Thread by @latinamericanah

Why is it racist, classist and colonialist to use the term "banana republic? Particularly when talking about what has happened in the US 🧵

This term was created by the writer O. Henry, first mentioned in his book "Cabbages and Kings", that ocurred in an imaginary country named Anchhuria, based on the authors experiences in Honduras.

He called Anchuria a banana republic due to its corrupt government and its economy that depended almost exclusively on the cultivation and commerce of bananas. Later on this term was incorporated into popular use as an insult, defined by Wiktionary as...

"A small country, generally in Central America or the Antilles, that depends on the exportation of a single commodity (generally bananas), that has a corrupt dictatorial government.

Therefore the term is sarcastic; isn't is hilarious how a company that sells fruit has more power over a country than it's own government?

The United Fruit Company was founded in 1899 as the result of various smaller companies that fused together. throughout the twentieth century it expanded to most countries in Central America and part of South America. They acquired large areas of land...

imposed authoritarian regimes by coup (with the help of the US government arguing that they were trying to stop the advance of communism) and exploited the workers that cultivated, harvested and loaded the ships that exported these products to the US.

They became so powerful that they were known as "The octupus", a beast with tentacles that seized and controlled everything in its reach.

In 1928, workers organized a strike in La Ciénaga, Colombia, and were brutally repressed by the colombian government, that was trying to preserve the company's interests.

This event was so violent that it is even narrated in “One hundred years of solitude”, by Gabriel García Márquez. He talks about a protest that ends in a massacre, where the dead are thrown into the sea, and the government even tries to eliminate this event from public memory...

...by pretending it never happened.

In 1943, thanks to an intervention coordinated by the United Fruit Company and the CIA, a succesful coup was staged against Guatemala's elected president Jacobo Arbenz. The excuse was that he was possibly a communist and that Guatemala could become a soviet threat...

In reality Arbenz had recently passed an agrarian reform that was against the company's interests as well as those of the guatemalan elite. This coup was the start of a violent civil war that led to the maya genocide during the 80's.

(In this sense, I recommend @BustamanteJayro's movie "La llorona", about how the genocide shaped the collective imaginary of people in Guatemala)

Therefore, it is simply impossible to compare the insurrection of white supremacist groups that are supported by the US president to the series of authoritarian military governments imposed by the US government in Latin American countries...

dominated under imperialistic dynamics that extracted everything they could from these areas. Not only does this comparison demonstrate ignorance about the meaning and history of "banana republics", it also reflects a profound racist and classist disdain...

of the people who resisted, died and still struggle against these neocolonial structures, even resisting the consequences of these processes to this day.

If you would like to support my research and sharing of history you can do so here:
PayPal.Me/Jumko

Here are my sources if you want to consult them directly:

https://twitter.com/latinamericanah/status/1347037003796283392