ya know....I am sick of sanctomonious Americans comparing the US to a "banana republic"...The writer O. Henry first coined the term to describe a fictional small, single crop country with a corrupt government. But where does that corruption come from??--AMERICAN IMPERIALISM

After O Henry's fictional country, Honduras was first of a string of Latin American countries described as a banana republics...created by the greed, racism and land grabs of American companies.

One such American corporation, United Fruit, highlighted in the literature of Pablo Neruda, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.. A corporation controlled by Americans (including the John Foster Dulles, later US Secretary of States and Allen Dulles, later director of the CIA)

Backed by the CIA implicated in coups and attempted coups in multiple countries in Latin America, massacres of workers and the creation and bribery of authoratarian and even facist leaders (as long as they weren't "communists").

United Fruit and other US corporations, displaced peasant farmers, controlled and bought off governments across Central America. And what they couldn't buy, they worked with the CIA and death squads trained by the School of Americas to support coup d'etats.

The Bay of Pigs was about United Fruit and Castro's rejection US imperialism. The US backed dirty wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala...and around the world...our pro-corporate, anti-democratic, authoritarian, extractivist foreign policy CREATED so-called "banana republics"

So, yes, of course we are a banana republic...greed, corruption, oppression of workers, the poor, racism, white supremacy....this is the fire we started...consuming us.