Banana Wars 1898 to 1934: Sam Zemurray's Honduran Coup and Smedley Butler

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The writer O. Henry coined the phrase banana republic in 1904 while hiding from embezzlement charges in Honduras, a country he saw controlled by foreign fruit companies. The era behind the phrase began with the 1898 Treaty of Paris, which gave the United States control over Cuba and Puerto Rico, and the 1901 Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, which cleared the way for the Panama Canal and turned the Caribbean into a defensive perimeter. The United Fruit Company, now Chiquita, and the Standard Fruit Company, now Dole, argued that their plantations and railroads were a matter of national security. Washington backed Guatemala's autocrat Manuel Estrada Cabrera, who granted concessions to U.S. firms, and targeted Nicaragua's José Santos Zelaya, who opposed them. Companies built national railroads in exchange for vast tracts of land, and when Panama disease ruined a plantation, they moved on and tore up the tracks.

Samuel Zemurray, known as Sam the Banana Man, built United Fruit into a vertically integrated empire of land, railroads, ports and refrigerated ships. In 1911 he financed a coup in Honduras with mercenaries and a decommissioned U.S. Navy warship, removing President Miguel Dávila and installing Manuel Bonilla, who granted him land, tax waivers and a hand in financial policy. After Theodore Roosevelt's 1904 corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, the Marines occupied the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Haiti for years at a time, and in 1914 they seized Veracruz to block a German arms shipment for Victoriano Huerta. Smedley Butler, who won two Medals of Honor in these campaigns, later said in his 1933 speech War Is a Racket that he had served as muscle for Wall Street and the banks. Franklin Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy ended the era with the withdrawal of the last Marines from Haiti in 1934.

• British Honduras, now Belize, stayed relatively stable under a United Fruit monopoly because the company could not overthrow a British colonial governor.
• The Dominican occupation from 1916 to 1924 faced guerrilla fighters known as gavilleros and cost 144 Marines and up to 950 Dominican lives.
• Presidents Taft and Coolidge justified the Nicaraguan intervention as ensuring good men were elected, at a cost of about $20 million.
• Haiti's 1917 constitution, adopted under U.S. pressure, removed the ban on foreigners owning land.
• The Marines turned two decades of counterinsurgency lessons into the Small Wars Manual, which shaped later doctrine in Vietnam and the Middle East.