bogleech:

imsobadatnicknames2:

imsobadatnicknames2:

imsobadatnicknames2:

imsobadatnicknames2:

The term “banana republic” was originally coined to describe countries in Central and South America (mainly Honduras and Guatemala) whose economies were rendered dependent on the production and export of bananas (among other agricultural goods, but mainly bananas) by American fruit corporations leveraging the power of the U.S. government, the U.S. military and the CIA.

Throughout most of the of the 20th century, American corporations such as United Fruit, Cuyamel, and the Standard Fruit Company owned large portions of these countries’ lands, to the point that in some cases they controlled their railway, road, and port infrastructure, and they engaged in a variety of imperialist actions to lower production costs, such as violence against labor activists and anti wage reform lobbying.

The pinnacle of this phenomenon was the 1954 Guatemalan coup, when United Fruit convinced the goverment of US president Dwight D. Eisenhower that the elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz (who had expropriated some of the company’s unused land and given it to Guatemalan peasants) was secretly working with the Soviet Union, resulting in a CIA coup which deposed the Árbenz government and replaced it with a thirty-year right-wing military dictatorship which effectively acted as a puppet government to protect the interests of United Fruit and the U.S. government.

Nowadays the term has broadened to refer to any small, economically unstable country with an economy which has been rendered dependent on the export of a particular natural resource due to economic exploitation by a more powerful country.

So yeah bit of a fucked up name for a clothing store ngl

These companies still exist btw. Standard Fruit is now the Dole Food Company, United Fruit and Cuyamel merged and eventually were renamed to Chiquita Brands International, and the Guatemala coup is barely scratching the surface of the fucked up shit they did over here.

In 2007 Chiquita admitted to financing far-right paramilitary groups in my country as recently as 1997.

Yeah the weirdest part is that “banana republic” never had a more innocent meaning or anything. The store chain was named in 1979 long after the term was coined and people knew exactly what it meant then, they just also thought that was a cheeky joke to make.