Banana republic

For other uses, see Banana republic (disambiguation).

The phrase banana republic was coined (ca. 1904) by the American writer O. Henry (William Sydney Porter, 1862–1910).

Banana republic is a political science term for a politically unstable country whose economy is largely dependent on the export of a single limited-resource product, such as bananas. It typically has stratified social classes, including a large, impoverished working class and a ruling plutocracy that comprises the elites of business, politics, and the military. This politico-economic oligarchy controls the primary-sector productions and thereby exploits the country's economy.

Origins of the term

The term banana republic was coined by the American writer O. Henry (William Sydney Porter 1862–1910 ) to describe the fictional "Republic of Anchuria" in the book Cabbages and Kings (1904), a collection of thematically related short stories inspired by his experiences in Honduras, during the 1896–97 period, when he was wanted in the U.S. for bank embezzlement. In political science, the term banana republic is a pejorative descriptor for a servile dictatorship that abets or supports, for kickbacks, the exploitation of large-scale plantation agriculture, especially banana cultivation. In economics, a banana republic is a country operated as a commercial enterprise for private profit, effected by a collusion between the State and favoured monopolies, in which the profit derived from the private exploitation of public lands is private property, while the debts incurred thereby are a public responsibility. Such an imbalanced economy remains limited by the uneven economic development of town and country, and tends to cause the national currency to become devalued paper-money, rendering the country ineligible for international development-credit. Such government by thieves is a kleptocracy; such a kleptocratic government is manipulated by foreign (corporate) interests, and functions mostly as ceremonial government that is unaccountable to its nation. The national legislature is, in effect, for sale, influential government employees illegitimately exploit their posts for personal gain (by embezzlement, fraud, bribery, etc.), and the resulting government budget deficit is repaid by the country's working people who earn wages rather than making profits.

The original banana republic

The Banana planter: Minor C. Keith, American businessman.

The history of the first banana republic begins with the introduction of the banana to the USA in 1870, by Lorenzo Dow Baker, captain of the schooner Telegraph. He initially bought bananas in Jamaica and sold them in Boston at a 1,000 percent profit. The banana proved popular with Americans, as a nutritious tropical fruit that was less expensive than fruit grown locally in the U.S., such as apples. In 1913, for example, twenty-five cents bought a dozen bananas, but only two apples. Its popularity among Americans was also spurred by the American railroad tycoons Henry Meiggs and his nephew, Minor C. Keith, who in 1873 began establishing banana plantations along the railroads to produce food for their railroad workers. This experience led them to recognize the potential profitability of exporting bananas for sale, and they began exporting the fruit to the Southeastern United States.

In the mid-1870s, to manage the new industrial-agriculture business enterprise in the countries of Central America, Keith founded the Tropical Trading and Transport Company: one-half of what would later become the United Fruit Company (Chiquita Brands International, created in 1899 by corporate merger with the Boston Fruit Company and owned by Andrew Preston.) By the 1930s, the international political and economic tensions of the United Fruit Company had enabled it to gain control of 80 to 90 per cent of the U.S. banana trade. Nonetheless, despite the UFC monopoly, in 1924, the Vaccaro Brothers established the Standard Fruit Company (Dole Food Company) to export Honduran bananas to the port of New Orleans in the Gulf of Mexico coast of the U.S. The fruit exporters were able to keep U.S. prices so low because the banana companies, through their manipulation of the producing countries' national land use laws, were able to cheaply buy large tracts of prime agricultural land for banana plantations in the countries of the Caribbean Basin, the Central American isthmus, and the tropical South American countries--and, having rendered the native peoples landless through a policy of legalistic dispossession, were therefore able to employ them as low-wage workers..

Moreover, by the late 19th century, three American multinational corporations — the United Fruit Company, the Standard Fruit Company, and the Cuyamel Fruit Company — dominated the cultivation, harvesting, and exportation of bananas, and controlled the road, rail, and port infrastructure of Honduras. In the northern coastal areas near the Caribbean Sea, the Honduran government ceded to the banana companies 500 hectares (1,235.52 acres) for each kilometre of railroad laid, even though there was still no passenger or freight railroad to Tegucigalpa, the national capital city. Among the Honduran people, the United Fruit Company was known as El Pulpo, the Octopus, because its influence had come to pervade their society, controlled their country's transport infrastructure, and sometimes violently manipulated the national politics of the Republic of Honduras.

Exemplar republics

Honduras

Honduras, the quintessential banana republic.

Lee Christmas

In the early 20th century, instrumental in establishing the "banana republic" stereotype was the American businessman Sam Zemurray, founder of the Cuyamel Fruit Company. He had entered into the banana-export business by buying overripe bananas from the United Fruit Company to sell in New Orleans. In 1910, he bought 6,070 hectares (15,000 acres) of the Caribbean coast of Honduras for agricultural exploitation by the Cuyamel Fruit Company. In 1911, Zemurray entered into a business and political alliance with Manuel Bonilla, an ex-President of Honduras (1904–07), and General Lee Christmas, an American mercenary soldier, for the purpose of unilaterally changing the republican government of Honduras.

To this end, the mercenary army of the Cuyamel Fruit Company, led by Gen. Christmas, carried out a coup d'état against President Miguel R. Dávila (1907–11) and installed General Manuel Bonilla as President of Honduras (1912–13). The United States Government turned a blind eye to this deposition of the elected government of Honduras by a privately owned army. The U.S. State Department saw President Dávila as politically too liberal and as a poor businessman whose management decisions had caused the Republic of Honduras to become too indebted to Great Britain — an unacceptable geopolitical risk for the U.S. in the Western Hemisphere. Moreover, domestically, the Dávila Government had slighted the Cuyamel Fruit Company by colluding with the rival United Fruit Company to award it a banana-trade monopoly-- which it got in exchange for the fruit company's brokering of U.S. Government loans for the Honduran government.

Because of its resulting political instability, stalled economy, and huge external debt (of about $4 billion), the Republic of Honduras was excluded from international capital investment. Its financial deficit perpetuated its economic stagnation, and so perpetuated its banana republic image as well. With the native government hobbled with a historical, inherited foreign debt, such fiscal weakness undermined the Honduran Government's functions, and so allowed foreign multinational corporations to manage the country and the people of Honduras more effectively and efficiently — especially because the fruit companies had built, and thus controlled, the Honduran infrastructure (road, rail, port); had established long-distance communications (telegraph, telephone); and so were the principal employers in the economy of Honduras. In the event, the U.S. dollar became the legal-tender currency of Honduras; the mercenary Gen. Lee Christmas became Commander-in-Chief of the Army of Honduras, and later was appointed U.S. Consul to the Republic of Honduras. Nonetheless, twenty-three years later, by means of a hostile takeover, Sam Zemurray assumed control of the rival United Fruit Company, in 1933.

Guatemala

Guatemala suffered the regional socio-economic legacy of the banana republic: inequitably distributed agricultural land and natural wealth, uneven economic development, and an economy dependent upon a few export crops — usually bananas, coffee, sugar cane. The inequitable land distribution is the principal cause of national poverty and the low quality of Guatemalan life, and the concomitant socio-political discontent and insurrection. Almost 90 per cent of the country's farms are too small to yield adequate subsistence harvests to the farmers, whilst two per cent of the country's farms occupy 65 per cent of the arable land, property of the local oligarchy.^{[citation needed]}

In the middle of the 20th century, during the 1950s, the United Fruit Company convinced the governments of U.S. presidents Harry Truman (1945–53) and Dwight Eisenhower (1953–61) that the popular, elected government of President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán of Guatemala was secretly pro–Soviet, for having expropriated unused "fruit company lands" to landless peasants. In the Cold War (1945–91) context, of the pro-active anti-Communism of the Senator McCarthy era of U.S. national politics (1947–57), such a geopolitical consideration, about the "security" of the Western Hemisphere, facilitated President Eisenhower's ordering and authorising Operation PBSUCCESS, the Guatemalan coup d'état (1954), by means of which the Central Intelligence Agency deposed the elected Government (1950–54) of President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, and installed the pro-business government of Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas (1954–57), which perdured for three years, until his assassination by a presidential guard.

A mixed history of elected presidents and puppet-master military juntas were the governments of Guatemala in the course of the thirty-six-year Guatemalan Civil War (1960–96). However, in 1986, at the twenty-six-year mark, the Guatemalan people promulgated a new political constitution, and elected Vinicio Cerezo (1986–91) president; then Jorge Serrano Elías (1991–93).

In art

With the poem "La United Fruit Co.", Pablo Neruda denounced the corporate subjugation of Latin America.

In the encyclopædic, historical poetry in the book Canto General (General Song, 1950), the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904–73) denounced foreign multinational corporate political dominance of Latin American countries with the four-stanza poem "La United Fruit Co."; the second-stanza excerpts read:

. . . The Fruit Company, Inc.

Reserved for itself the most succulent,
The central coast of my own land,
The delicate waist of America.

It rechristened its territories
As the "Banana Republics",
And over the sleeping dead,
Over the restless heroes
Who brought about the greatness,
The liberty and the flags,

It established a comic opera. . . .

See also

• Absurdistan
• Dictator novel
• Failed state
• Kangaroo court
• McOndo
• Neo-colonialism
• Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (1904), by Joseph Conrad
• Ruritania
• William Walker

External links

• From Arbenz to Zelaya: Chiquita in Latin America - video report by Democracy Now!
• Cabbages and Kings — The O. Henry book of short stories wherein he coined the banana republic term
• The Banana Republic: The Myth of the United Fruit Company