The Banana Men

American Mercenaries & Entrepreneurs in Central America, 1880–1930

Lester D. Langley, Thomas Schoonover

• Éditeur: The University Press of Kentucky
• Année: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780813145983
• Sujet: Storia
• Sous-sujet: Storia dell'America Latina e dei Caraibi

"An engaging and fascinating narrative of the entrepreneurs and mercenaries who 'ravished' Central America between 1880 and 1930." — The Americas Ambitious entrepreneurs, isthmian politicians, and mercenaries who dramatically altered Central America's political culture, economies, and even its traditional social values populate this lively story of a generation of North and Central Americans and their roles in the transformation of Central America from the late nineteenth century until the onset of the Depression. The Banana Men is a study of modernization, its benefits, and its often frightful costs. The colorful characters in this study are fascinating, if not always admirable. Sam "the Banana Man" Zemurray, a Bessarabian Jewish immigrant, made a fortune in Honduran bananas after he got into the business of "revolutin, " and his exploits are now legendary. His hired mercenary Lee Christmas, a bellicose Mississippian, made a reputation in Honduras as a man who could use a weapon. The supporting cast includes Minor Keith, a railroad builder and banana baron; Manuel Bonilla, the Honduran whose cause Zemurray subsidized; and Jose Santos Zelaya, who ruled Nicaragua from 1893 to 1910. The political and social turmoil of modern Central America cannot be understood without reference to the fifty-year epoch in which the United States imposed its political and economic influence on vulnerable Central American societies. The predicament of Central Americans today, as isthmian peoples know, is rooted in their past, and North Americans have had a great deal to do with the shaping of their history, for better or worse. "Recounts incredible stories within the framework of social imperialism and dependency theory." — Latin American Research Review

1

The World of the Banana Men

North American opportunists, filibusters, and mercenaries have ravished Central America in three epochs. The first great age of filibustering occurred in the 1850s, when William Walker commanded an invading force of adventurers into Nicaragua, then wrenched by civil war. Walker fashioned a political alliance with Nicaraguan Liberals and, following their victory, used his own army to get control of the country. He lured hundreds of southern slaveowners into Jacksonian America’s new tropical empire with promises of land in a slave republic. His contemporary and persistent adversary, Cornelius Vanderbilt, sought domination over the vital Nicaraguan transit route from the pestilential town of San Juan del Norte to the Gulf of Fonseca on Nicaragua’s northwestern frontier. Vanderbilt made his fortune. After Central Americans drove him out, Walker became a celebrity in the U.S. South, wrote a book about his exploits in Nicaragua, and in 1860, on the eve of the U.S. Civil War, launched another invasion of Central America. He perished before a Honduran firing squad in Trujillo, Honduras, the victim of blind ambition and the determination of Central Americans to resist the intruder.

The second epoch of North American intrusion occurred in the first thirty years of the twentieth century. From 1900 until 1930, soldiers of fortune (the modern equivalent of Walker’s generation of filibusters) served U.S. entrepreneurs who were taking advantage of opportunities for banana production and marketing and who needed muscle as well as capital and talent to operate in Central America—men like Samuel Zemurrary of Cuyamel and United Fruit Companies. During the 1980s, the third epoch, mercenaries pursued their own goals, though occasionally—as occurred in Nicaragua—they were in the service of powerful isthmian exiles or, marginally, of the U.S. government. Modern foreign companies still wield considerable clout in Central America, especially in Honduras, but they no longer need mercenaries.

Despite the undeniably admirable work of some private U.S. organizations and citizens who have committed themselves to bettering the lot of the ordinary Central American, these soldiers of fortune and mercenaries, however mitigated their records may be in individual cases, served ignoble causes: the expansion of slavery, the pursuit of wealth, or activity based on warped convictions about what was necessary to preserve isthmian democracy. In none of these three eras of filibustering were Central American aspirations and needs of primary concern to the intruding North Americans. The driving impulses in these interventions had their origins in U.S. society and the parallel economic, social, and political disequilibrium identified with the industrial revolution. Lee Christmas may have gone off to Honduras in 1894 because he had little future in New Orleans; the banana men, however, knew that Central America was the next great frontier of opportunity.

The industrial revolution, which occurred at different times in different countries, altered the method of production, social relationships, the value of labor (from independent and self-directed worker to dependent employee), relationships within the family, and finally each society’s relations with other countries. Though this study focuses largely on the last adjustment, all are relevant to societal interrelationships. Modern transnational tension arising from economic growth and technology grew between core (roughly, metropole, industrialized, “have”) societies, between core and the peripheral (roughly, third world, less developed, “have not”) societies, and, less commonly, between societies on the periphery. This tension was closely related to the rise of the industrial order. In addition to material accumulation, the core powers pursued the intellectual, social, and cultural authority and influence that shaped societal conduct.

Some European states, the United States, and Japan underwent similar experiences of industrial expansion between 1770 and 1930. Industrial activity altered the way wealth was produced, valued, and distributed. Productionism (the belief that material production offered the answer to societal problems, and another byproduct of liberalism’s emphasis upon material growth) used technology, science, and the educational system of a society to increase material output. Productionism required an increasing body of consumers and the expansion of raw material sources—including food, even exotic foods—to facilitate the altering demands of the labor force and the values and status of laborers, and to induce them to accept new work relations and values. After brief periods of national internal development, industries strove to reduce labor costs—for example, by using the cheaper labor of the periphery to supply raw materials and food production. On the international level, productionism intensified competition for sources of inexpensive raw materials and food, for areas of potential market expansion, and for control of communication lines or support points. The U.S. government recognized that foreign competition would undermine its capacity to use Latin America to ease its own social and economic crises. Distrustful of foreign penetration into the New World, it staked its claim to a privileged position with the Monroe Doctrine and its self-serving version of pan-americanism.¹

U.S. officials expected their privileged position in the New World to include a priority stake in isthmian interoceanic transit and access to the Pacific. In particular, U.S. leaders sought better access to East Asia. In the late 1880s the United States confronted Germany and Great Britain in Samoa. A few years later an aggressive U.S. diplomat helped dissident North American planters overthrow the Hawaiian monarchy, and the Benjamin Harrison administration quickly negotiated a treaty of annexation. For political reasons, this was repudiated by Harrison’s successor, Grover Cleveland, but Hawaii was annexed during the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the Philippines and Puerto Rico became U.S. territory in the peace settlement. U.S. strategic concerns in the Caribbean and Central America heightened in the aftermath of that war. Cuban and Panamanian independence in 1902 and 1903, respectively, came at the price of their sovereignty. The United States dominated Cuba for strategic and economic reasons; it created the Panamanian protectorate because it wanted to construct an isthmian canal under the control of the United States. In a sudden but predictable way, Central America’s place in the calculations of U.S. leaders was now magnified. The security of the nation, they argued, depended on U.S. domination, given the size of European investment and the dramatic increase in German activity throughout the region. But national security was also linked to internal social and cultural dynamics. In an age when Jacob Riis and other social commentators wrote of the widening gulf between rich and poor, when racist ideologues warned of the “passing of the white race,” and when it became manifestly clear to U.S. producers that capitalism could not survive on a domestic market alone, Central America provided a means of exporting not only capital but the cultural and social conflicts that raged within the United States.

In the nineteenth century the major industrializing states—Great Britain, France, Belgium, the United States, Germany, Holland, and Italy—used power and diplomacy to assure themselves of unfettered access to the linkage between the Atlantic and Pacific half-worlds. The North Atlantic metropole nations were motivated by the desire to alleviate internal crises or by apprehension over the alternatives to a liberal economy—“growth versus death or decay”—that intellectuals and theorists from Thomas Robert Malthus to Brooks Adams and Otto Spengler found so threatening and ominous. In Central America the competition generated by productionism from about 1850 to 1930 occurred on two levels: first, between U.S. firms trying to gain access to Central American raw materials, land, and labor (mostly private firms) and the communications routes (both private and government competition); second, between governments and firms of different nations. Central America, only marginally valued for its resources, was important to any nation wishing to enter the Pacific Basin. Since all industrial, free market powers eyed at least some part of that vast domain, the isthmus attracted their attention.²

Metropole countries (those that controlled production and distribution in the world economy) turned to policies of social imperialism (the amelioration of domestic social woes through links to foreign areas) in periphery countries (those that did not control production and distribution in the world economy) in order to preserve the metropoles’ well-being and security. In the late nineteenth century the United States government transformed the country from a semiperipheral society into a metropole state, in part by using social imperialist policies to exploit the transit, market, and investment opportunities of the Central American-Caribbean region. Scholars of social imperialism used phrases such as “exporting the social problem” and “exporting the unemployment” to epitomize the transfer of problems, burdens, and injustices of a metropole’s political economy to weaker societies. U.S. officials presumed that social imperialism would bring wealth and security to the domestic economy; they rarely gave thought, however, to the impact such programs might have on vulnerable societies of the periphery other than to mention vaguely the transfer of democracy and material progress. More than a hundred years of metropole “uplifting” have not managed to leave many signs of democracy or material progress on the isthmus.³

Metropole leaders had to subordinate societies on the periphery in order to coordinate periphery resources effectively with metropole problems. A metropole’s desire to apply social imperialism for its benefit required it to restrict the sovereignty and development of the periphery. Metropole policies to ameliorate domestic social and economic policies demanded the extraction of wealth from the land, labor, and capital of the periphery and the domination of import and export trade. All these policies encouraged the preservation of the underdevelopment of the peripheral economy and social order. Thus, social imperialism describes the domestic aspects of metropole foreign policy, and dependency theory focuses on the metropole-periphery relationship.⁴

Liberalism’s focus on growth sharpened both internal and external competition. The private and public urge to expand into Central America in the age of the banana men was also rooted in U.S. societal needs to find a place for excess entrepreneurial energy and capital; and expansion served to locate places for the export of U.S. surpluses and to reduce U.S. production costs by supplying food to workers and raw materials to industry. Social imperialism made the Central American nations—which possessed limited resource bases, smaller and less educated populations, and less capital, communication, and technological development—bear some of the burden of metropole unemployment and social disorder in addition to their own. At the turn of the century the internal disorder in Central American societies was related to their ties with metropole states.

During the colonial era and especially under those governments that identified progress with the countries’ ties to interests, Central American peoples struggled to retain control of their economies as they exported to acquire investment capital and luxury goods. They met tremendous obstacles in confronting the challenge of modernization. A high mountain range hugs the north and west (or Pacific) coasts. Most Indians and then the Spanish settled chiefly in the mountains along the Pacific coast, and Central America’s active ports lay on the Pacific side, although the harbors of Belize and San Juan del Norte on the Atlantic coast were physically more suitable. The coastal plane on the Pacific is narrow and humid; on the Caribbean (or north) coast, wet and humid. The sparse Indian population on the Caribbean littoral lived in the Mosquito area or near Belize, which served the timber people extracting the hard woods from Guatemala to Nicaragua and the overland route for British trade with Guatemala City.

Central America attained independence in 1821. Three years later, the five republics of Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador formed a political federation—the United Provinces. At the time, independent Central America had about one to 1.25 million inhabitants (Honduras had 100,000; Nicaragua, 160,000). By the end of the century, population had grown to 3.6 million (Honduras’s, to 480,000; Nicaragua’s, to 450,000) and in the next quarter-century reached 5.8 million. The Honduran population in 1924 stood at 635,000 and the Nicaraguan at 640,000.⁵

Yet despite this impressive growth, old geographic dynamics—environmental, economic, spatial, and cultural—still profoundly affected isthmian development, Central Americans’ perceptions of themselves, and their relationships with other cultures. Drought is a recurring problem because the rain generally falls only in one season and then in downpours rather than showers. There are active volcanoes along the mountain chain. Earthquakes are a continual menace. (Managua has been twice devastated by earthquakes in the twentieth century: the first, in 1931, contributed to the rise of the Somoza dynasty; the second, in 1972, to its fall.) Internal communication has always been problematical. The only low spot between the Caribbean and Pacific in Central America (Panama is geographically not a Central American country) lies along the San Juan River (which forms two-thirds of the boundary between Nicaragua and Costa Rica), across Lake Nicaragua, and overland to the Pacific ports of San Juan del Sur and Realejo. In the nineteenth century, however, Nicaragua rivaled Panama as the preferred route for a transisthmian crossing and, in the early twentieth century, as the site for an isthmian canal. This physical feature explains in part why Nicaragua suffered from filibustering and military intervention—Walker’s three invasions in the 1850s, the U.S. military intervention and war against Augusto César Sandino from 1909 to the early 1930s, and the subsidizing of a proxy war in the 1980s. Nicaragua and its neighbor Honduras witnessed intense and aggressive foreign intervention in all three eras of filibustering.

Central America opened to the liberal, industrializing states of the North Atlantic about 1850. Commercial magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Accessory Transit Company obtained a contract to launch a river, lake, and land route through Nicaragua. A New York group built a railroad across the Panamanian isthmus. Both projects reflected the growing interest in incorporating the Pacific Basin into world trade and, of course, the popularity of the transisthmian route as alternative to the equally perilous overland journey to California. Their success whetted the appetites of transit promoters for even more lucrative concessions. This heightened interest in communications corresponded with the surge of metropole activity in Africa and Asia and an intensified commercial and investment activity in Latin America. U.S. leaders were already voicing a concern of their predecessors, that intensified economic activity in the circum-Caribbean (the “American Mediterranean”) might threaten not only the security but the well-being of the nation.⁶

Economic stagnation in the metropoles increased competition between their governments and enterprises and thus prompted vigorous efforts to “guide” the material and ideological restructuring of Central American societies. The influence of the outsider was an explosive issue in isthmian politics. In the early years of independence, isthmian leaders fashioned their confederation (the Provincias Unidas) on liberal, rational notions of governance and economy. Their agenda clashed with the traditional values of the corporatist culture of Hapsburg Central America of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, values and traditions that had eroded during the Bourbon era of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries but resonated well with Central America’s folk cultures and its patriarchal families. The result was a series of fratricidal wars, conflicts that bespoke social and cultural tensions as much as ideological division, which terminated in the dissolution of the confederation in the 1840s and the appearance of Liberal and Conservative political factions. (These are capitalized for good reason. In the Central American political context, a Liberal can be “liberal” on some issues but “conservative” on others. The same holds true for Conservatives.) Foreign interest and competition over transisthmian commerce and transportation and, especially, the humiliation stemming from the Walker invasions momentarily united Central Americans in the 1850s. Once Walker perished, however, older quarrels revived.

One of these had to do with modernization of the economy. Liberals, identified with the foreign intruder, suffered politically after the 1850s. Following a generation of Conservative governments, however, a Liberal resurgence commenced with the transformations of Guatemala under Justo Rufino Barrios and Costa Rica under Tomás Guardia—both dictatorial in their political style but liberal in their approaches to political economy—in the early 1870s. By 1876 the Guatemalan president had assisted Liberal factions in El Salvador in the overturning of Conservative governments suspected of aiding Guatemalan Conservatives. Only Nicaragua resisted the Liberal revival, largely because of the discredited record of Liberal ties to Walker.⁷

Central American Liberals championed material progress. They facilitated the privatization of communal land, advocated policies that hastened the growth of a wage-dependent labor force, freed domestic capital by undermining the cofradías (religiously inspired socioeconomic brotherhoods) and other church-controlled sources of capital, and encouraged the formation of banks (especially hypothecary or mortgage land banks). They also offered inducements to foreign settlers and financial interests.⁸

Foreigners took advantage of the new liberalized laws to build isolated centers of extraction, exploitation...