The Banana Republic of Honduras

by Natasha Chart

Published June 29, 2009 @ 10:40AM PT

From the Encarta entry on Honduras, a brief backstory on how Honduras came to be the original "Banana Republic":

At the start of the 20th century, Honduras was the poorest of the Central American nations. In the early 1900s U.S. fruit companies began growing bananas along the Caribbean coast of Honduras. They competed ruthlessly for grants of land from the government under favorable terms and often promised political support in return. The banana companies soon became the dominant force in the country’s political and economic life.

By 1910 U.S. firms controlled 80 percent of all banana lands, and bananas had become the mainstay of the economy. Honduras became known as a “banana republic.” When revolutions broke out in 1911 and 1913, the United States intervened on the side of the ruling elite to restore order and protect U.S. property. ...

By US firms, they mean United Fruit (Chiquita) and Standard Fruit (Dole), who abused their workers, backed military dictatorships, and seemed at all times to be fully supported in their ruthless land and power grabs.

As the previous century continued, the US continued training Central American military and paramilitary forces at the School of the Americas*, and, in what I'm sure is entirely a coincidence, these individuals replicated the brutal repression of democracy in service of corporate profits throughout the region and the world. Its graduates, trained in "torture, extortion, blackmail and the targeting of civilian populations," have been implicated in numerous coups, murders, kidnappings, rapes and incidents of torture directed at social workers, union organizers, labor activists, and even nuns or priests advocating for social justice reforms.

Via RandomNonviolence, it's worth noting that graduates of the School of the Americas are responsible for the weekend coup in Honduras.

While you may want to go to Chavez Code (via Xcroc) for breaking news, I think it's worth remembering that in Honduras' bloody, recent history, a direct line can be drawn from banana monoculture, extreme economic inequality and overweening corporate power to torture and political repression. And perhaps more to the point, these tragedies spring from an unstated belief in the right of businesses to profit at the expense of all else, to privatize productivity gains and impose costs and losses on the public.

There's nothing unique about Honduras that couldn't be replicated elsewhere.

* The School of the Americas went through a PR exercise in which its name was changed to “The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation” (WHINSEC).

(Photo credit: Arpana Sanjay on Flickr.)