Banana Republic Pros And Cons

Banana Republic is a term used to describe nations whose economy is dominated by extraterritoriality, but more specifically nations in the Caribbean and Central America whose economies were controlled by the three big fruit companies: the United Fruit Company, the Dole Fruit Company, and the Cuyamel Fruit Company. Under a liberal rhetoric, these companies used their investor rights established through extraterritoriality, to purchase huge plots of land while claiming it’s governed authority. The indigenous that previously tilled the land are converted into peons. Peons are completely controlled by debt, having no customary rights to the land, and are forced into a form of debt slavery, similar to plantations of the mercantilism era. Through the peonage system, owners can charge rent for the land, own all the transportation infrastructure of the land, and essentially regulate everything to do with the land. Including the privilege to force peons to sell them their crops at the prices set by landlords, which keeps peons in spiralling debt. This ‘frutera’ system works much like the old style enclosed plantation system, but is more sophisticated since it can be imposed on ‘free’ people, and supported by the legal structures, which make local governments responsible for enforcing this structure, in terms of upholding their ‘liberalism’ and the principles of investor rights.
Through the Banana Republic, we see the transformation of old mercantilism methods of periphery-core resource extraction, into a form of liberal economic imperialism that retains many of the same principles of