Banana Wars
Based on Wikipedia: Banana Wars
In 1935, a retired Marine Corps general named Smedley Butler gave a speech that should have ended careers. He'd spent three decades as one of America's most decorated soldiers, earning two Medals of Honor. Now he was touring the country telling audiences that he'd been, in his own words, "a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers...a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism."
Butler wasn't exaggerating. He was describing a thirty-six year period of American history that textbooks tend to gloss over—a time when the United States military invaded, occupied, and overthrew governments across Central America and the Caribbean with such regularity that it became almost routine. Historians now call this era the Banana Wars.
How Fruit Became Foreign Policy
The name sounds almost comical. Banana Wars. It conjures images of soldiers slipping on peels or fighting over tropical produce. But the reality was deadly serious, and the bananas were very much the point.
Between 1898 and 1934, the United States conducted military interventions in Cuba, Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. The Marines were so frequently deployed to these countries that they eventually wrote a manual about it—the Small Wars Manual of 1921—essentially a how-to guide for invading small nations.
Why? The official reasons varied: protecting American citizens abroad, restoring order, supporting legitimate governments, safeguarding the newly-opened Panama Canal. But underneath all these justifications sat a simpler truth. American companies had invested heavily in tropical agriculture—bananas, sugarcane, tobacco—and those investments needed protecting.
The United Fruit Company, known today as Chiquita, was the most powerful of these enterprises. At its peak, United Fruit owned vast plantations, railroads, ports, and telegraph lines across Central America. The company didn't just grow bananas. It controlled entire countries.
The Man They Called the Banana Man
Samuel Zemurray started with nothing. A Russian Jewish immigrant who arrived in America as a teenager, he began his career buying overripe bananas that the big fruit companies considered worthless and selling them quickly before they spoiled. By 1910, he'd built this hustle into a small fortune.
But Zemurray wanted more than money. He wanted land.
In Honduras, the government of President Miguel Dávila had implemented laws that threatened Zemurray's profits. So Zemurray did what any ambitious fruit merchant would do: he helped overthrow the government.
In 1911, with weapons supplied by Zemurray and naval support from the United States, insurgents toppled Dávila and reinstated the more cooperative Manuel Bonilla as president. Bonilla promptly put Zemurray in charge of the country's finances. This was not a metaphor. The banana salesman literally ran Honduras's treasury.
Zemurray eventually merged his company with United Fruit, became its CEO, and spent decades using American military power to protect his corporate interests across Latin America. Business historians call his approach "vertical integration"—controlling every step of production from plantation to grocery store. Critics called it something else entirely.
The Doctrine Behind the Guns
To understand how this happened, you need to understand a bit of legal fiction called the Monroe Doctrine.
In 1823, President James Monroe declared that the Americas were closed to European colonization. Any attempt by European powers to extend their influence into the Western Hemisphere would be considered a threat to American security. At the time, Monroe's declaration was mostly bluster—the United States lacked the military power to actually enforce it.
Eighty years later, Theodore Roosevelt added a corollary that transformed Monroe's defensive doctrine into an offensive weapon. The Roosevelt Corollary, announced in 1904, asserted America's right to intervene in any Latin American country that couldn't pay its international debts or maintain domestic stability. The United States, Roosevelt declared, would serve as an "international police power" in the hemisphere.
This wasn't about protecting Latin Americans. It was about preventing European powers from using debt collection as an excuse to establish footholds in the region. If anyone was going to dominate Central America and the Caribbean, it would be the United States.
The Roosevelt Corollary gave American interventions a veneer of legal legitimacy. When Marines landed in Nicaragua or Haiti or the Dominican Republic, officials could claim they were simply enforcing international law and protecting regional stability. The fact that this stability always seemed to benefit American corporations was, officially, a coincidence.
Country by Country
The scope of American intervention during this period is staggering. Consider the record:
Cuba was occupied from 1898 to 1902, then again from 1906 to 1909, briefly in 1912, and once more from 1917 to 1922. During the first occupation, an American general held "supreme power" over the island. The terms of Cuban independence included a provision allowing the United States to intervene whenever it deemed necessary—a clause that remained in effect until 1934. America also secured a permanent lease on Guantanamo Bay, which it holds to this day.
Nicaragua was occupied almost continuously from 1912 to 1933. American troops were deployed to ensure the country elected what U.S. officials called "good men"—meaning leaders who wouldn't threaten American business interests. The Nicaraguan leader José Santos Zelaya had made the mistake of being openly critical of American interference and had suggested that Nicaragua, not Panama, should have hosted the canal. American opinion of Zelaya was correspondingly low, and when a rebellion against a U.S.-backed president broke out in 1912, Marines arrived to restore order. They stayed for fifteen years.
The Dominican Republic saw American military action in 1903, 1904, and 1914 before a full occupation began in 1916. The trigger? A rebellion had damaged an American-owned sugar plantation. Marines seized Fort Ozama, killed its defenders, and established a military presence that would last eight years. Dominican forces attempted conventional resistance but were outmatched. At the Battle of Puerto Plata, Las Trencheras, Guayacanas, and San Francisco de Macoris, local troops without machine guns or modern artillery faced American firepower and lost. Even so, it took the Marines five years to suppress guerrilla resistance in the eastern provinces. The occupation killed 144 Marines and wounded 50. Dominican casualties numbered 950.
Haiti was occupied from 1915 to 1934—the longest American military occupation of the era. During this time, the U.S. oversaw the writing of a new Haitian constitution that, among other changes, ended the country's longstanding ban on foreign land ownership. This wasn't coincidental. American companies wanted to buy Haitian land, and the previous constitution had prevented it. The occupation sparked two armed conflicts known as the Caco Wars.
Honduras saw American troops arrive in 1903, 1907, 1911, 1912, 1919, 1924, and 1925. United Fruit and Standard Fruit Company dominated the country's banana exports and owned vast tracts of land along with the railroads needed to transport their harvests to port. It was Honduras that inspired the writer O. Henry to coin the phrase "banana republic" in 1904—a term that has outlived its original context to become shorthand for any corrupt, unstable government.
The Panama Exception
Panama deserves special attention because it demonstrates just how far the United States would go to protect its strategic interests.
In 1903, Panama didn't exist as an independent nation. It was a province of Colombia. The United States wanted to build a canal across the isthmus—a waterway that would allow ships to pass between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans without sailing around South America. Colombia was reluctant to grant the concessions America demanded.
So the United States helped Panama secede.
With American backing, Panamanian separatists declared independence during Colombia's Thousand Days' War. U.S. naval vessels prevented Colombian troops from landing to suppress the rebellion. Within weeks, the new Panamanian government signed a treaty granting the United States control over a ten-mile-wide strip of territory bisecting the country—the Panama Canal Zone.
The canal opened in 1914 and immediately became the most strategically important waterway in the Western Hemisphere. Protecting it became the primary justification for every American intervention that followed. Any instability in Central America or the Caribbean, the argument went, could threaten the canal. Therefore, American military force was necessary to maintain regional order.
This logic was circular but effective. The canal justified intervention, and intervention protected the canal.
The Mexican Complication
Mexico presented unique challenges. It shared a two-thousand-mile border with the United States, making traditional occupation impractical. It also had a much larger population and more developed economy than the small Caribbean nations where Marines operated freely.
Still, American forces intervened repeatedly. The Border War from 1910 to 1919 aimed partly at controlling immigration from revolutionary Mexico and partly at stopping rebel raids into American territory. In 1914, U.S. forces occupied the port city of Veracruz to prevent German weapons from reaching the government of Victoriano Huerta, whom President Woodrow Wilson refused to recognize.
The German connection was real. In the years before World War One, Germany was actively cultivating Mexico as a potential ally against the United States. German advisors trained Mexican troops. German ships delivered weapons. In 1917, the infamous Zimmermann Telegram proposed a German-Mexican alliance in which Mexico would recover Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona in exchange for declaring war on America.
The most dramatic American intervention came in 1916, when General John Pershing led thousands of U.S. Army troops into Mexico hunting for the revolutionary leader Pancho Villa, who had raided the border town of Columbus, New Mexico. Pershing never caught Villa, and the expedition accomplished little besides straining relations between the two countries. But it demonstrated that the United States would use military force in Mexico when it deemed necessary, regardless of Mexican sovereignty.
The Business of Empire
The relationship between American corporations and American foreign policy during this era was not subtle. Companies like United Fruit didn't just benefit from military interventions—they actively requested them.
When political developments threatened corporate interests, company executives lobbied Washington for military action. When Marines landed to "restore order," they protected company property. When new governments took power after American-backed coups, they granted favorable concessions to American businesses.
The contracts between fruit companies and Central American governments typically worked like this: a company would receive exclusive rights to large tracts of land in exchange for building railroads. The railroads, of course, served primarily to transport bananas from plantation to port. They benefited the companies far more than the countries that hosted them.
Worse, when banana plantations failed—often due to Panama disease, a soil-borne fungus that devastated production across Central America—companies would simply abandon the land and destroy the railroads they'd built. The exchange of services supposedly benefiting both parties turned out to be largely one-sided.
The companies also intervened in domestic politics. They financed guerrilla fighters, backed presidential campaigns, and propped up friendly governments. According to historians, this corporate involvement in armed conflicts introduced more dangerous and modern weapons into regional disputes, making civil wars deadlier than they might otherwise have been.
The Exception That Proves the Rule
British Honduras—modern-day Belize—offers an instructive contrast. United Fruit operated there too, serving as the sole exporter of bananas and attempting to manipulate the local government just as it did elsewhere. But British Honduras was a British colony, not an independent nation. The presence of British imperial authority meant that United Fruit couldn't simply call in the Marines when things didn't go its way.
The result? British Honduras avoided the instability and armed conflicts that plagued its neighbors. The same company, the same economic interests, the same banana trade—but without American military intervention, the pattern of coups and occupations simply didn't occur.
This comparison suggests that the violence of the Banana Wars wasn't inevitable. It was a choice, made repeatedly by American officials who valued corporate profits and strategic advantage over the sovereignty of Latin American nations.
Two Rulers, Two Fates
Nicaragua sat at the center of American anxiety during this period, and the contrast between two regional strongmen illustrates how American favor could make or break a leader.
Manuel Estrada Cabrera ruled Guatemala with an iron fist, using forced indigenous labor to modernize the economy. He was, by any objective measure, a brutal dictator. But Cabrera was skilled at flattering American representatives, presenting himself as an enlightened progressive bringing his backward nation into the modern age.
José Santos Zelaya of Nicaragua was equally autocratic but made a critical error: he criticized American interference openly. He argued that Latin American nations should manage their own affairs without foreign meddling. He also harbored a grudge over the Panama Canal—Nicaragua had been the other leading candidate for the canal route, and Zelaya never forgave America for choosing Panama instead.
American officials despised Zelaya and admired Cabrera. The difference wasn't one of governance or human rights—it was simply a matter of which dictator knew how to play the game.
The End of an Era
The Banana Wars ended not with a dramatic confrontation but with a change in American policy. In 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced the Good Neighbor Policy, renouncing the right of unilateral intervention in Latin American affairs. That same year, American troops withdrew from Haiti, ending the last of the occupations.
The reasons for this shift were complex. The Great Depression had reduced American appetite for foreign adventures. The rise of fascism in Europe demanded attention closer to home. And decades of intervention had generated resentment throughout Latin America, complicating American diplomacy at a time when hemispheric solidarity mattered more than ever.
The term "Banana Wars" itself didn't become common until 1983, when historian Lester D. Langley published his book on the subject. Langley's work portrayed the United States as a self-appointed police force in the tropics, reconciling what it saw as "warring tropical countries, lawless societies, and corrupt politicians"—while conveniently establishing American control over regional trade.
Smedley Butler's Confession
Which brings us back to Smedley Butler, the retired general touring the country in the 1930s, denouncing everything he'd once fought for.
Butler had served in Honduras in 1903. He'd enforced American policy in Nicaragua from 1909 to 1912. He'd received his first Medal of Honor for bravery at Veracruz in 1914 and his second in Haiti in 1915. No American officer had been more active in the Banana Wars.
Now he called himself a racketeer for capitalism.
His standard speech, titled "War Is a Racket," argued that American military force had been used to advance the interests of bankers and industrialists rather than the American people. He listed his accomplishments with bitter irony: helping make Mexico safe for American oil interests, making Haiti and Cuba decent places for National City Bank to collect revenues, helping pacify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers, protecting American sugar interests in the Dominican Republic.
I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. Looking back on it, I feel I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.
Butler's audiences were mostly left-wing groups skeptical of capitalism, and his message was easily dismissed as the ranting of a bitter retiree. But he wasn't making things up. He was simply describing, with unusual candor, what American foreign policy had actually accomplished during the decades he'd spent enforcing it.
Legacies
The Banana Wars shaped Central America and the Caribbean in ways that persist today. The countries occupied by American forces remained politically unstable for generations. The fruit companies retained enormous influence long after the Marines withdrew. The resentment generated by decades of intervention colored relations between the United States and Latin America throughout the twentieth century.
United Fruit continued operating under various names—it became United Brands in 1970 and Chiquita in 1984. The company remained controversial, accused of labor abuses, environmental destruction, and political interference in the countries where it operated. In 2007, Chiquita pleaded guilty to funding Colombian paramilitary groups and paid a twenty-five million dollar fine.
The strategic logic of the Banana Wars also persisted. The United States continued intervening in Latin America throughout the Cold War, backing coups in Guatemala, Chile, and elsewhere while supporting authoritarian governments friendly to American interests. The methods changed—the CIA replaced the Marines as the primary instrument of intervention—but the pattern remained recognizable.
Most fundamentally, the Banana Wars established a template for American power projection that extended far beyond the Caribbean. The idea that the United States could and should use military force to protect economic interests, maintain regional stability, and shape the internal politics of foreign nations—this became a cornerstone of American foreign policy that would eventually take American troops to Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
The bananas were just the beginning.