A private businessman financed a coup that made him master of Honduras

Evidence

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

• FICTION: The ‘Banana Man’ who arrives broke and stages a coup to plunder a country reads like prime source material for a plantation-corruption novel.
• CANDY: The United Fruit/Chiquita and Standard Fruit/Dole origins are fun conversational tidbits.