge of controlling the situation, did not believe they would be able to take effective actions, as they might be related to the plantation workers. The troops set up their machine guns on the roofs of the low buildings at the corners of the main square, closed off the access streets, and, after issuing a five-minute warning that people should leave, opened fire into a dense Sunday crowd of workers and their families including children.