Word: zamoranos
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There was, for a starter, the charge of threatened arson. One night not long after Padre Antonio Zamorano took over the parish in 1942, his flock, mostly peasants who lived and worked on neighboring estates, came to the church in tearful anger. A landlord, annoyed by one of his farmhand tenants, had refused to pay any of them for their work that week. The priest, whose life until then had been the unharried existence of a Catholic school teacher of algebra, Latin and Greek, was shocked. "Is weeping all you propose to do?" he roared at his parishioners...
Dancing in the Churchyard. After that the landlords gave less and less to Padre Zamorano's church, and that led to the incident of the gambling party. Right in the churchyard, the peasants played roulette, held a raffle, drank wine and danced; Padre Zamorano himself pounded the piano and sang. The proceeds, fortunately, were substantial and went to support Catapilco's school, founded by Zamorano...
...jungle. Now, rather than let its wartime abacá acreage go back to bush, United Fruit plans to let laborers have the land (which it got for little or nothing) and raise abacá as a peacetime "peasant crop." In 1944 the company opened an agricultural school at El Zamorano, Honduras, to train scientific dirt farmers free of charge...
Costing $750,000 to set up and $150,000 a year to run, the Zamorano school is a princely gift from the great United Fruit Co. to the restive people of its banana empire. Tuition is free. So is everything else, including clothes and elaborate dental work. Most of the 122 students come from poor Central American families of Indian blood, who could not possibly afford a U.S. education for their sons. Said one father of a successful applicant: "It was like winning the lottery...
Keenly aware of the distrust with which it is regarded throughout Central America, the United Fruit Co. leans over backward to keep the Zamorano school above suspicion. It has announced that it will not employ the graduates in its plantations. The school does not teach banana culture, admits no students because of political connections, markets no surplus produce for fear of being accused of exploiting the students' labor. Said one relieved staff member, long a United Fruit employe: "We feel as pure as missionaries here...