In the Honduran town of La Ceiba, sweltering on the Caribbean coast, the US Standard Fruit Company has built a theme park. Ancient wooden banana wagons, like something out of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude , are tastefully arranged among the sprinklers on manicured lawns. A tooting Standard Fruit steam locomotive gives free rides through the town to excited hordes of Honduran schoolchildren. Standard Fruit, along with the other US banana giant, United Fruit, dominated Honduras for much of this century, turning the country into the original 'banana republic'.
Bananas still make up a third of all exports.
The banana companies also fed the system of political corruption which has become a hallmark of Honduran public life. In the 1920s one banana baron boasted that 'in Honduras, a mule costs more than a deputy'. Bananas made fortunes for the US companies, but did little for most Hondurans. In the 1980s, Honduras found itself caught up in Cold War politics, as Ronald Reagan chose it as a launching pad for his attempts to destabilize the Sandinista government in neighbouring Nicaragua. They launched raids over the border into Nicaragua, helping to precipitate an economic collapse which eventually led to the Sandinista electoral defeat in 1990.