A private banana businessman staged a coup in Honduras in 1905

Evidence

One of the first invasions of the twentieth century was actually carried out not by the U.S. military but by a private one. The army’s financial backing came from “Banana Man” Sam Zemurray. When Zemurray arrived in Honduras in 1905 from Mobile, Alabama, the country was already weak and debt-ridden from a British railway construction fraud that had produced no railway. Seizing the moment, the businessman launched a coup and replaced the Honduran government with one more “sensitive to Zemurray’s every wish”—namely, land and tax concessions for his banana plantations. Within five years of arriving in Honduras, he controlled more than five thousand acres of plantations. A few years later, it was fifteen thousand. By 1913, Zemurray and his closest rivals, the Vacarro brothers from New Orleans (whose Standard Fruit Company later became Dole), accounted for two thirds of Honduran exports. — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 277

Categorization

• CANDY: A private citizen ‘Sam Banana’ Zemurray toppling a government with a private army is a superb conversational anecdote.
• XREF: Connects to the familiar theme of corporate power and ‘banana republics’ and to the reader’s interest in how economic interests drive US foreign intervention.
• DEEPTHINKING: Rare example where a private corporation literally launched an invasion decades before the US state did — blurs the state/corporation line that pervades the book.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 277