Fortune Archives: A dispatch from the banana wars

If journalism is “the first draft of history,” then the account in Fortune’s March 1933 edition of how an American banana company planned and executed a revolution to install a friendly dictator in Honduras is a particularly colorful first draft.

The magazine’s multipart exploration of the history of the United Fruit Company—the precursor to the Chiquita corporation—takes us to a brothel in New Orleans in 1910, where, we’re told, “Champagne corks popped in the smoked-filled air, the piano played incessantly, and Madame Evans’ house guests shrieked with laughter as the playful gentlemen pinched their sterns.” 

Those “playful gentlemen” included three men who were preparing for a brutal adventure: General Manuel Bonilla, ex-president of Honduras; General Lee Christmas, a “famous soldier of fortune”; and his lieutenant Guy “Machine Gun” Molony. 

Sometime after 2 a.m., the men finished their revelries: “‘Well, compadre,’ said Lee Christmas to Manuel Bonilla, ‘this here’s the first time I’ve ever heard tell of anybody going from a whorehouse to a White House. Let’s be on our way.’”

And with that, the three men set off, taking a cruiser across Lake Pontchartrain to the waiting yacht the Hornet, which had been retrofitted for war and armed to the hilt. They were backed by fruit tycoon Samuel “Banana King” Zemurray, then the owner of the Cuyamel Fruit Co. (and later the president of the United Fruit Company), who was eager to halt a treaty in the works between Honduras and the U.S. Zemurray was building a railroad to carry fruit from the fertile banana fields on the north coast of the country, where he would go on to make an enormous fortune. Under the treaty, American bankers would offer the country financing, with the debt to be paid out of customs duties—but Zemurray didn’t want to pay duties on the building materials and equipment he was importing.

Everything went as planned: The ragtag group on the Hornet shot their way through Honduran port defenses to the capital city of Tegucigalpa, which fell without a battle, and reinstalled Bonilla as president. Bonilla gave Zemurray whatever concessions he asked for—“and didn’t charge him a penny.” And so, Fortune reported, “[t]hat revolution saved Honduras from the bankers and left it free to be conquered by the fruit companies.”

Much has been written since about the dark history of exploitation, violence, political repression, and environmental degradation that the United Fruit Company visited upon Honduras and several other countries in the region—including a slew of books, some by historians and and some by novelists. 

The Nobel-awarded poet, diplomat, and politician Pablo Neruda described the legacy of the company in stark terms in his poem “United Fruit Co.”: “It rebaptized these countries / Banana Republics, / and over the sleeping dead, / over the unquiet heroes / who won greatness, / liberty, and banners, / it established an opera buffa: / it abolished free will, / gave out imperial crowns, encouraged envy, attracted / the dictatorship of flies.”