Historically High - The Banana Wars

Episode Date: May 6, 2026

We start out with the Monroe Doctrine - the legal and political "rules" the U.S. used to claim dominance over Central America and the Caribbean. This set the stage for the rise of corporate giants like the United Fruit Company and Standard Fruit, who grabbed so much control over land and labor that they literally controlled the operational infrastructure (ports, railways, communication) of some countries. It wasn’t all business, if a government in any number of Central American countries attempted to negotiate terms for their people were deemed unfavorable by these companies, corporate backed private military coups would take place to topple administrations. The U.S. government backed these interests with "Big Stick" diplomacy, using the Marine Corps as a private security force under the guise of "stability."  It’s a wild look at what happens when fruit, politics, and military power all collide. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

It's going to give bananas today. Nobody gets to do the Gwen Stefani thing, okay? We're just going to make a pack now. I wasn't going to spell anything. There's, listen, I realize there's no, there's an appeal to doing that. Fuck you, dude. Oh, we're so. But I'm not going to, I'm not going to slip on that one.

I got to get all of these. I don't like this. I got to get them all out of the way. We're going to need this because this is some dark stuff. we're gonna have to you gotta have some puns we gotta put the puns in the punishment that this episode is gonna

inflict on us just because it's depressing the banana wars are a very don't learn about it in school at all at least I can say that in the states I don't I don't think of any history course other than a college specific course on this and even then I think this is something

that was probably glossed over a little bit but from the what late 1800s up until even as recently as what like the 70s well 1933 is the finish because we have FDR coming in with a policy yeah that's because we just backed off doing it like six different countries of one time we're like hey it's just us in like two other countries now we can't consider it still going there is also the invention of the CIA that starts to turn these into less of a a front facing mission and more of a covert. We have to go knock off this president and install a dictator. Now it's more clandest time. Yes. Hey, guys, it's kind of obvious what we're doing to the rest of the world. We just need to make sure we kill these guys on the lowdown.

So we're going to need a division for that. But yeah, for this area, this time of the Banana Wars, this wasn't a time when anything was really hidden. And the craziest part about this is a lot of this that happens during the Banana Wars. isn't driven just by the government. It's driven by the fruit companies. I would say probably driven primarily by the fruit companies. And then with them having so much, this is insane to say, this statement right here,

the fruit companies having so much pull over the government that they are able to make them intercede and intervene in the affairs of private enterprise in other countries where those companies, those fruit companies in other countries, are basically in a weird, what do they call it? Is it indentured servitude? Or they call it like debtor slavery or something like that? I think it was a mix of pretty much everything that they could do.

So where those corporations are taking advantage of the people in these other countries, but all of a sudden the people are like, we don't like this or the government that's in places like, hey, we're going to start charging you more money or put some more restrictions on you. And they're like, excuse me, United States, government, can you please go down and overthrow their current leadership and just maybe put someone in that's not going to give a shit for grown bananas? Or if you don't really want to shed the blood, just go on and take the banks. Just going to take a whole ass country's bank.

And not only that, it was like a state within a state type situation where I'm trying to think of where else this applies, but you would have in the Central American countries the fruit companies being the largest corporate entities in the entire country and not only being in control of their specific enterprise, but being in charge of a large portion, if not all of the infrastructure that is installed in these countries. Because not only are you running the plantations, running the fields and everything, you then have to have a way of getting all of your product from those fields so you're developing a railroad system. And at the same time, you need to have port facilities. That allows that country to then bring in other stuff to that port or use the railway

system for other things. But if you want to shut shit down in that country, that's all of your stuff. It's very easy to do. So you're almost like holding the populace itself kind of hostage as a corporation. And you're also getting tax subsidies and tax credits in these countries, so you're not paying your fair share to boost these economies as much. And again, if they try to short you or try to take the land back that you're not using, they will just say that you have an up, or that they're having an uprising on their plantation. And if you don't take care of it, then you have a U.S. military occupation hanging out in your country. Sometimes you have a U.S. military occupation. Sometimes you just have these fruit companies literally hiring private armies

to go in and overthrow governments. It's insane. We're not going to make you wait any longer remember patreon.com slash historically high bonus content comes out every week bonus episodes twice a week or twice a month, not twice a week and then just little historical like questionnaire game show type

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much for that. All right. Without further ado, let's get into the banana whores. Wars. We're going to start out with some banana facts. Okay. Hold on. Let me get to me the pot on my tab.

That's got my banana facts. We got to know what these wars are fought about. So the earliest domestication of bananas began in Indonesia more than 5,000 years ago. I love that this is what starts the episode. I mean, you knew that if we were. were talking about food. I was going to have to... Y'all want to know about bananas? To jump in here.

It's crazy because this is where we also get the term banana republic and everything. Yeah. Yeah. So 5,000 years ago, they began to spread into Southeast Asia even further. They're introduced to Africa from Southeast Asia to, of all places, Madagascar. So that sweet-ass island that Disney has done like four movies about, five movies about, is it Disney? I think Madagascar might be like DreamWorks. Okay. Yeah, it used to be, you know, Disney was the only game in town, and now other companies are making good shit.

A wildly diverse place. Madagascar is a very cool place that we're going to have to dig into one day. After it ends up landing in Madagascar, we have texts from the 10th century. of Palestine and Egypt making references to bananas. So it had spread all the way by the 10th century into Palestine and Egypt. The first really European discovery of bananas was on Magellan's expedition in 1521. So it kind of pops up in all these different areas.

The Portuguese sailors are the ones that introduce bananas to South America from West Africa, Africa, the Spanish introduced them to Central and North America from the Philippines. So you have Spain who is in control of the Philippines is taking banana plants over to Central America and then North America to plant them there. Do you know where they can grow in North America? I would assume it would have to probably be a climate like Florida. Okay, that's kind of where I was thinking too. Somewhere close, maybe Southern California. I don't know if you consider like Baja Peninsula, even though it is Central America now.

You just don't never think of bananas when you think of Florida oranges, California. Cornia oranges like yeah I would assume it would have to grow in kind of the tropicalist regions um these bananas that they were coming from back in the day were so different and even today there's more than a thousand different varieties of bananas that are grown worldwide these first bananas were pretty wholly unedible because if you ever seen a picture of like an original banana the seeds look like nickel size seeds inside of this banana and they're dark like jet black. They're gross. So you're basically eating

the filling from around these big seeds? And then I don't know if you're spitting them out or you're just pulling them out. They're not aesthetic. So like bigger than a watermelon seed? Yeah. Oh yeah. Okay. Yeah. The dominant banana that was exported up until the 60s was known as the gross Michelle. Something called Panama disease,

which is a fungus, ended up wiping out the entire variety because there are no seeded gross michelels. Everything was a clone from a different plant. So you would have a banana plant, not a tree, they're plants. You would cut off a section of it.

You would replant it. So there's one single source of basically like DNA from this plant. So each one of these banana plants is the exact same makeup as the others. So this fungus did not have to adapt at all. It automatically, if it knew plant, the progenitor plant A,

it was going to get all the way to Z without having to make any type of adaptations. Exactly. Okay. So in that regard, when something happens and it decimates the entire population, at that point, you've already sent out all the other product to be eaten. So like the retrieval of seeds from other plants. Oh, and it wouldn't have helped them either because the seeds themselves would have all been the same one. Oh, and the Gross Michelle didn't have.

Wait, so then... This was just over time in going through and farming practices and hybridizing them. And they basically, like we have seedless watermelons now, they'd created a seedless banana. The problem of the seedless banana is you can't plant banana seeds to get any sort of new varieties. So everything is at that point is predicated off you being able to just do clones of something else. Yes. That's fucking weird to think about. And Panama disease wiped them all out.

And it sucks too because apparently these things were sweeter and creamier, larger, and they were actually tougher, which is why that they preferred to use this because they would survive like long trips. The skins on them were thicker. And then like you could just toss them into ships without them bruising or getting all beat to shit. They also said that they stayed in the fridge for an insanely long time, like up to three weeks.

Okay, what's the coolest fact about these bananas though? The coolest or the saddest. Both. So the gross Michelle is a very important. very similar taste pattern to all of our, say, like, banana-flavored runts, banana-flavored taffy. Artificial banana flavor. Because that is what the Gross Michelle banana tasted similar to. It has a chemical compound inside of it called isomal acetate.

And these gross meshells had higher concentrations. When they created the artificial banana flavoring during this time, which was like way the hell back. want to say it was like late 1800s, maybe even been like 1860s, yeah, 1860s, they saw that compound and like, this is what makes these taste like this. So we're going to model this flavor with higher levels of this compound, chemical compound inside of it. Okay, so what ends up happening here is the surviving dominant banana. We're going to get out of the bananas and into war here. You just wait with us. So what makes this a non, like white people don't recognize this as the banana flavor for the actual fruits because the new bananas that came out were the cabin dish.

Yep. Bananas, correct? Cavendish have been around since the 60s and they say that 99% of the bananas that are shipped to larger countries are these cavendish bananas. And the reason for that is because the processing process fits the cavendish perfectly. So if you were to throw in a different variety of banana that might be shorter, stubbier, fatter, anything like that, as far as the processing, that would go through, you would have to change out the machines.

So the whole banana... Oh, to, like, de-peel a banana automatically for use in other things? For that, or for, like, shipping, anything as far as, like, bundle sizes. It's all geared towards this Cavendish banana that can be recreated pretty similarly to everything else. So you have the actual Michelle, or not... The Michelle. The Michelle. The Michelle's.

The Michelle's. We're just going to call them that. It has an artificial flavor-based. on that, when those are gone, people aren't going to switch the artificial flavor because that's what they liked before because technically they were better. Like, imagine if our bananas today tastes like banana runts. Awesome. And so when it came to being like, okay, so we've got these new cavend dish bananas, we should probably make some artificial cavend dish banana flavoring. No one's buying that shit. They're like, you know how to make the only way that this banana

lives on is if you keep making this flavor, which you have gotten nailed down. There's a reason why new Coke didn't catch on. There's a reason why everything's Coca-Cola classic again. Yeah. It's because the new Coke formula was shit, so we had to go back to the old stuff. Okay. Boy, what else are the banana facts that I have? I don't know if I have anymore.

I think I might be fresh out of Nanners. That's fine. It's 13 minutes in. We're now getting into the conflict. Oh, one last thing. the whole thing behind the the gag of slipping on a banana peel comes out of people actually

eating bananas on the street, tossing them onto sidewalks and then people slipping and falling that transition into it fully did so bananas were so and this is the entire reason why there's such a demand for these things that it warrants military intervention going in to protect companies

wrongly of course but bananas were so popular because they would keep. You could throw them in a lunchbox. You could take them to a dirty work site. You could do anything like that. And they were just a self-contained piece of food or a snack. And when you had only apples and bananas,

because again, there wasn't a lot of this fruit getting shipped, you know, all over the place. Large cities would just have people throwing bananas. Guys are walking down the street. It's banana pill. I'm done with it. It goes on the ground. and everybody's eating these and people are literally

because when they get warm, isn't that when they get slick, if it's on like a warm sidewalk or something? And they get a little rotten. Yeah. Yeah. It wasn't a fresh banana pill people were slipping on is when they get a little slimy and stuff.

A little dark, little brown. Yep. Top three fruits. What do you got? Oh. Okay, well bananas is, I'm in there. It's in your top three? Because I would probably say

strawberries, oranges, watermelon. But the fruit that I eat the most is absolutely bananas. I go banana because I'm partial to it. Like chocolate banana is one of the most amazing flavor combinations ever. It's versatile. You can put it in smoothies. You can put it in...

Yes. Damnier or anything. It could be frozen. It could be drinkable. It could be, you know, whatever. Add little peanut butter in there? Come on. Yeah, it's...

Like I say, it's certainly not my favorite, but it's the one that I consume the most. because it's the easiest fruit to consume. And B, just because they're so cheap and readily available. I mean, you can buy them in a bunch. You can buy them in sixes, sevens. I think I got to go bananas, mango. Ooh.

And then raspberries. Raspberrys, huh? I get a little, I got a one of sweet. I got a little tart. I got, and then I don't know, cherries can sometimes sit in there. Rainier cherries. Yes. Those are our tippy top for cherries.

That's a little Pacific Northwest treat that we got there with the rainier cherries. Okay. We are getting into this. So this all comes out of this thing called the Monroe Doctrine. So the Monroe Doctrine was introduced by President James Monroe to Congress on December 7th, 19, or sorry, 1823. It's actual, the person that drafted it is mostly attributed to John Quincy Adams. And what this basically does is this is a foreign policy that tells the European powers to stay out of the Western Hemisphere, creating this separation of like spheres of influence. America is for the...

So it's basically like America being like, okay, we're over here. Anything in the America's north, central, south, that's kind of our purview. We're not even really asking South America or Central America about this. We're just saying, hey, we got it over here. Europe, that's for the European powers. All the places that you guys have already fought over, like everybody's already established, you guys do shit over there.

And we probably said, fuck it, do what you want with Africa at that point, right? Yeah, knock yourself out, have fun over there. You guys have a southern part that you can pull around with. Yeah, exactly. Would you say that was 18? 1823. Okay, so you're talking two years after the revolutions

that happened in Central America. to push Spain out further. Still pre-Civil War, we're still pre-Spanish-American War, so you have the Spanish that are still holding on to their half of Hispaniola, which was the Dominican Republic. You have France that is still in Haiti, I believe, right around? No, no, they were gone. They were gone in the beginning of the 19th century.

So the Haitian Revolution. We still do have European holdings within the Caribbean, within Central America. I think England still had like the mosquito islands at this point. That's why you still have things that are like the Bahamas that are still have that British like Nassau and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. So while all this is happening because this is 1823,

Monroe Doctrine makes this very bold proclamation that you will not be doing any more business over in the Western Hemisphere causing any problems. This is maybe a toothless threat at this point in time? It kind of is, but are we got our fucking, listen. We have short up shop after the American Revolution. We got our big dick pants on. And now we're saying, hey, guess what? Now that we've actually lit France and England slap each other around again for like the last 15 years.

Because again, they always be fighting. We just got a nice spot where we were like, are they both fucked up? And they're like, yeah, they've been fucking each other up for a while. They're like, fine. Send it. Send it. Send the Monroe doctrine that says like, hey, we're going to run stuff here. They know they're not going to be able to come over and stop them. Their holdings are small.

Well, if we load everybody onto the ships and send them down to Central America, we're not going to have enough army to protect our homeland at the same time. We got it again. We got our pants on. Yeah. So the four core principles of this Monroe Doctrine were non-colonization. Non-colonization. Here we go.

The American continents were closed to any future colonization by European nations. Okay, that's worded very specifically. separate spheres like we just talked about. Non-intervention. The U.S. would not interfere in the internal affairs or wars of European nations. Non-intervention works the other way. Any attempt by Europe to oppress or control independent nations

in the Americas would be viewed as a hostile act against the United States. Hmm. Hostile acts against the United States, you say. So, not ours. No, hold on. So what if you're technically attacking the United States in another country? Does it still...

I just like how they worded it that said, the American continents were closed to any future colonization by European nations. They didn't just say... They could have said the American continents were closed to any future colonization. We closed the door, but we were the only person inside the room. Yes, we're still in the same room. They're in the house with us. So while this was originally intended as like a defensive shield against European influence

and basically to protect newly independent Latin America countries, very young countries that are just establishing themselves. Young, supple countries. Yeah, it's basically just used as a reason to an intervention and intervene are going to be terms used very loosely during this episode. But it was used as reason to intervene in countries like Haiti, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic to, quote, restore order and to keep European creditors away. Well, as we'll come to find out in a lot of these countries, we still don't give Germany enough pre-World War I credit. Germany was on the up and up. They were on the up and coming.

They were kind of feeling around and poking and prodding over in Central America. And when World War II is getting gassed up and getting ready to run, or World War I, when it's getting gasped, up and ready to run, and the Germans are thinking, well, how are the United States going to play a part in this if we get this going? If we can maybe stick some fingers over into Haiti or Nicaragua or Mexico and keep them busy in this Monroe safe Western Hemisphere. Just delay them, a little delaying tactics. They can't send their full strength over anything. Even if they do, if there's a threat on that side, they're going to take care of themselves first. Yeah. So you have Germany that's going to, it felt weird every time I read Germany because the last thing I

connect with with Central America is Germany. South America, I can get to Germany in a few places, but not Central America. He's got to go to Argentina, right? So in 1871, this railroad entrepreneur named Henry Meigs had signed a contract with the government of Costa Rica to build a railroad from San Jose to the Port of Limon on the Caribbean side. his nephew, Minor C. Keith, ends up going over to work with him. Meigs ends up dying during this railroad project. Minor ends up taking over for his uncle in 1877. And along this railway, Miner had planted these banana plants

because he needed a way to feed the workers who were dying by the hundreds, just creating this railway. He was going through workers on this railroad. like hotcakes. A banana for every person he was rolling through these guys. There was a point in time where the locals were even like,

we're not going to help you anymore. So it was like, all right, I got to import some guys to finish this railroad because everybody else around here is smartened up. As he's building this railroad, Costa Rica,

who was making the payments to Keith to finish this project, ended up defaulting. They defaulted on payments to Keith in 1882. Keith ends up having to borrow 1.2 million pounds from European creditors. Along that same line, Keith is also awarded 800,000 acres of tax-free land and a 99-year lease of operation on the train route. So he gets to run the train route.

He gets to charge tolls for anybody that's using the train that he's creating from the capital to the Port of Limone to send anything out. and he has 800,000 acres to where he can start growing whatever he wants, owning whatever he wants. And eventually when this rail line ends up opening in 1890, there's not enough of a flow of passengers that can sustain the payments that he's making on the debt that he accrued trying to finish this up. So what does he do? He starts cultivating these bananas along the railways.

He starts building out this land or these big banana plantations. and he's just using the railroad to ship all of these bananas up into the Port L'amon. Is the land that he's giving or given, is it around the railroad, like on each side of it? Yeah. Kind of the Panama Canal style. It's just, yeah, that stretch that zone. So that's genius, just in the sense of like your stuff is growing. You don't have to transport anywhere.

You can grow it on both sides of the track wherever you need to. And then it just gets loaded onto the train anyway. We just bring the train up the tracks to wherever to load it. The train just keeps going. Everyone just keeps throwing in loads. Yeah, he ends up sending these back to the United States, and he's making a killing. The banana has hit the market in the late 1800s, early 1900s, and people just absolutely love these things. He runs what is known as the Tropical Trading and Transport Company.

Now, in 1870, along the same timeline, you have Sailor Lorenzo Dowell. Baker, who bought his first bananas in Jamaica to sell them back stateside. By 1885, Baker teamed up with Andrew Preston and eight other investors to form the Boston Fruit Company. So you have the Boston Fruit Company who's in direct competition with this tropical trading and transport company, but at the same time, they're both making money because the banana business is good. And in 1899, Keith ends up losing out on $1.5 million because this New York City broker just went bankrupt. He just, I don't know if this was a Bernie Madoff type situation back in the day, but he ends up losing a million and a half bucks. He doesn't have any money. He has to be able to

figure out what he can do. So he goes over to Boston and he ends up meeting with Baker and with Preston and they end up striking a deal to merge their companies to form the United Fruit Company. And then after that, just to make sure that they had a pretty good grip on the banana a market, they ended up buying shares or just bought out 14 other companies. By the time they were done with all of their acquisitions, they controlled 80% of the banana import business. Jesus. Now, anybody else that controls 80% of business now has to deal with anti-monopoly laws.

This episode so far sounds like it's going to be about competing like fruit companies and everything. I'm sorry if it sounds like that's what it's going to be. This is not what this is. This is like full on armed conflict, all of that stuff. That is just based on like Adam was saying, these guys having this huge pull with this market. And it being such a, it's so crazy to think about that it's like big banana.

Because like there are very few fruits available. And these things are coming in and being relatively cheap to where anybody can buy these. it does not matter where in the social ladder you are. A banana tastes good. I also have to assume at this point in time, too, the banana was probably the only year-round fruit that they could get because this harkens back to a time when grocery stores didn't carry fruits and vegetables year-round.

You couldn't buy a pineapple in any month of the year. Look, you couldn't even buy a pineapple at that point. You couldn't buy an apple at any point during that year like you can now. Yeah. But bananas coming from this tropical round. region, depending on when they're being harvested. What do you pack in your kid's lunch? What do you pack in your husband's lunch?

Yeah. A fucking banana. Real quick. So going back and kind of going before, you know, this is the private part of this thing. Yeah. The Monroe Doctrine is actually doing some stuff that it should have been doing. Well, has they had written it anyway? So a couple instances that it actually did work.

There was a removal of an Austrian Archduke named Maximilian I first who, was placed as the puppet emperor of Mexico by Napoleon the 3rd of France during the Civil War. So again, this stuff that we're talking about 1865, 8 up to the 1900s, that's not that far off historically from the Civil War. No.

So once the war was over in 1865, the U.S. moved 50,000 troops to the border, which, along with the loss of popular support within Mexico itself, led France to withdraw in 1966, sorry, 1866, and Maximilian was captured and killed by Mexican Republic forces. Now, this is where we're also going to get the implementation of the Mexican Republic, that then in a few years we're going to fight when we try to take Texas and all that kind of shit. It also worked in the sense that it settled the British-Venezuela border dispute in 1895.

So now we're actively engaging with the Brits. were kind of trying to broaden out that Monroe Doctrine to take Central South America as well. And it was the border dispute over British Guyana. Now, this set up the U.S. as the primary arbiter in all Western Hemisphere's fares. So just putting that in perspective, if there was some type of stuff going on down with like Brazil or anywhere within like Costa Rica, and on an international stage, we were basically just putting our hand in front of me, like, no, shush, shush, shish, shish. Hey, we'll talk for these guys. We're the defense attorneys.

Yes, but we're the benevolent defense attorneys that will make sure these guys are taken and given their fair shake. So this basically forced this recognition of the doctrine by a major European power when Great Britain had to be like, shit, I guess they are arbitrating now on their behalf and they recognized it. And then there was also resistance to this Russian expansion with, which I didn't know about this. 1824, they attempted to claim territory on the northwest coast of North America, Washington and into Oregon. And with this Monroe doctor, and it was just like, nope, again, that's you trying to invade this, and they were forced to basically sign a treaty, that at that point, I believe, gave them Alaska, but no further down than that. Pretty funny that they were like, we need to go invade this area. wasn't there some way to walk across it? And they're like, yeah, no, that's all flooded.

We've got to go by boat now. We're still going to go that way. And then we're going to travel on landown. Bering straight and connected anymore. Yeah. We've got to find a different way. Okay. So you have this habit of already the government,

basically stepping in and kind of being like, hey, just so you know, everyone is having their little independent countries, but we're going to kind of just make decisions for the whole table. We're going to order for the table. Well, the table ends up growing. And then we're going to eat off everyone's place. And that's, as this table grows, right around this same time,

we're talking September 15th, 1821, a couple years before the Monroe Doctrine. And probably the reason why the Monroe Doctrine becomes that important is Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica all declare independence from Spain. They end up forming the Federal Republic of Central America in 1823. The Republic gets dissolved between 1838. 1841, Panama ends up staying with Columbia, we'll call it Columbia at this point, who also had gained their independence in 1821. Now Mexico took for some reason like, I don't know, another 12 days to gain their independence from Spain. I don't know what they were doing.

Once they gained their independence, they briefly try to annex the rest of Central America. Like, ah, shit, Spain's gone. All these guys down below us are trying to. to figure their shit out. You're all Mexico too. We're going to take you. You're all Mexico too. There was just enough of a conglomeration of them to shake off Mexico. And so you now have this kind of loose confederation, but it's in a way where all of these

Central American countries begin to have border disputes. Because those border disputes are cut up in the middle of jungles that nobody can really figure out whose is what, but everybody wants to try to get a. as many miles for their country as possible. It's kind of the thing where you're just like, well, when we drew this line, I thought it was the ridge over on that, that mountain range.

They're like, no, we thought it was the one behind you guys. And then you also have pressure because like, looking at a map, it's just a very narrow spit of land going down there. And you're getting pressure coming down from Mexico, one direction, and then you have all the players,

which I think it's Columbia right there. Is that right up on top of South America that was with Panama? So you have Columbia that's also pressuring. So they're also being squished from north and south while then also trying to kind of defend the borders against each other. So there's a lot of fighting. There's a lot of shape-shifting of lands. There's a lot of them sending in militaries to try to fight these things out.

As the westward expansion happens in the United States, you have the U.S. looking at this, like, hmm, if we could just stick our finger in the middle of this, obviously we have the Monroe Doctrine, and so we should be okay. Let's see what we can do, though. In 1846, you get the Treaty of Molarino Buildlack, which granted transport rights for the U.S. to build a railroad.

And this is happening down on the Isthmus where Panama is. It grants the U.S. this military ability as well to come in and squash any social uprisings in the areas where we have, this land that we can build this railroad on. Well, we get a fantastical appearance of all of these U.S. citizens right around the Gold Rush. Because as we talked about in the Gold Rush episode, as we talked about in the Panama Canal episode, you had three ways to make it from the East Coast to the West Coast for the Gold Rush.

You're either going over land, which you're dealing with Native Americans and sickness, and all sorts of shit. You are taking off from New Orleans. You're tired of dysentery. Yeah. You're taking off from New Orleans somewhere on the eastern seaboard. You're traveling all the way down around Cape Horn and going all the way up South America on its western side and dropping off up there. Or you're taking off in a boat.

You're headed down to Panama. You're crossing the isthmus. You're being loaded onto a boat and you're headed up that way. Well, lower onto a boat taken across to another boat on the other side and then going up. Yeah, pre-canal, it was all the railroad that was going through in 1849. You would go boat, railroad, boat. Yeah. Yeah.

So you start seeing these U.S. citizens show up down in Central America and Panama. And of course, this never really seems to end up good for us. 1856, April 15th, something called the watermelon riot happens. And the watermelon riot is basically this big riot that ends up starting because there's an American that buys himself a slice of watermelon from one of the vendors out in the street. Well, he doesn't buy it. Well, he orders it. Yes.

He orders it. He eats it. He doesn't like the taste of it. He refuses to pay the vendor. And chaos ensues. And during this chaos ensuing, you have 15 Americans and two Panamanians that are killed. You have all of these businesses partially owned by U.S. citizens that are burned down in the square because of this riot that happens. Pay for your fucking watermelon.

It couldn't have been that much. It really couldn't have been that much. You should have paid for it then. This guy was probably so fucking tired of these fucking white American tourists coming down and just grabbing watermelon slices like their free samples at Costco. Yeah. Good chance. Well, just in response to that, within the next five months,

you have on September 19th of that same year in 1856, there's 160 Marines that come down and take possession of different spots along the railway. They don't really do a whole lot, but you are having the United States flex their muscle and send these Marines in and be like, you guys really want to start some shit? Because, of course, all the messaging coming to the United States is this was started by the Panamanians.

What a shitty post, right? Hey, have you heard of malaria? Yeah. We're still talking about pre-canal zone when they came in and took care of the mosquitoes. So those dudes are getting sent down there and probably getting yellow fever for just hanging out at train stations really.

I'm down here because some motherfucker couldn't pay for a slice of watermelon. Pretty simple fix. You would think that it could just really could be easy from there. French efforts, as we talk about in the Panama Canal episode, I think it was a good episode. It was a fun episode. Go back and listen to that to kind of get more in on the Panama Canal. I'm so glad that we did the Canal episodes already.

This is going to be a weird question. Is the Panama Canal the one episode we did outside of the studio? Yes. Okay. That's how I remember it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

We weren't, it was not on location. No, it was our away game. Yeah. Their efforts end up falling, trying to build this Panama Canal in 1889. November 3rd, 1903, with the help of the Navy and the Marines, Panama ends up seceding from Columbia. and Columbia is playing some dirty pool because they know that the French collapse. The French being in charge and ruling over Panama at this point in time, were looking at the deal they signed with the French.

And there was a certain number of years, I believe it was like 1902, or maybe it was 1904, that if the French didn't do anything with the land, all of it would revert back to Columbia. So Columbia was trying to slow play these negotiations with the United States in purchasing this Panama Canal land to go over and try to make all this happen. Because Columbia wasn't going to let it happen. No, because Columbia wanted it to revert back to them so they could build on their own canal. Yeah. So you have the Colombian slow playing, the United States are kind of figuring out this isn't

going to go well for us if this stretches out any longer. Right around that time, the Panamanians begin talking about succession from Columbia. And the United States knows if they maybe read them. reinforce Colombia or Panama a little bit. If they show some force towards the Colombians, then the Panamanian independence means that they can just purchase this land out right from Panama. Well, and we're confident, too, because this is coming off the 1898 Spanish-American War. So the Spanish-American War basically just in a nutshell, and it'll get its own episode and everything. This is just kind of an overview. The U.S. supported the Cuban rebels bid for independence from Spain.

Now, we had a ship, I believe, that was out there called the USS Maine that was off of Cuba. It sunk by accident. They thought it was like a detonation, but because of a public opinion going strictly off of certain ways of getting their information very kind of few and far between, yellow journalism was super effective. And so Joseph Pulitzer and then our good buddy William Randolph Hurst had U.S. public opinion square league in Spain saying, this was the bombing of the USS Maine.

There was this big thing about Remember the Maine and some shit like that. So this wasn't just confined to the Caribbean, though. This also had some stuff going down in the Philippines where the Spanish fleet is basically destroyed by the United States Navy

like in just a few hours and at the same time we're supporting these rebels over in Cuba as well and fighting against them. Results in this thing called the Treaty of Paris, which I'm not sure why. because maybe it was signed in Paris or something like that. There's like 15 treaties of Paris.

Which saw Spain renounce all claims to Cuba. It ceded Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines to the United States. So if you want to wonder why we had the Philippines, why we talked about that during World War II, I shall return all that kind of stuff. It's because we got the Philippines from Spain as a result of the Spanish-American War. This is the event that pretty much ends the Spanish Empire. and flip-flops it and is the rise of the United States as an imperial world power.

You had colonization happening from Europe for so long, but the United States is so young and was a victim of colonization in a way? And it's still technically so far unremued from being European, like not that many generations away from still being considered European. I think we were talking about this when we were doing the research and study, and this is kind of like Belgium's moment when they, finally gain their independence and they start rubbing their hands together and looking around for places to buy.

But imagine like you're Belgium and you're looking around and there's a lot of places available. Yeah. And you're more technologically military or militarily advanced than those other countries. Like this is Belgium's wet dream. And it happened to be ours too, apparently. Yeah. It's, it feels like it was definitely something that as it's set up and as it's played out, it, the Monroe Doctrine, I think, gave us a lot of car plunge to...

Well, and it wasn't just like, hey, people of Cuba. Here's Cuba. We were fighting for you. 1899, President William McKinley basically states that U.S. Army General Leonard Wood has, like, supreme power in Cuba. 1903 is when we saw the permanent lease on Guantanamo Bay that was taken by the United States, which explains, like, if you've ever had questions about why we were able to keep Guantanamo Bay, despite the Cuban Missile Crisis, all that stuff, Castro. It's because we had this weird permanent lease that had been.

How does that work? I think the lease was only kept in place because we had enough firepower down there to keep the lease in place. No, no, no, I understand that. That's insane, though, that there was just this little area, that it was just like, we're still in your country. Like, yeah, but stay there. It's also massively concerning to think about a secret of base

down in Cuba that we have. Like Guantanamo, obviously, after September 11th, really kind of took on a whole different meaning. But they were doing some stuff down in Guantanamo that seems like it would be something that would have to happen off the mainland, the United States. Yeah. Maybe a little bit further away.

You have the U.S. naval blockade of Colombia as they attempted to retake Panama, Obviously being pissed about what happened. You're referring to the old gunboat diplomacy, right? The U.S. has ended up granting a perpetual lease on the land that's around the canal, the Panama Canal Zone. So the way that you had the railroads that had been developed by the Americans, and we had the protection of those and everything like that, the ones that shuttled people across to get over during the gold rush, they had been expanded going different ways. within Panama. And because we had control over those, there was no way for Columbia to move its troops. There were situations where they just took like generals and they took the train and the

train that was supposed to carry all their troops. It just didn't go anywhere. And then they sent the general way up the front line. He had no troops to commander, vice versa. So the troops couldn't do anything. It's such a weird thing to say like, hey, United States, we need to use a railroad to make, move into Panama to make sure Panama stays part of Columbia. But at the same time, we know that you're upset at us for not allowing you to build the canal and are probably backing Panama. So this is, this is awkward. This isn't really fair.

Yeah. You guys, you shouldn't be down here. What's going on? We, we already kicked the French out. They failed in their mission. Why are you down here just eyeing us? it definitely feels like a little bit of a power push. I mean, it's history.

That shit happens all the time. No, no, it does. It's what we're talking about now, but what comes out of it is kind of like, okay, this is a little bit more than just strong arming the Panama Canal. Yes, and so basically we did this to ensure the security of our deal for the Panama Canal or control the Panama Canal after we had bought the semi-complete project from the French in 1904, completed in 1914, I think, about $375 million later.

It just made money hand over fist after that. Just crazy money. Starting in Mexico, we can start 1914 with the U.S. occupation of Veracruz. Now, I don't know. I mean, occupations start for all sorts of different reasons. Oh, real quick. One more before we get to the actual, what's considered the time frame of the Banana Wars. So 1911, the Honduras coup.

So that guy, Sam Zammari, who was the owner of that Q, Ku Yulamil, food or whatever it was. You know what they became? Which one did they become? Pretty sure they become Dole. That is standard. Okay, standard becomes dole. Kulumel is then the one that gets sucked into United Fruit.

Yeah. And then the guy you're talking about. It's going to make sense when I say this, yeah. So this guy, Sam Zamri, hired a gang of American mercenaries and basically a former Honduran president to overthrow the sitting government because they were negotiating this debt deal with British banks that Zemarie didn't like. And so the U.S. Navy basically knew about this and the government knew about this and just sat by and let this succeed. the owner of a fruit company hired American mercenaries

and a former Honduran president performed a coup and the United States was just like, I guess. Honduras is a wild, wild story. When we get to them, it's going to be a, it's a hell of a ride for Honduras. All right, we want to start knocking out these areas? Yes, we need to.

Mexico, 1914, the occupation of Veracruz From April to November, this occupation happens. It happens days after something called the Tampico affair. And the Tampico affair is an affair that starts because a man named Captain Earl, who is a U.S. Navy captain, sends Enson Charles Seacop in this whale boat to grab coal from the docks in Mexico and Veracruz. They fly an American flag. I believe there's six of them in the ship. The soldiers end up getting to the dock.

They're then surrounded by General Ignacio Zaragoza. And Zaragoza ends up taking these men prisoner. The boat that they had taken in was able to get away. They were chased back to the ship, essentially. And Zaragoza is holding these guys on land and questioning about what they're doing there, why they were in a zone that they weren't supposed to be in. And he says, okay, you guys can go back to the docks and finish loading up, but you're not allowed to leave.

we have to have a discussion about this. Well, Earl is pretty angry that Zaricos' men just took them and he demands an apology, on a punishment, and for some reason, his idea of a good apology

is that the Mexicans are supposed to raise the American flag on their soil and then fire a 21 gun salute, which will then be reciprocated by a 21 gun salute on the ship back to them. Guy so wide, his name's Mayo.

Oh, that's, Mayo is the one that, yeah, US Admiral Henry Mayo demanded the 21 gun salute from the American, to the American flag as a formal apology. And of course, the Mexican, Zaragoza in the Mexican dictated. Yeah, the general, what, Victoriano Huerta, I think,

were just like, no, man. Like, you guys were entering like a restricted area. You guys weren't supposed to be here. Yeah. Of course, that makes it all the way back to the U.S. President. I believe at this point in time it was Wilson, Budra Wilson. Yeah.

He does not like Huerta one bit. And there's some issues that are going on because there is word of a German freighter, a German boat, carrying a bunch of guns and ammunition. Basically, yeah, it's a German armed shipment. Into Mexico. And so the way that they end up taking care of this is there's a compromise that gets somehow agreed upon that they'll fire the 21

gun salute from both sides at the same time. See, this is ridiculous. Okay, so basically you say like, it's reading the fabricated story first. Yeah. And then they answer, like, is this really what they're going to invade for? And it's like, oh, no,

it's this second thing. So basically, Woodrow Wilson doesn't see you worth his regime as legitimate. And it's like the only place that they're going to be able to accept these larger ships like this German arms shipment or whatever is going to be in Veracruz. I don't want them having any more weapons, despite what they're going to do with it, because I don't like this guy's regime, whatever.

But hey, has anything gone down in Mexico like Veracruz? And we had like seven dudes that got drunk and weren't supposed to go somewhere they shouldn't have. Okay, ask for something really ridiculous. Like make sure the country gives us like a 21 gun salute or like as an apology, something they're not going to do. Raises the American flag on Mexican soil. Yeah, exactly. And so this ends up resulting in U.S. Marines landing on April 21st, so that's what of 1814?

Yes. Sorry, 1914. 1914. 1914. They seized the custom house, other key positions. They're met with resistance from basically the Mexican naval cadets because there's a school there because it's like they're made both, I'm trying to say, both naval and industrial harbor or pier, like location on that side for getting stuff in,

regular soldiers and armed civilians in house-to-house urban combat. I think they said like 19 to 22 Americans were killed and 70 wounded with like between 150 and 300 Mexican casualties. So they end up just in fear that the U.S. Navy is going to run over them. They end up letting out all of the prisoners that they have in custody and arm all the people. prisoners and immediately when all the townspeople and all the free folks see the military see the

marines coming they just turn tail and run all the criminals are the ones that go straight towards the military straight towards the Marines and just get mowed down yeah they get blown apart now meanwhile while this whole thing is going on this german ship ends up landing in puerto mexico i believe it's north of vera cruz and they end up dropping off all of these arms Now, the interesting thing about this ship was most of these arms that were coming into the country had been purchased by a U.S. citizen named John Wesley DeK. DeK. had interest down in Mexico, and he was buying guns from Remington in the United States. And since the United States had a weapons embargo on Mexico, he sent them over to Germany. and then the German ship was going to bring them down to his holdings in the United States.

So it wasn't like a German government ship. No. It was just simply a mercantile vessel. Yeah. So once all these arms get there in the United States hears about this, they say, hey, we're going to require a force surrender of arms. And they ended up getting back like 13,000 guns. So this shipment had to have been a whole hell of a lot. Well, I mean, the U.S. forces garrisoned and administered the state.

city or administrative the city for like seven months. Yeah. They ended up withdrawing on November 23rd, or 1914. I'm going to get these dates down, I swear to God. The resolution was mediated by what they call the ABC powers, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, at this thing called the Niagara Falls Peace Conference. So basically, three of the main countries from South America had to come up. I mean, like, get out of Central America.

The fuck are you doing? We don't like how close you're getting. Central America is a pretty good buffer between North America and South America. We already got Germans up our ass. The occupation contributed to Werthe's eventual resignation in July of 1914, but this significantly damaged United States-Mexico relations

fostering a lot of deep-seed anti-American sentiment, which, again, this is 1914. In the grand scheme of things, it is not that long ago. No, and we're also less than 100 years on the flip side of the Mexican-American war and taking land prior to for Mexico already. So kind of around this same time, we have this occupation also in Nicaragua. So in 1912, there was a rebellion led by this minister of war, Luis Menya, that threatened

the currently standing pro-U.S. government of this guy named Adolfo Diaz, President Adolfo Diaz. And Diaz requested, like he would, being pro-American, he's like, give us, you know, to the United States, we need aid to protect the American lives and property are down here. Okay. Basically, this was, and if you're looking at a map,

so you have Panama, and then right above Panama, is Nicaragua, correct? Or is it Costa Rican then? I said that, so, like I was so sure. I believe Costa Rica is on the, western side. Okay, I'm pretty sure that is. I'm going to pull it up here in a second, but anyway, I'm going to talk like that's correct. Now, that had also been an area that they had looked to build a canal because it has so many lakes and rivers that it was a viable option, but it was only after the

success of the independence of Panama, and I do independent in quotes here, Panama, that they were like, the French have already been working on this. Let's just go and take their project over. But there was still this fear that someone else could come in, use the plans that they had initially to build this other canal through this other country, and then take a piece of the pie. Yeah. And so we have to make sure that countries like Japan or Germany can't get in here to build these competing interoceanic canals and also to protect, you know, the American-owned railroads and fruit plantations that have already been established down there.

Well, to get Diaz in power, prior to that even, you have United States intervention because in 1909, you have the U.S. supporting these rebel guerrilla forces against a man named President Zelaya. And U.S. interest over the potential canal that you're talking about ends up being a push where Zalaya is like, oh, you guys want to come in here and take our shit, huh? So we're going to try to restrict foreign access to all of our natural resources and try to protect our country. Zalaya ends up killing 500 rebels and two Americans that were down there. And this is what justifies them coming to protect, quote-unquote, U.S. lives and property that forces Zalaya to resign. Diaz gets in power, like you were talking about, and immediately asks his Secretary of War, Luis Mania,

to resign in 1912. He sees that there's going to be the revolt. That's why Menna then turns on him for the actual rebellion. Okay, that makes a lot of sense. And looking at the geography, sorry about that, when it goes Panama, Costa Rica, then Nicaragua. And I could see why they would choose that selection to or that place too because the Lago de Nicaragua is this insanely huge,

I don't know if it's a lake or if it's ocean fed, but it takes up like a distance of half the country at one point. So definitely something to be worried about if someone's going to try to be building a competing canal. Yeah. You have mania who is forced to resign, who ends up making the brilliant decision to capture American banana company steamboats

to try to start this coup to get rid of Diaz. Diaz immediately runs the United States and he says, I can't ensure the safety of the United States citizens down here. Or the banana boats? Yeah. Boom. That's what he said first. I cannot ensure the safety of the profits of the companies that are down here. What? Or the workers, because here's the deal, too. Who are the Americans down there that were actually working? You know that it's the top 1% of management that are just overseeing these places. It is not anyone that's actually doing

any of the actual work. That's local. And you have, have these banana farms. I don't know when the right time is to really talk about the banana practices as far as United Fruit's practices. We'll maybe try to fit it in around the time that we talk about the banana massacre maybe, just to kind of fill in as to why some of that happened. Yeah. So, of course, as the Marines come and occupy, they end up occupying Nicaragua from 1912 to 1933. That's how long the occupation goes. So, and everything kind of, we've, we've talked about events that we've done in previous episodes like being connected to each other. So shortly after, you know, well, all this is going down, we're in there to help protect our interest. There was this

treaty in 1914 that was established that made the country basically a protectorate, giving the United States exclusive canal rights, which is basically like there will not be a canal. We have the only rights if we were to build one, but we got Panama, so we're not going to build another one. And a naval base there for $3 million. Now, second phase of this conflict, or a second phase of this conflict, took place, I think, starting in 1926 when there was this civil war that broke out between two factions within Nicaragua, leading to this full-scale marine intervention. I notice how he's intervention there. Well, part of that is they signed this thing called the Brian Chamorro Treaty, which gives the canal rights to the United States. States that they were hoping for. That was the one in 1914, right? Yeah, that was 1925. Okay. So this happens in

25. You're talking about the civil war that happens in 1926 directly over those rights being handed to the United States. Also, a crazy callback. From 27 to 1933, there's a man named Augusto Sandino that is holding this guerrilla war against this Diaz regime in the Marines. he's the guy who births the Sandinistas. So he is the guy who birthed the guerrilla group to Sandinistas that we talk about during the Iran Contra. Yeah. So he's, okay, so you have the guerrilla resistance leader who's Augusto Sandino, right? Mm-hmm.

He's unable to be captured by U.S. forces who basically train the National Guard of Nicaragua and put this guy Anastasian Samosa Garcia in control, and then we got out in 1933. So afterward, Samosa assassinated Sandino, and I think 34, and seized power in creating this family dynasty that ruled until the Sandinista Revolution in 1979 that was inspired by Augusto Sandino,

who he had assassinated. Yep. Talk about a weird little circle of revolution, guys that we were fighting before as the Sandinistas and Sandino to guys that we were helping support overthrow

that same government through the sales of drugs. It's a weird little tie-in. And again, you're going to wonder why we're talking about 1933 being the ending for a lot of this stuff and we'll tie that up at the end. But there is kind of a hard out for a lot

of these countries. and a lot of these occupations is because 1933, we get FDR coming in and wheeling and dealing. You want to do a bathroom break before we get into Haiti? You want to do, let's do bathroom break and then Honduras. Let's cut through the land and then we'll jump over to the islands. Gotcha.

Well, hello. Listen, while we head to the restroom and get ourselves something to drink, why don't you do something nice for yourselves? Head on over to patreon.com slash historically high and get signed up for a little bonus content. I mean, come on, you deserve it. If you want to keep up with this, our main source of social media is going to be our Instagram,

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at gmail.com All right, and with that said, let's get back to the good stuff. All right, we're going to go on to Honduras, I think, next. Honduras. United, or, Jesus, not the United States yet. United Fruit Company and Standard Fruit Company had just dominated the banana trade in Honduras. The poor treatment did a lot of these workers

faced and kind of the interesting thing for a lot of these places is, in Central America at least, most of the population is centered around the western half of the country. So these lands that are being purchased by these banana sellers are usually going to be on the East Coast because you don't have the Panama Canal during some of these portions yet. You have to wait until 1914 to get there. So these banana plantations are sitting on the East Coast. It's going to be a less populated region. and you need people to work there.

So you start importing Afro-Caribbean workers, workers from Jamaica, which was a former British territory. So they were going to be English-speaking Jamaicans that are going to be coming down to work in these places like Honduras. Also, 10 of people that have been working on, like, the sugar plantations and everything like that in Cuba as well, right?

So, yeah, you've seen kind of poor worker relations, but Cuba being, less or further removed from slavery, they aren't quite into this position of understanding just how bad stuff can get. And as like these companies are expanding, they want to pick these places to grow as close to their shipping,

you know, the ports and everything like that as possible. And as they're gaining more land and everything like that, they have to bring in more people to where maybe you can't just bring in people from out of the country or anything like that. You're bringing in people from all over the country. You're paying them extremely poor weight.

Because again, this is not like them being like, hey, we're hiring for a location down in Honduras. No, we're hiring for the guy that's going to go down there and make sure that these people aren't running away from the plantations and everything. And that when we set up places for them to shop, and I know we'll go into this little bit more, that the infrastructure that is being set up

for the survival of these people to work, is also owned by us. Yeah, fuck it. Let's just do it now. You have these towns in these cities that are springing up that are just basically company towns. What did we talk about? Was it tires? Ford.

Ford. Fordlandia for the rubber plants, for the lower plantations. It is, that's what it is. It is these places. And you know what? Because I wanted it in people's minds as well. Yeah, guess what? We ate bananas all week.

It's a normal staple of our diet. But don't think for a second that on each of those bananas have to be. doing this episode. We've wondered how many people had to give their lives. But the United Fruit Company ends up becoming Chiquita after some whole bunch of dirty shit ends up

coming out not too long ago. Now, the standard fruit company becomes Dole, I believe, and I don't know who becomes Del Monte. But I know that that's also a player in this as well. Later, later on, as far as getting into the banana game.

But the majority of this shitty corporate exploitation stuff, a lot of it's going to be Chiquita. Yeah. The lady with the fruit on her head. Just think of that. Good looking lady, too. Doesn't look mean.

I know that. You know what? She was probably the worst fucking manager they had down there and they're like, we're just put her on there. Possibly. Who was the drug dealing, like, Queen Pen? Griselda. Was that her?

Yeah. She was like the Grisela. Delta of the fucking banana game. There was a few of them, but the last lady that you wanted to see down there. In these kind of corporate towns, you would have a situation, especially in Honduras, where they segregated the housing for the workers. And part of that is because they're trying to continue the divide between the immigrant work that they're bringing in and then the local communities.

so they don't have a chance to poorly unionize or kind of become one. They are in a situation where the payments that they're getting aren't coming over in cash. They're just peso equivalents of basically coupons that are then used inside of these company cities, these company towns, charging exorbitant prices that they're just getting back in these vouchers, essentially that they're paying these workers and there's really no monetary exchange going on. Or you're going into debt because you have to be there to work. You don't have the option to leave and then you're working off essentially a debt

while you're there as well with like a ridiculous amount of interest or something. So yeah, it is a it's a debtor servitude is basically what it is. And not to mention if you're looking to raise your station, if you're looking to go work for another company, anything like that, you have a situation where you're not able to. to save money to try to move or anything like that because you're not getting paid money. You're hiring the security for these towns. The government's not coming in because guess what? You're also able to pay the government and officials. You are creating infrastructure for these countries,

essentially. And despite the fact that you own those, as long as the people that are in control are not hassling you on taxes or anything like that or telling you how to treat their, their people, you're running your own security. You don't have, you know, the army from that country going in there be like, hey, is everyone being treated all right? It's like, no. We have our own private, you know, army that technically has more funding than your country's army. And if our army isn't enough, if our private funded army, we can just go back to the United States and tell them that you're being bad. Yes.

And then they'll send in the actual army because people love bananas. Yeah. Along these lines, you have land exemptions in ownership of this infrastructure that Chris is talking about. And these projects that they're building give companies so much power in the country within the governments. And at the same time as they're having this power grab within the government, the economic growth of the country isn't keeping pace with the amount of money that the banana companies are made. banking because they're not paying in any taxes. All these land and tax exemptions that they're getting are making them pay pennies on the dollars that they should be paying. And had these countries, like Honduras, been able to fully tax these companies instead of giving them these

sweetheart deals to try to bring jobs into the countries, you have a situation where they're still destitute. They're still poor while these countries are making more money than some of the GDPs in these countries just shipping out bananas alone. A lot of these lands that they're getting, and I think this happened a lot in Colombia when we were talking about the size of, or the Costa Rica, when we were talking about the size of the land that they were given, they would be farming out like 100,000 acres of 500,000 acres that they owned. And at the same time, they're doing that, all of these other people that have been run

off their land because that land was granted to the company, don't have a place. to live. So some of these governments will come in and say, well, you're not using this other 400,000 acres. And the banana companies are saying, but if something happens, if we get this Panama disease that ends up wiping out the Michelle

bananas, if we have to slash and burn our entire crop, we need another 100,000 acres to immediately begin growing on from there. So as these countries, as you get these leaders that are coming into power, they're saying, well, we're taking back this land. And the banana companies are

say, no, you're not. You gave this to us and we have a private army. And if we don't have a private army, the Marines are going to come in and make sure that our area is safe. And it's not just those two options. So this is an exact example then. We're talking about Honduras anyway, so just getting into it. So that guy that we've mentioned a few times,

Sam's Murray and the Ku Yumao Fruit Company. So in 1911, he personally recruited a team of American mercenaries to stage this coup in Honduras. Now, to support the coup, he purchased a former Navy vessel, the USS Hornet, which was basically used to transport them to Honduras to launch the invasion. I want to say they snuck past the Navy is what they said. Now, in addition to having this private military, what they would do is they would just fund rebel groups because there's always going to be someone rebelling against the current administration. And so they would actively supply these local rebel groups with weapons and training to destabilize the government that attempted to either increase taxes or implement these land reforms on him. So basically, as all of a sudden this government's getting harassed, things are starting to happen.

You get this representative from Cuyamil Fruit showing up being like, hey, you look stressed. Things, things a little bit stressful for you. You should probably maybe just like, I bet if you stop talking about these. taxes and these land reform deals, I bet other stuff would stop happening and you'd be able to relax a little bit more. And weapons for this kind of stuff were acquired through outdated army surplus, especially, apparently New Orleans was like a hot spot for like arms dealing and all of this stuff. And then you could also get it throughout European merchants.

Yeah, I mean, it's the same stuff today. Most of the guns that we complain about that the cartels are shooting each other with down in Mexico were made in America. they've crossed the border from north to south instead of south to north so we care less about it. But I mean, you literally have these companies staging coups to replace the government to put into place someone like, that's an insane amount of power for a private enterprise to have. Yeah. And it's recognized because Honduras is where we get the term banana republic.

There was a man named William Sidney Porter that wrote under the pen name of O'Henry. coining the term banana republic using Honduras as the inspiration in the tail. Just a banana republic is somebody who only exports bananas and they're being run through a government that's just not functioning beyond that. Just to kind of give you a little taste of how long the Marines or how many times the Marines landed in Honduras. They landed in Honduras from 1903, 1907, 1911, 1912, 1912, 1919, and 1925. Those were all the marine landings that happened just in Honduras alone, is how much that they were hitting. And it wasn't another country in there trying to build another canal. It wasn't their country trying to build a rival canal.

It was the government that was there wanted to charge these fruit companies more or restructured their or take some of the land back. And it was just like, send in the fucking Marines. Yeah, you have instances in 1911. The reason they come in 1911 is because there's this president named Miguel DeVila that ends up being overthrown from opposition to fruit company concessions. So all the sweetheart deals that he gave the fruit companies The people are like, nah, you're out. We're going to go ahead and take you down. Boom.

Marines come back in because the United Fruit Company and Standard call And they say, hey, we got some issues. They just overthrew the president. And the Europeans are just looking at being like, See, we knew you guys were going to do that shit too. No fair. You told us we couldn't come over there. This is bullshit.

That's what they're asking. And they're like, what do you mean? They're like, read that. first thing about how we said that no European countries could come over and do any colonizing in the Americas. We didn't say anything against America, America,

you know, on America action. So you have DeVila overthrown. United States shows up. They do their little intervention. End up getting a banana-friendly general Manuel Bonilla

to take the presidency. Through World War I, you have a man. Francisco Bertrand that is the president, Rafael Gutierrez, gets in and is elected in 1920. From 1920 to 24, he's in power. Pretty much the whole time, they're running this second civil war that's happening. It's fueled by these competing financial and social interests. You have all of these people rising up saying that the banana plantations are just basically stealing and raping from the land.

And you have the banana companies being like, here is a bag of money. money to keep, keep us going down here. So you figure out what you want to do. After this ends up happening, the U.S. backs, this interim president, Vincenta Carrasco, he's a bridge to another U.S. friendly president, Miguel Barajona. And so from then on, you just have the United States picking and choosing who they're going to throw up as president in Honduras. I don't know exactly where this fits in,

but seeing as we were just talking about kind of the way that the banana companies worked in some of these areas, they didn't just work off of plantations. They were buying from small growers too. But the contracts that they were making these small growers sign were insane. Because basically the contracts were you can only sell exclusively to one company. So anything that you try to sell to another company, we can legally go over and seize from them because all of your product comes to us. If we take a load of your shipment up to the United States and your cargo goes bad on the way there,

you don't get paid. If we go up and take your cargo to the United States and it doesn't sell. But you can't sell to anyone else. Yeah. So you have to accept our insanely shitty terms. So you have to rely on the honesty of these fruit companies that your shipment is going to arrive up there and be sellable. People fucking suck. Yeah.

Yeah. Really, really bad. That should have just been the tag. When they were asking us, what did they should have put on the new logo down at the bottom? And we were like, let's put something clever and everything. We should have just put historically high where you find out people suck. Historically, people have sucked. It's not just everybody else.

It's us too. These plantations end up taking over so much of this land, but then even the private growers, even the guys that are just growing to try to get their families going have to abide by these roles of the contracts. And they have to fuck over people just to survive because they're not running just as family businesses. They still have people working for them. They've also figured out a solution that they put a contract date, expiration date, X amount of farms 24, X amount of farms 25, X amount of farms 26. So that way all of the contracts don't come do at the same time and everybody can, just move away from that company.

So they're basically keeping them in limbo saying there's not enough of you to be able to go over to another company and sign a contract with them. So you're basically with us. And you know that that's just a system 100% of like, oh, why don't you let us supply you with something? They get into debt and they just take their land. So it's just this constant thing of absorbing just even these independent.

If you can even call them that. No. You have these contracts that are also during the season saying, you need to have your harvest done in August, you need to have your harvest done in September, November, so on and so forth. So you have a constant flow of bananas being harvested to being sent up to the United States.

So if you're running out of money and they say, ooh, we actually have to push your harvest date another three months away. This is a very high thought. So instead of growing for seasons, like we were used to something, here where it's like get it in the ground and this season because you have to harvest it by this season everything. What they're doing, because it's not just like, hey, leave it on the tree,

like stuff ripens in a certain time frame. So what they're basically doing is they're telling these farms, we need these, you know, by the time we sell these, you're having to do the whole cloning thing, but you're having to plant the clones at a very specific time to time when things are going to be coming into ripeness or picking at a specific time. Yeah. And because it can grow, it grows the same all year round. Or that might be ignorant of me to say, but it kind of sounds. So that's what your time frame is.

Because you don't have a growing season and a harvest season. It is literally a schedule of when to grow it so when you can harvest it. But then just staggering it to where there's always something growing and always something being harvested. Yeah. Or if you can reuse the plants, if the plants are just producing year round, you're cutting off, you're sending off, you're waiting for everything to regrow. I know that should have been really simple for me to think of, but we don't live around trees that do that. Uh-uh.

The trees we see go through a very constant cycle of just like the spring, the summer, it loses the leaves, it's dead, you know, the concept of a tree, just like pine trees don't count. But the concept of a fruit tree that's just constantly like bananas, bananas, bananas, bananas. bananas just all year round is very weird to me right now. It just, yeah, it's a full cycle. It's like having a basil plant and cutting off a few leaves, and then a couple days later you just have more basil to use because more leaves grow, except for this is happening on a grand scale of a banana plant

for these giant plantations. So many bananas. It's bananas. All right, you want to move on to Columbia? Uh, see. United Fruit is kind of the main. contributor to the badness that happens in Colombia. In Columbia, you have these smaller farmers that are displaced as the government's just

selling the land out from underneath them. And these mixed race workers are coming in. You have segregation happening in there. But at the same time, these separate groups are basically building these kind of small, uh, uh, fuck, like, not prototype. pre-union unions. And they're doing this kind of based on race. So you will have the natives, the people that are living there and working on the farms,

begin to rebel. That rebellion has to be put down. Then you'll see the Afro-Caribbean people start to strike themselves, pushback in Colombia. They'll have to be taken down. As all this is going on, there is no taxation of the United Fruit Company. in Columbia, and everybody, even beyond the workers, is now freaking out, and these uprisings are happening because their national treasury is staying the same, and nobody's getting paid from these jobs well enough to live and survive. So here's kind of the standards that are occurring

right now prior to this thing, which is going to be the 1928 Banana Massacre. I don't like that this is called the Banana Massacre. Stop fucking smile it. That's why I don't like being called a bit. But at the same time, it's just like, God damn it, when you first hear this, you're just like,

you have a comical whoop sound in your head. It's fucking horrible. So... Is Lisa Bonnet, a banana masker? I don't get it. The lady that chopped

her husband's dick off. Lorena Bobbitt? Oh, Lorena Bobbitt. That's the one. Not Bonay. Lorena Bobbitt. I was going to say, isn't Lisa Bonnet like the actress that was like with Jake

Mamoa for a while. Lorraine Bobbitt, you're correct. I was right. Wow. She had herself a banana master. Okay. So these plantation workers end up going on strike. They're demanding a transition to what at the time is modern labor relations.

So they want a few things. They want to end the practice of hiring subcontractors to avoid labor laws. What these fruit companies, United Fruit, was doing is they were hiring subcontractors to be running these plantations. So when it came back that there were these horrid conditions, you know, debtor enslavement, all of this crazy shit, it could never be tied back to United Fruit because they would just say, we didn't know what the company we hired was doing. They were responsible for that.

They were a subcontractor. It distanced themselves from all the fucking atrocious shit that was happening. They wanted to abolish the company coupon system of pay, which we talked about, where it could only be spent at their designated places. they wanted a six-day work week instead of the full seven that they were being required to work so reasonable there

seven days a week 10 hours a day they were working 70 hour work weeks and the only drop off is hey can we do a 60 hour work week yeah mandatory insurance from all the shit that they were doing to get hurt and everything

because guess what don't bananas grow up kind of high and you're using machetes and you're in the field with all these poisonous snakes and spiders. Improved medical services basically meaning like when we get hurt, have someone there to take care of it. Recognition of formal employees, as former employees,

sorry, instead of temp workers, because as formal employees, they would have more rights within the company. As temporary workers, they were saying basically they were disqualified from certain things. Independent contractors, so you don't have to cover... Oh, losses and things like that.

Okay. Um, yeah, so United Fruit refused to negotiate on any of this. Oh, we got more, because this one shocked the shit out of me. Increased the daily pay for workers who earned less than a hundred pesos a month. A hundred pesos a month. Back in that day, the equivalent was like a cent to a peso. So they were making somewhere around like 97 cents US a month to work in these areas. And they were just asking to raise it up to at least a hundred.

hundred for the ones that didn't make that hundred threshold. Absolutely insane. Weekly wage, abolition of the stores that you were talking about, coupon system, there were nine of these total. And the reason that nine becomes pretty important is kind of the aftermath

of what happens during the massacre. And pretty much United Fruit's response to this is just one big middle finger. We are not going to do anything. So you have a push. We will do no such thing.

Yeah. You have October 1928 that strike begins with these nine demands that we just mentioned. November 12th, 1928, the strike grows to 25,000 workers. And then all of these families and everything that are outside start to join in. And you just have this big mass strike that's going on. as they are kind of starting to concentrate in these cities, you have 300 soldiers that were sent to a place called Magdalena. And the reason why they had to send them from other areas

is because they had a wholehearted belief that the soldiers inside of that city weren't going to kill the people that were on strike. Their neighbors? Yeah. Family members, anything like that. They were going to make sure that they brought some from the outside that didn't maybe have any sympathy or empathy for what's going on. December 5th in that same year, there's 1,500 banana workers that are gathered in a town square

in Sienega. And as they're there camping overnight, Sunday, they are waiting for the church service that's going to be going on in the square. These troops set positions and machine gun nests on the tops of buildings basically all around the square. They cut off any exit streets to make sure that nobody's going to be getting out of the square and then they give a five-minute warning. So you cut off all the exits.

You tell them that they have five minutes to leave. Yeah. This guy, General Carlos Cortez Vargas, declares a state of siege at this and then basically is just like run. Basically knowing that it's going to cause a panic probably has a lot of these exits, It's like maybe a couple ways that people can get out because you have to, I don't know, give the, give the appearance that you were like, but did you, but did the, was five minutes actually given? Yeah. That's like saying, hey, we're going to block and not let them out and wait five minutes to do this because someone's going to try to do something.

You're not doing either, maybe. Basically, the exact death toll is unknown due to, of course, military cover up. but the initial reports claimed only like 47. This dude, he was the U.S. ambassador, Jefferson Caffrey, ends up later reporting to Washington that the total killed likely exceeded 1,000. They had these either thrown into the sea or buried in these mass graves. By morning, there were nine bodies that were left in the square. Yeah.

There were nine demands that were made by the workers of United Fruit. there were nine bodies that were left there by the Colombian military forces that had surrounded that city. And like you say, they just loaded up train cars of bodies and took them to the ocean and just threw the extra bodies in the ocean. The way that this was looked at, this is something that broke containment. It became more than just Colombian and U.S. news about what goes on. But at the same time, the United States kind of has this. this situation where they can say, we don't really support what happened, but it was their military. It wasn't us.

And all while the United Fruit is the puppet master that's running the Colombian government, basically. What's crazy? And I don't know if it was a church service, but I did also hear that they were gathered to hear some type of government address, like some type of like gubernatorial address, which would be crazy if you were just like, we're going to get them out to the square to listen to something. and we're going to have to say in the hopes that maybe we're announcing we're going to side with them

or try to force you United Fruit to fulfill their demands and then we're going to basically do this. Just so nasty to think about how that happens. Do you have anything else in Colombia? I do not. Do you want to move on to Guatemala?

We can go to Guatemala. So in Guatemala, there was a president named Estrada Cabrera that welcomes United Fruit again, open arms. You have basically him saying, do you want to get into our economics? Do you want to get into our political arena?

And United Fruit says, yes, please. Please let us in. Oh, no, we really shouldn't. Already taking out all the papers and everything like that. So they finish and end up taking control of a railroad from a major port in Guatemala all the way, or Puerto Berrios,

all the way into the capital. One of the questions that kind of like came up several times during doing this is like, why are these countries so, because they can see what's happening. They've at least heard rumblings of what's going on. Is it a simple, I guess nothing is simple on this, but are the issues that these companies are coming in and being like, what we can do is we can make you a whole lot of money, you personally will make you very wealthy, we'll build some things that will be attributed to you, like railroads and infrastructure and everything like that.

So it'll look like you're advancing the country. But then we're just going to exploit this shit out of your people. And eventually, maybe they might rise up. But, you know, we have the military. So as long as you play ball with us, you're probably going to stay in power. So are you good with just being in power and being rich, not giving a fuck what's going on with your country?

And they're just like, yeah, cool. Well, you have situations too where it's not necessarily. I mean, these companies are probably being welcome to token arms, like you're saying, because they're paying off all of the high-level officials. They're paying the doorman. Yeah. They also see this as a political situation where you have liberal parties that are trying to open up their country to globalization, thinking that this foreign private industry is going to come in and it's going to change their countries around.

I'm bringing in jobs. Not the right fucking ones. And you have a conservative party that has a more nationalistic bent to it saying, no, we don't want to keep these in. So as these liberal parties are inviting in this private enterprise. Those ones don't have funding. Yeah. It's the grassroots shit that they're trying to say, like, we're getting exploited.

Like, we can do this ourselves. If you guys are patient, it might take a little bit longer. But it'll be, we'll be getting the fruits of our labor. Right now, all of our fucking fruit is leaving on boats. And again, we're talking about a time that's less than 100 years from Spanish occupation. So these countries and these governments have less than 100 years to, try to get their shit even remotely together to be able to put forth a actionable plan to try to keep the United States separate from the...

We've never run an economy before. Exactly. Yeah. It's what... We're literally at our most vulnerable and we're being just exploited to fucking high heaven. When you have situations like we talked about Nicaragua earlier, one of Nicaragua's biggest issues was they handed over the customs and the banking systems to the United States. So now you're handing over all of your purse strings and your savings account for the country

to a foreign country. You guys are still using this old version of internet X? You mind if I update your web browser and everything like that? You know what? Why don't I just install a new system for you guys? I'm really good at it. We've been doing it for a while. You know what?

Yeah, modernize us. Please have at it. You guys seem to be very successful. And I'm sure you're not going to take advantage of it. us. Yeah. Oh, you want a computer too? That's yours now?

Okay, I guess that works. But in Guatemala, you just see a situation where guess who is the one that's finishing the railroad? Minor C. Keith. You get the guy that started the railroad in Costa Rica that brought together the whole thing. So now you have one of the sitting board members of United Fruit that is himself privately getting the contract for the railway.

Yeah. So it's not even just the company is going in and flexing its muscle. It's Keith with his own little private company. It's like, I don't know, I'll take the railroad contract. It looks better if I do it than if United Fruit does it. And again, more tax exemptions, more land grants, control of all of these railroads on the Atlantic side. And Estrada. And it's not just like the, they're making the money.

If they're building the infrastructure, anything that the country needs to ship via rail or any other industry within that country has to then pay United Fruit or that guy's company for use of the railroads and for like the shipping and everything. So it's a monopoly on all necessary services. You're not making money on just bananas anymore. You're making money on transport of any other good that requires a railway. Yeah. I just make money hand over fist. It's incredible. Estrada is successfully repelling these uprisings,

and these are all being funded by other Central American governments that don't like what Estrada is doing to Guatemala as far as just letting United Fruit. So I think that kind of harkens back to when you were talking about how do they keep getting into all these other countries. There are other countries that understand just how bad United States, Fruit is. So they're trying to knock out the kingpin in Guatemala so they can maybe hopefully keep the spread contained a little bit. So maybe they don't come into these other countries.

Do we look happy over here? United Fruit just left. Yeah. And just get them out. The United States offers support to Cabrera at this point in time. And he's being threatened to be removed by revolution. The United States comes in and they say, well, if you remove him, by a revolution, we are going to come take over your country and we're going to occupy it until we can get this figured out. So the guy that's been helping our assets down here can't be removed by a revolution. In 1920, the country actually comes together as a coalition. Basically, the government gets together like, well, we can't let a revolution happen because we don't want the United States army here or the Marines here and the Navy here. So we just have to come together and both decide

that it's best for Estrada to leave. And he ends up taking off. Just the way that these Central American countries continuously are dealing with this, like you say, they're new countries, they're trying to build all the things that they need. And it's not to say, and again, this is for selfish motivations, but it's not to say that as the Marines are coming in for these interventions and these occupations, that it's all bad. They're building roads.

They're going through. They're building hospitals. They are taking care of any of the mosquito-borne illnesses. And the reason that I'm saying that so fast is because all of that sounds good on the surface. But when it is servicing more of the American citizens that are down there? Yeah. It's benefit through. It's a weird thing that's a benefit through greed.

I don't know if that makes sense because the reason that you're establishing the railroads and all that kind of stuff is for transport, not of the development. of the country, but the way you want the country to be developed. You're building the hospitals because it's much cheaper to be able to treat your workforce there and prevent them from dying, then bring in a workforce and deal with those other things that that's going to require. So you're doing it for these purposes, and the byproduct just happens to be a betterment or not a betterment in the sense of like people's conditions, but it takes generations for that to actually be a net benefit because then it's at a time where those hospitals have grown to

just be normal hospitals in that country or allow that country to have those things. It's like trickle down resources almost. Correct, but no one like gets to benefit from it when it first gets introduced. Yeah, so again, not everything that they're doing is bad, but a lot of the good that they're doing is self-serving. Yes. There's a lot of need to provide basic human rights for the U.S. citizens that are down there while they're exploiting all of the natives

in the Afro-Caribbean workers that are being brought down to work. We need a hospital because some of the white people end up getting sick sometimes and then if we have the capacity, we'll treat the workers. It's a wild system. You got anything else?

Guatemala? No. Cuba. Let's go to Cuba. As Chris was talking about in 1898, the Spanish-American War begins to liberate Spanish possessions that included Cuba. Prior to that war, you had a Cuban president named Valerio Weilerio Weiler.

And Valerio Weiler was a bad, bad man. He was concerned about a lot of the uprisings that were going on in the rural populations. And he basically created the term through these camps. This is kind of the first ever mention of a concentration camp. I was pretty surprised that that comes from Cuba first. And these concentration camps were basically them emptying all of the people in the rural countryside. Anybody that was found in the countryside after this was shot and killed basically on site. Within these concentration camps between 200 to 400,000 Cubans died of starvation and exposure

and just everything else that happens in these camps. And again, we're not talking about a massive population of Cuban. at this point in time. So even 200,000 in the low numbers, absolutely. And the population of people that have been brought there too. Yeah. Not my choice. Yeah, dude.

As Chris was talking about the USS Maine is sent to protect the U.S. interests. I'm so excited to do the Spanish-American War because I really want to get to the bottom of this. It explodes inside of Vana Harbor, mysteriously, killing three quarters of the crew on board. I've heard so many conspiracy things. theories about what may have happened in Havana Harbor. I'm so interested to find out like what the actual historical threat is. So I don't think anybody really knows. No, that's what sucks about it.

Is the further something gets away or the, you know, the less amount of evidence there is, like then the conspiracy theories can come out. And yeah, some of them do sound really good. I think it's pretty evident, evident what this one was. It was an accident, but it was an accident that was used in the most opportune way possible. So this was like the proto U.S. fuck up in Cuba before you get to the Bay of Pigs and then the missile crisis. This is like the first American fuckup in Cuba. Yeah, it always sends us around Cuba.

We just can't ever see it get right. I don't know what we're doing, man. We're 0 and 3 against shit with Cuba. Just leave it the fuck alone. Yeah, you just, you can't win. Get on good terms with Cuba. It's fucking nice down there, I bet. Yeah, but it's probably pretty awesome.

I mean, whether, like, I don't know how to read, yeah. We know why Cuba is the way that it is. Yeah. And I don't think we're ready to play ball with that. But war is declared April 1898. Treaty of Paris, as Chris was talking about earlier, gets signed December 10th, 1898. So Spanish-American War is a very quick war, it sounds like.

There was a $20 million purchase of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. Cuba regains formal independence from the United States finally leaving May 20th, 1902. So you have from December 1898 to May 20th, 1902, you got U.S. occupation going on. They are deep inside of Cuba. They are going through and looking at all of these different things to maybe push in the United States way. You have something called the Platt Amendment that allows the U.S. the right to, to intervene in Cuban affairs and supervise not only all

of their finances, but then all of their foreign affairs. So just like you were talking about earlier with the Monroe Doctrine, where we were kind of stepping in and working towards a resolution for these countries. We're the worst fucking like, we have this weird and it's all, again, it's all about control

and everything like that. Yeah. We're the fucking overbearing mother and every other country is like the son that's just trying to get away but she's just like, she comes into then she's like, nope, what are you doing? No, this doesn't go here. Everything.

Let me know, I'm going to go ahead and do your laundry for you. It just comes in, but it's really just trying to control every fucking aspect of your life. Yeah. In Cuba, it goes from a mother who is watching the playdates with the friends to see if they're bad kids, to then the mother being like, you can't hang out with him. I don't like him. He's a bad seed. Partially, this is going on again because you have these fingers of Germany that are slowly

kind of reaching over and poking and prodding in the Western Hemisphere. Germany's doing the same thing that like the Soviet Union did during the Cold War. Yeah. A lot of poking and prodding, a lot of feeling stuff out. The Platt Amendment is really pushed back on by the Cuban people, but there's not a lot that they can do because, again, the United States is still sitting in Cuba, monitoring everything that's going on. The first president that was elected Thomas Palma

Immediately it was a contested election By 1906 you have an armed revolt that's going on So four years after the United States leave You already have an armed revolt that's going on U.S. of course using that Platt Amendment Goes ahead and sticks their nose back into it and intervenes They place a U.S. diplomat named Charles Magoon is governor for three years.

And again, you have a situation where Magoon comes in, they clean up kind of some of this revolt, and then they don't have a whole lot going on for three years. So you have the same roads that are being paved. You have the same hospitals that are being built. You have the mosquito abatement that's cleaning up all of the yellow fever. So our troops don't get yellow fever. Yeah, there you go.

So the workers don't get yellow fever. That and then all the owners of the sugar plantations that have bought down from the United States are also... And when their families come down to visit, they don't get, yeah. It's a lot to support U.S. interests in these foreign countries. 1908, the government finally gets restored under Jose Gomez. The United States continues interference in Cuba. By the early 1920s, the United Fruit Company had established these large tracks of land

and created a central hub for their infrastructure in the Cuba. city of Banes. I'm going to say Baines, Bones. There's increased immigration coming from Haiti and Jamaica into Cuba, and you kind of start to see the same pattern that you saw everywhere else where the Cubans aren't really mixing well with the English-speaking Jamaicans, and you have the Haitians who have been treated very poorly themselves coming over into Cuba, coming from a formerly French held territory into a formerly Spanish held territory while they're both independent they're just always going to clash. As this is going on, you have a 1912 U.S. intervention to suppress what is known as the Negro Rebellion that was led by Afro-Cuban members of

the Liberal Party. So they just continue to come down and suppress these things because of this Platt Amendment. 1917 to 1922 intervention is known as the sugar intervention to go down and protect those sweet, sweet sugar plantations, the protection of their own natural resources. And the interesting part of that is a Prohibition episode because the mob was running all of the alcohol for the southern part of the United States. Oh, and also like, isn't that you make rum too? So when people wanted to have rum, you made, yeah.

So you get Cuba who's playing a part in the fighting against prohibition that's going on in the United States and the 1920s is they're running this Cuban rum up into the United States. And there's this kind of symbiotic relationship of not only are they trying to be down there to take care of all the sugar growers. they're also unknowingly protecting the mob that's bringing the rum into the United States. There were other points in time when they would interfere in these different countries, but as far as Cuba goes, they help eventually usher in the first presidency of Fulgencio Batista.

And Batista runs the country for a number of years before he ends up being overthrown. You have the U.S. backed sergeant's revolt that comes in and basically clears Batista out again. When was that? When was that? 1940. Oh, shit. I had some stuff before.

Oh, okay. Go ahead. So, yeah, like you were talking about the sugar intervention in Cuba. So 1916 in Cuba, there was a pro-U.S. president named Minokal, I think. and he was declared the winner of this re-election campaign that was widely seen as fraudulent. His opponent was former president. You mentioned him, Jose Gomez. And he ends up leading this revolt known as La Chambalona, the La Chambalona uprising.

Now, the U.S., this was right during the brink of World War I. And basically, I was trying to figure out why this was so important. It viewed sugar as, or Cuba as it's sugar bowl. Now, American companies had invested over $200 million in Cuban sugar, and the reason it was so important is European sugar beet fields because of the war over there had been decimated and there was no way for them to produce sugar. So it became so valuable to be able to provide to the European countries during the war that it was just like the price and demand just went crazy. Sugar futures were going to the road. Now, in 1917, that's when the Marines. end up arriving in Cuba and basically that kind of acts as a deterrent to any of the like rebels who threatened to burn like the cane fields and everything of the companies again like you said United Fruit Company it was it was like the importance of sugar and to prevent any disruption to the harvest was seen as a threat to national security is how they justified being able to send the military into help on that a threat to a national security outside of your nation

Yeah, and I mean, just in regards to like how much they had put into it and then what ended up happening is by 1920, the global price of sugar had just like plummeted leading to this huge financial crash because so much of the industry was based around that in Cuba. The U.S. sends this guy named Enoch Crowder as a special envoy to oversee the election and the financial reforms. Basically, instead of having to do a full-scale invasion, they're like, we're just going to actually kind of invade your government with this guy. because the finances in the economy of the country or in the, you know, shit or so badly, they basically just took out all the Marines in 1922 after this guy had stabilized the sugar industry, and they basically just handed it over to, again, another U.S. friendly government. It's just the same story everywhere else. There's just a little different spin to it.

But I feel like the central American countries, certainly were it felt like it was very united fruit forward as far as where the troubles were coming from when you get out in the Caribbean and these other protectorates of your Panama Canal and you're reaching

closer to the to Europe it's going to be more of well the military just needs to make sure that there's a government that's pro US do you feel this was also a situation where at some point the fruit companies united fruit goes down to

Brazil and is like, hey, we have a proposition. You just hear Brazil, just a thousand guns cocking. Get the fuck out. We just, we, we got rid of the Spanish, man. Or the Portuguese, actually. For Brazil, it was the Portuguese. Like, no. We're going to stick to Central America, I guess.

We don't trust anybody that has any familial ties back to Europe. I understand you guys have been in the United States for a real long time, but we know where you came from. Yeah. It's, Cuba definitely, again, has, I think, climbed up our list

of countries that we need to do just because the histories. I know, which is crazy, because I feel like when you, like, told me that, I was like,

I feel like we've done so much Cuba-centric stuff, but it's because of, like, how much it's fucked with. We did the missile crisis, but that's nothing to do with. Well,

we have the whole time between this time and, I know. Like. I know. That's what I'm saying. There's so much more that goes on in Cuba.

It gets passed around so much. Yeah, to understand the story, too. To get how it was a Spanish held area that was treated really poorly to the United States liberating it. And then the United States being like, hey, we, we understand why Spain liked you so much. It's going from abusive relationship just into another. You didn't sense the rest of it. at flags of the next abuser. And you didn't really have time to get away either.

No. Because they came and liberated you. Yeah. Yeah, Batista, just to wrap up Cuba kind of, Batista is the one that gets put back in power after 1940, and he is then the one that rides us all the way into Fidel Castro. Is he the one that takes the money and heads to Miami? Yep.

It takes like $300 million out of the Cuban bank and just heads to Miami. Yeah, pretty insane guy. It's all connected. So Haiti. Haiti is another country that is just climbing up the country episode charts because we talk so much about the slave rebellion and everything that goes on to gain the independence. Haiti takes independence around 1802. It takes about, or 1804. it takes until 1825 for Haitian independence to be recognized by France

and along with Haitian independence being recognized by France Haiti was two different ones or it was Hispaniola is Haiti on the West Coast or Haiti on the West Coast Dominican Republic on the East yes okay Which interestingly enough Dominican Republic was Spanish So you're sitting on that exact same island But there are these two separate areas

and at a point in time, Haiti was exactly like you were talking about, how Cuba was the Sugar Bowl for the United States during that. Haiti was France's most prized possession at one point in time and their biggest money earner because of all the sugar. So when the slave rebellion happens, in order to recognize them, they basically force Haiti to sign this indemnity to cover $150 million worth of money. That sounds stupid, worth of money. In 1825 money, that's like billions of dollars today.

1825, 150 millions. And it was Franks too. So you also get to throw that little twist in there. This just absolutely tanks Haiti's abilities to do a whole lot. I mean, they're under so much massive debt from France. There was a point in time during the 1800s where they did overtake the Dominican Republic and basically re-instrae they brought back Hispaniola as one solid country before the Dominican Republic ends up gaining their independence back from them.

I believe that was around like 1845. But Haiti doesn't have any money. And they begin these very, very short presidencies because they just, they can't figure out a way to dig themselves out of debt and still have enough money in the country to be able. to do anything. There's these previous incursions in these 1880 times by the United States to try to get a naval base or yeah, a naval base.

We've already got one in Nicaragua, right? And then Guantanamo in 1903. So yeah, why don't I have one? That's how you do it, right? If one's good, three's better. No, but have one every single place. Have a foothold every single place that you could send additional troops in. And it becomes so much easier for troop movements down there if you have somebody going to attack.

This makes it seem like D-Day was really easy. It's just like, no, listen, we know about establishing a beachhead. You just have to have a little foothold and you can take over any Central America, any country, not just Central American. We could get into France. Look how we've been getting into all these Central American countries. We know it'll work. did you read about the book, the manual

that was made about this afterwards? Yeah, it's like how to conduct like a banana repulose. It's not bad. A small scale war or a war on a small scale, something like that. So all of these tactics that they were using in all these countries. How to overthrow a country under a population of like 50 million. Yeah. They go into these manuals that get produced and get used as like military doctrine

for some of these places for so long afterwards. So this Mollay Saint Nicholas Naval Base ends up getting shut down in the 1880s. You have the Germans, again, sneaking into Haiti and talking about different things. Oh, we didn't talk about the whole Zimmerman Telegram that happens in Mexico that also shakes the relationship between Mexico and the United States, that Germany sent over to Mexico to try to talk Mexico and to go into war. So there's just another German touch. on this whole entire thing. They've touched Mexico. They've touched Haiti. They've touched, I believe, the other one was Honduras. It's a situation where Haiti just is too, too ripe for the taking.

By 1915, there's this increased German influence because in Haiti, there was a rule prior to this time, or prior to a time we're going to be talking about. Was there German influence? I don't know anymore. Well, the German influence is because, Was there a German place? There was a German restaurant in town, a beer garden with Wienerschitzel. And they were like, let's get a little too German on this island. Well, only Haitian residents at this point in time could buy land in Haiti or own land in Haiti. So you had all these Germans coming.

How easy was it for an American businessman to become a Haitian resident? I don't know how easy it was, but these Germans were coming over and marrying into these well-to-do Haitian families. So that's where the German influence comes in where they're coming in. they're marrying into the upper echelon of the people in Haiti, they're marrying into those families, and they're immediately able to go out and start purchasing this land up. And that's not going to go well for Haiti, because the United States isn't going to continue to let that happen.

All of a sudden, the U.S. comes in for occupation in 1915. So you have another occupation in 1915 in Haiti to... Under the guys, this 19-year military, again, intervention. Woodrow Wilson, I think, is behind this one, is basically sold as a way to ensure political and economic stability and to protect American financial interests like National Citibank. Who is it becoming, what, P&C Bank?

No, there's still Cit Bank. There's still Citib. Yeah. Oh, another S, or CITI, that bank? Yeah. Okay. They're not being in Calamara. I saw something about PNC. Nobody Sue us. And then also, like you said, to prevent German influence,

which coincidentally enough, this being 1915 that this is starting in World War I is going on. There's this, I don't know what the, like, was there a concern? Do you think it was a legitimate concern about the Germans somehow doing something to the Panama Canal? Was it just them trying to like destroy it, take it over? Because we weren't having to, I'm trying to think, were there any, we've talked about World War I a few times. never really talked about World War I in the Pacific because there was some stuff going down with some holdings. But did Germany, was there a concern with us doing something on the East Coast or the West Coast?

I think it was if we had ships over in the Pacific Ocean and then we needed to bring over. Yeah. Stop them from coming through the Pamunk and now. Yeah, for like the ship manufacturers, things like that. Just any way to slow the Americans down from getting over there, Germany, I think was kind of trying or thinking about. So in order to ensure this, Chris was just talking about, prior to the occupation, before they even got there for occupation, the United States showed up down there and pulled out $500,000 from the Haitian National Bank. It just brought it to the United States. And Haiti's like, hey, why are you doing that?

Are you going to use it to pay down our debts? In the United States, like, no, you'll see. after this happened Citibank takes over control the National Bank as you were just talking about the reason they pulled out that $500,000 was because they had

eyes on Haiti to be able to go in and start taking things over and they needed that $500 to start putting it towards infrastructure and other things that are going on and not allow Haiti to have access to that to then buy arms to defend itself or anything like that probably a good idea

well not a good idea for the Haitians but there was a president named Vilburn Sam, who ends up killing 167 political prisoners that sets off this massive civil unrest. So now you have a catalyst outside of the Haitian money situation to send in all of these troops. So he ends up getting assassinated. And then what followed that was the invasion in July of 1915. This ends up with the president being assassinated. Chaos is going everywhere. You're trying to go. then that's kind of where again, where you get the pretext of saying we need to go into protect like the investment and everything.

Yeah. Haiti has... We probably had a hand in the assassination. Haiti has this kind of crazy cyclical rebel force called the Kakos that are up in northern Haiti up in the mountains. And basically, if you want to overthrow the Haitian government, you go up and you get the caco stirred up and then you march the caco's south down to port of prince the capital and you depose the government or you kill the president and this has been something that has just kind of happened

in this cycle for years and years and years the cacos then take money from whoever they just got put into power and then the cacos go up and they hang out for a while until they need some money again or until somebody starts coming up and fomenting some sort of rebellion yeah so this is around the same time that this like assassination the invasion happens this is kind of when the U.S. establishes, what's it called the Gendarmerie of Haiti, which is this like military slash police force. They control national finance, customs, and public works. They're basically compliant with like installed public governments. Even prior to them doing that, because that all kind of comes about in this new constitution. But part of the reason for the involvement is there's this guy named Rosalvo Bobo.

and Bobo goes up, gets the cockos all fired up to come down and take over. As they're slowly moving down the country, they get intercepted by the American intervention. And they depose Bobo and they say, what are you doing, man? He's like, hey, Bobbo. Bobo, Bobo, what's going on? He goes, I'm going down to Port of Prince and I'm going to depose the ruler or the president and I'm going to become the new president. They're like, okay, well, why don't we shepherd you down to Porta Prince?

Kind of speed up this process of getting you down there. So go ahead and get on our naval vessel. We're going to take you down to Port of Prince, and we'll get this whole thing settled out. As they get down there, they meet up with Bobo. There is another guy who is, his name is Philippe D'Art de Nugave. I will just call him Philippe because that last name is rough. They bring Philippe and Bobo in the room together, and they go,

So you both want to be president of Haiti? And they both go, yes. Bobo goes, it's my right. I am allowed to do this. I am basically divinely chosen for this role. And they look at Philippe and they go, would you support Bobo being president? And Philippe says, if it's good for the country, yes, sure.

They asked Bobo, would you support Philippe being president? And he goes, no, I am going to be president. And there's going to be nobody that's going to stop me from doing this. They asked Philippe, would you be opposed to the, United States staying down here and maybe helping Shepard Haiti along. He says, no, of course not. If it's going to help Haiti, I will support anything. They ask Bobo, Bobo goes, I am president. You guys get the fuck out of here and let me rule this place. Bobo gets put in chains immediately. Bobo gets deposed. They install Philippe as the president. And there's a new constitution that gets

written. This new constitution that gets written for Haiti was written by F.D. are himself. Pretty interesting that he was the guy that writes this. Along with that, Slow day. Yeah, he was just writing new constitutions for countries. Not that big of a deal. In this process, there is this first time clause that's included of foreign ownership in the land of Haiti.

So now that little pesky rule that kept anybody. Oh, yep, you got to be citizen. to be, yeah. They kept anybody out of there. Now, you know, it's just all gone. Kind of seems like a big in. Yeah, it does. It does, doesn't it?

Especially when a foreign country is writing the constitution that you're signing, that's allowing that to happen. Along with that, you've had this policy that we kind of skipped over before. It's just basically, it's called dollar diplomacy. It's something that Taft enabled or kind of put into practice in 1909. say, we're going to trade dollars for bullets. Instead of going in and shooting our way into these countries to be able to control them through any sort of landings

and then taking over, we're just going to assume their debt and purchase their debt. And that way, their beholden to us, we'll lend them money and loan them out money. So instead of having to go in there and shoot, we just have this monetary hold over these countries. And in Haiti, this is something that was going on to where Haiti doesn't have the ability to really do anything,

except for pushback against this Constitution. Well, I mean, their structure has been run at this point by the U.S. for so long. I mean, like you said, they built roads, they built infrastructure. But most of this time, they rely on that thing. It's the Corvay system of forced labor. Basically, it wasn't slavery, but you're working at gunpoint. Brutal conditions, tons of deaths. The cacao wars, I think was 1918 to 1919.

There was a guy named Charlemagne Peralta or Peralta that led this major uprising against American rule. It was suppressed by Marines with hundreds, possibly thousands of Haitian casualties. And then that's when internal pressure and reports of abuse, the U.S. began planning the withdrawal in the late 1920s. Roosevelt does his thing to be like, yeah, we'll totally get out of here, but I'm going to set the rules up before we do. and then I think they formalized the exit with the last Marines departing on August 15th 1934 but again with that constitution then in place of being like

we're gone but we've already changed all the rules so we don't need to be there. Yeah. Just to show you how probably above board getting all this stuff going on in Haiti was that 1918 constitution that they had a little bit of trouble getting past the House of Representatives because of that little

that tiny little detail. You know, that's a typo, but you know, we've already printed out so many copies that we can't do anything with it. So just leave it in. It's not that big of dough, right? I'm sure a ton of white business owners won't try to buy up all of your guys' land. The referendum in Haiti was approved by a 98,225 to 768 vote for. how because on on who's a thought who was running the fucking government at the time i mean you can't

really call that a free and fair election i don't think when you get that you gotta make it seem so overwhelming that someone couldn't look at that and say maybe we should take a vote again and have people get on to it yeah it feels feels questionable at best um mixed race urban citizens were okay with the economy growing along with the united states getting involved. There's a situation in the northern region again where the Cacos are starting to train to come down. And you get these two Caco wars.

The first one is... I feel like it's just, it's this bird in the mountains and you're saying that every something you do... Yeah, you just hear a sound and it's like, oh shit. They're coming again. First one was put down within a year. The second Caco War that you were talking about, that Charlemagne ends up leading.

Yeah. 40,000 troops is how many people they're bringing down to fight the United States. That's a fucking lot of troops. Did you say that earlier? 40,000? I didn't know I didn't have a number on it. That only lasted like a year too did it? Yeah, it lasted. Well, yeah, I guess it began 1918, 1919, it might

have been less than a year, but we'll just call it a year. He was captured and killed by the Marines. Could have been early in 1819 or 1918 and late in 19. It can go either way. Time is crazy. And the official recordings of these two Kako Wars and the deaths that had gone on during the occupation. They had said were 2,250 Haitians killed.

That was the number that was reported to the Senate. The Secretary of the Navy reports that the number was actually much closer to 3,250, which again, I'm pretty sure it was on the low end. But both of these wars were fought over the forced labor that you were talking about. The push for forcing these laborers to come down out of the mountains and work on all of these pet projects that the United States had under the guise of we're going to make this better, we're going to take care of this stuff. And it was just so much that it pushed them to the, well, I mean, the cacos didn't need a lot of pushing. But these revolutions against an occupying

force, like they were that mad. They were thinking they were going to be able to throw over the United States occupation. That occupation doesn't end until 1933. So you get the occupation beginning in, what did I say, 1915? They ride it all the way until 1933. And again, we had that number 1933 that we'll talk about. We're totally done with countries, right? Oh, no. Oh, no. God, I wish.

One way. There's more. Dominican Republic gains its independence from Spain in 1821. Again, we talked about that. Makes perfect sense. It's the same island. Yeah. All we've got to do is cross that.

Now not really a border border, but... Spain lost so much in 1921. You lose Mexico. You lose the entirety of Central America. You lose the Dominican Republic. That's what I'm saying, dude. It's like Spanish Empire just... And they just...

They keep holding on. What was it like? I mean, when we do the history... That's going to be a long history. Yeah. But when we do the history, fuck. That may need to be the next one now that I'm thinking about it to see the...

fall so quickly of that empire and how it happens. At that point, are you just looking around Europe and you're just like, oh, oh, I lost all my shit. Yeah, after all that,

you're going to tell me that they're going to blow up a U.S. ship inside of their harbor in Cuba to start the Spanish-American War. Like, they just lost so much in 1821, and then 1898 rolls around. They're like, yeah, we'll fuck with the United States. That makes sense.

shit bloated and they're like, uh-uh. Not us. Nope. We didn't fucking touch it. We saw some of your idiot sailor out punching bottle rockets. They were absolutely plastered on Cuban rum and they were just

having a Roman candle fight on the deck, man. We don't know what happened. So there was the short time that the Dominican Republic was taken over by the Cubans, I believe again that was like 1840s. By 1902, kind of the short

political reigns of the norm in the Dominican Republic. The country is bankrupt. It couldn't pay any of its European creditors. And... Yeah, because Spain ain't leaving the fucking cupboards full when it leaves. If they're leaving a place and they're not going to be able to control it, they will. And it's not just like, hey, we're pulling out of town and we're pulling up everything that's not nailed down. When they know they're leaving, they're working overtime to get as much shit out of that place as they

possibly can. Yeah, I guess this wasn't even the Spanish American War. This was way prior to that that they lost, so they didn't get taken over by the Spanish American War. The United States does something that they've done so

well to this point in time in buying up all of the debt of these countries. And one thing that they do in the Dominican Republic that's not shocking is they go in and they start taking over all the customs houses. So all of the money that's leaving the island to go out and be sold

everywhere else, now the United States is going to be in charge as they come in because Teddy Roosevelt sends this small military force to intervene to prevent France and Germany and Italy from coming back and taking all of their money that they're owed from the Dominican Republic that stopped paying them. This happens in 1905 with an agreement that the U.S. over the Dominican customs that we were just talking about. And they end up saying, okay, what we're going to do is any of your customs money that comes in, we're going to take 60% of that. And we are going to pay it off to creditors, which are now us and Citibank and P&C Bank

that are holding these debt notes. Yeah. And we're going to give you 40% of your money to be able to improve your country. Now, the Dominican Republic wasn't making enough at 100% customer. capacity. So you're basically saying we're going to cut your earnings, but here's what we're also going to do. We know a way that you could possibly make some money because you got all this land and you're not using all of it. So even though you're getting 40% of it, if you sell some of this land to these, I don't know, these fruit companies or something like that, then you can use that money to then improve your infrastructure. I mean, we're going to take our 60%. The fruit company

is already giving us a percentage as well based off of that. Because, you know, if we have to call them the military, anything, not for you guys, of course, not in case you guys want to reject anything, but, you know, in case the Spanish come back or anyone like that or the French, or, oh, my God, the Germans might.

It's widely Germans. Mm-hmm. You just can't quite seem to stay away. It, along with this, a year later, after they come to the 1905 agreement to take over customs in 1906, they set a timeline for the that agreement of 50 years that the Dominican Republic, or that the United States has rule over

the customs houses of the Dominican Republic. I don't know if they're looking at that and saying, hey, it's going to take 50 years at this rate to pay it off, so let us be in charge of this. But at the same time, you have a country who is, you're less worried about customs because these presidents are going to start getting assassinated rather quickly. 1911 president Ramon Casares has assassinated instability just can't be controlled at this point by Taft or Wilson

they're just like fuck man everywhere else is going okay the Dominican Republic's wild as far as being able to go in and squash a rebellion is they're sending troops they already are established there and everything they got it we already got a system set up in all these other countries and Tafton Wilson

two guys who had varying degrees of success and all these other places can't figure out the Dominican Republic kind of conundrum. In 1913, you have Jose Valdez that becomes pregnant. Well, president. I don't know. He becomes pregnant with the presidency. There's a revolt immediately after this. And Valdez ends up saying, okay, at the end of my term, I can promise you free and fair elections. You don't have to worry about anything. Everything will be okay. In that same year before these free and fair elections can show up, there's another revolution that breaks out. And the USS Macias ends up intervening in that naval ship. And Wilson tells the DR, you're going to pick a president or we're going to pick a president for you.

So this is very much what they've said in a lot of these other places where it's like, hey, if you guys can't get these revolutions under control, we're going to put somebody in power and the revolution's going to be against us, not against another Dominican leader. And so they get their shit together, and they choose this old president that they had had before. His name was Ron Juan Perea.

And Juan makes the mistake of turning down U.S. protection, and he has the Secretary of War. Be a shame if something happened to you, your beautiful country. Well, in the U.S. was offering this, I think, partially out of trying to get him under his wing,

but there was a secretary of war his name was Decerio Arias, who was a pretty big threat to his rule. And he ends up saying, no, I can take care of this guy, which is a pretty big mistake because Arius ends up coming up and threatening him, and he immediately steps down. So he turned down to the United States, and then he steps down to Arias, and the United States is like, okay, we tried.

we are going to occupy or occupy you this time for good. Like we're not going to let this happen too long. They just pay the Secretary of War, whatever. They're just like, just go challenge him. Here's a million dollars. Yeah. Arias does a pretty decent job as he's fighting against these U.S. forces. But...

Okay, so he's not paid. No, no, no. Well, Arias is pushing on the other president, and the other president says, no United States I can handle this guy. Turns out he couldn't handle him. So then the United States goes, okay, well, we have to handle him now. And then we just pick a ruler after that.

Gotcha. Arias's forces end up falling. There's a military government that's established November 29th, 1916. So Arias holds on for less than a year. I thought Arias might have just been somebody that they could control more. But he was legitimately against the pro-U.S. Yeah. This military government is,

established and it's led by a Vice Admiral Harry Knapp. Harry Knapp doesn't sound like a guy that should be a Dominican Republic president. That just seems wrong. Government ends rule October 1922. The fruit company at this point

is just growing in power during this time because the United States is there. So if they are running all of the contracts, you are going to be able to have access to building more railways taking over ports, establishing all of these telegraph lines within the country.

And you're doing this basically unabated because you're not fighting against any revolutionaries or anything like that because the government's doing that for you. So they're just able to kind of roll through what's going on there. By 1930, there is a marine-trained future dictator that it knows is going to be a dictator named Raphael Trujillo. and Trujillo ends up taking power,

ends up consolidating his rule after this massive earthquake that ends up hitting the Dominican Republic and under his rule, the United Fruit Company just thrives. They do better and better under a now dictator who's going to be able to protect them.

And you have the United States just by 1933 saying, all right, let's back out of here. Let's get out of the debate. Dominican Republic. They seem to have a leader in charge. Yeah, he's a dictator, but he is treating our people nice, so we'll just let him be. Yeah, the people that complained to us that are going to be on our asses if they're on good terms. It's not about if he's on good terms with his people. It's if he's on good terms with our people. Well, not to mention, we trained

this guy and we trained his army how to fight. So we should be fine. But not too. Well, uh, yeah. During the time of the banana wars, you know, United Fruit Company had over three million acres of land across all of these countries. Three million acres that they owned inside of all of these other foreign countries. And it's a situation where maybe the best way to explain the stories of what happened have to come from the inside. And you have to have somebody who had had boots on the ground and all of these different places. Is UFC just evil in all if it's in incarnations? Yeah, but at the same time, this guy was a part of the evil.

He was a U.S. Marine Corps Major General. His name was Smedley Butler. Ah, Smetley. Oh, Smedley. He saw action in Honduras in 1903. He served in Nicaragua from 1909 to 1912. Smedley was in the shit. Yeah. He gets awarded a Medal of Honor for his actions in Veracruz. Does he get two? gets a second Medal of Honor for his 1915 action in Haiti.

And Smedley becomes almost more famous afterwards. But he has timed, and this is, it blows me away how his conscience allows him to continue to do this. But after he gets his Medal of Honor for Veracruz, he tries to return the Medal of Honor because he wasn't proud of what he did. Yeah, when he's first down there, it takes him a few of these times to come. kind of catch wind of what's actually happening. And eventually he's like, we're not down here fighting against any like legitimate forces. We've noticed all the people who are fighting against look like the people who live here.

And we've kind of caught wind to the fact that all the places we're protecting. All are fruit companies that have their headquarters and all of their money being funneled back to the United States. And like you said, it seems like it takes him a little bit of time to wake up and kind of like let this way on his conscience. Yeah. But he basically just comes out and he's like, honestly, I was just kind of a whore and an enforcer for like the corporate mob. So he writes this kind of short book and then he gives a speech. And these are a little long.

I'll try to get through them kind of fast. But the summary contains inside of this, he says, war is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easiest, and most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is only one international, or it is only one international in scope. It is only one in which profits are reckoned in dollars and losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small inside group knows what is about. It is conducted for the best. benefit of very few at the expense of very many. Out of war, a few people make huge fortunes. Tell me that that doesn't describe pretty much all war. Yeah. And like we kind of talked about back at the very beginning of the episode,

this all comes down to this state within a state. These companies, again, didn't just grow fruit. They owned the infrastructure of these countries. They came in. And if you're saying like, well, yeah, they built infrastructure. but then they made these countries reliant on it and used it in a way to where if the government displeased the company, they could essentially just shut down the nation's entire export economy, not just for their product or anything like that, but make everybody in the country suffer.

Well, old Smedley comes clean on all that too. I know. They own telegraph lines, later radio stations, meaning that they also controlled the flow of information between the local government and the outside world, which means that people couldn't even go to other countries and try to get communications out and saying, hey, we're getting screwed over here. And not to mention, is anybody in the United States going to have Nicaraguan's best interests at heart? Most people didn't even know where it was.

You couldn't find it on a map. So Old Smedley has one other expert that I got to read because this is, it's incredible. It says, I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for our now. National City Bank Boys to collect revenues in. I helped in raping half a dozen Central American Republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1909 to 1912.

I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China, I helped see that standard oil win its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents. It's him calling out every single one of these companies that he helped be able to gain and maintain these footholds. And he was a Marine. He was a guy that was not a private contractor.

But he was so high up that he had his hand in all of these different things. If you were just, you know, imagine your way. one of the Marines that's down there and maybe you see two or three of these situations. Like even then you'd start to piece together. But if you're the guy that's looking at the whole board and is just like, how is everything, how is this fruit company and how are these commonalities all tied together that we're only going in to overthrow these governments when we hear that they're trying to be a little bit more fair in how they want to do things within their own countries?

And these American corporations have a problem with it. So it's just like, oh, you have a problem with it. Oh, you have a problem or new management's not going to have a problem with it? We don't really believe in fair and equitable treatment for everybody unless it benefits us. And it never benefits us. So we don't believe in fair and equitable treatment. A big part of the reason why 1933 is so important is because FDR institutes his good neighbor policy. And his good neighbor policy isn't, hey, sorry about what we've been doing.

It's more of a, the private enterprise is going to, continue, but under non-intervention, a commitment that the United States would not interfere in the internal affairs of Latin American nations. Mutual cooperation, promoting friendly diplomatic relations and shared economic prosperity through trade agreements. Sounds like bullshit. Sovereignty respect treating Latin American countries as equals in respecting their rights. Military restraint, renouncing the use of military interventions as previously. seen in Caribbean and Central America. So he just basically calls out everything that they've been doing for the last 35 years.

Yeah, again, but like you were just talking about, you know, through the 1930s and then from the 30s of the 50s, countries like Guatemala, Costa Rica start to implement these land reforms and labor laws when companies, you know, resisted that. You're going to start getting the quieter stuff, like the CIA operations that are going in there that aren't a ship going to actually invade because those guys are. already there and already have contacts and already have positions. I mean, and it took them long enough, do you know the company didn't rebrand as Jakita until 1990?

And I want to say it had been purchased either once or twice to get to Jakita. And I mean, again, when stuff and what can also kind of fuel those changes is all of a sudden somebody in the age of information or war information starts coming out, finds out about this 19, 20, you know, 20 banana massacre and that starts coming up. Oh, we just need to change our image on this. There was, I think, this landmark U.S. court ruling in June 2024 that found Chiquita liable for funding a Colombian

paramilitary group called the AUC that literally committed widespread murders. And the company was ordered to pay back 38.3 million in damages to the victim of the families, victims of the families. So what you're telling me is while we were up here fighting Colombia's El Padron problem and him sending cocaine up here, Chiquita was funding paramilitary groups in Colombia. They were killing people along the, I don't know how many, but I mean, you weren't safe from the people that were supposed to be selling you fruit. Yeah.

Yeah. And, I mean, Chiquita, for all the bad things that they had done, the production numbers, their peak production that they were able to carry from 1927 through the 30s, they had reached about 50 million bunches of bananas imported annually. 50 million bunches. And bunches are huge if you look at, this isn't a bunch in saying, hey, when you go to the store and you see those six bananas, that's not a bunch. No, these are like giant stocks that have maybe six to seven clusters. I would say more than that. If you see a bunch, I would say, I'm going to actually look that up. How many bananas does a bunch, on average, have?

How many bananas in the bunch? It's a fun. It's a fun goob. But the way that these companies run, I mean, we haven't ever talked about Black Rock or anybody like that, that's these private military contractors, that you're going to expect this kind of ruffian behavior from. When you're walking down the produce aisles in your grocery store, trying to figure out what you want to make for dinner that week.

A fully grown bunch or stock between 100 and 400 individual bananas. Oh, God damn. The cluster things are called hands, which now I'm never going to be able to not think about that when I'm reaching for one of it being like my banana hand. Thanks, internet. That's a lot of bananas. 400? Yeah.

God. How many people got crushed? Death by Banana. Yeah. I mean, this whole thing is death by banana technically. Yeah, I cannot believe that this is something that I can believe that we weren't taught about it. I can't believe that it's not brought up more. And as far as when you talk about the issues that we've been running into where people are talking about the U.S. aid.

We talked about like, it's not like we covered every. every coup. No. We just talked about the times that they were in and that they did this in this country. They did it multiple times in every country. Yeah. Just a little toss out here. Over 50 operations were conducted by the Navy and Marine Corps during this time.

Honduras had seven. Cuba had from 1898 to 1902, 1906 to 1909, 1912, 1912, 1917 to 1922. Nicaragua had these long-term intervention. occupations going on from 1912 to 1933. The Haitian occupation lasted from 1915 to 1934. And the Dominican Republic was off and on from 1916 through 1924. I think they said total casual. And again, this is going to be, who knows if it's even close, like 35,000 people throughout like the course of the banana wars like were killed. And that's on. That's not American troops. I think they said that number was as low as like a couple hundred.

And the 35,000 number feels low too. Yeah. And that's just U.S. involvement, I think. That doesn't count what the military... Do into themselves? Countries, yeah. Yeah. It's nuts.

I'm hoping that there's not like an orange wars or an Apple Wars or anything else that we don't know about. No, there's not. There's fucking shit like that. It just doesn't have a name that makes it seem palatable. Yeah. Pineapple Wars feels like it's probably... going to be something that happens. This, this sounds like something

that should have taken place during like Cold War type stuff with all of the espionage and all of the like coups and everything like that. It's, it's just nuts. Like this is one of those 250 years, man. We've been a country for 250 years. And like,

just pulling this shit on the regular just because it can be done. And because like people want fucking bananas. And fruit companies are paying people in the right positions to be able to do this. The worst part about it is, I'm not going to stop eating bananas. No, I'm not. They're delicious. Here's the other thing, too, was there secret signals for this?

Like, you have somebody that's in Congress or you have, like, the defense secretary, somebody that's in a position to lobby for you to get troops sent down somewhere to perform an intervention or an invasion. Is the signal you just show up to your office one day? and the fucking fruit lobby man has left like up fruit basket on your desk. And if it's all bananas, that's like the secret code. And it's just like, God damn it, where do we have to invade now? If everything's good every morning on your desk when you walk in, there's just a fresh banana sitting there.

And if everything's bad, it's just a peel. It's a fresh, it's a fresh banana and a cool 10 G's in your bank account. Yeah. Yeah. It brings up a lot of different feelings for me. just based upon consumerism because we talk about kind of fair and equal treatment a lot on the show. And when you think about it, it's it's tough to say, you know, stop eating bananas. As we're talking on two mics that are made in a foreign country with all sorts of parts that are brought in and cheaply made through forced labor and very low wage paying labor to say that it's bad.

Like there's such a scope of everything that we use on a daily basis that comes from a foreign country. going to be made under labor conditions that aren't something that would be acceptable in this country. And shit like this is kind of poignant today because like the talk of seizing land or just like the ownership of other countries, that just like, this is a historical precedent

for saying like, oh, you didn't know, we just used to kind of do that shit. We used to do it kind of on the download because people weren't be able to pay attention to it as close. But this is just stuff that's constantly been happening. And history is kind of cyclical in that way. We would like to think that we've moved on and evolved past that. But it's as a whole we have.

It's just the countries that we used to fuck around with don't have to be fucked around. They can do their own shit now. And on a globally connected scale, we can see everything that's going on in real time. And they don't need us. Uh-huh. Yeah, it's much.

Crazy time in history. Yep. I'm not feeling a banana tonight, but tomorrow. I had one on the way over. You made sure to. I had two today. Good for potassium. Good for cramps.

Good for your heart. I feel guilty, man, because I contribute to this shit or whatever this shit was in the past. Yeah, well. Is a big Nike fan boy. I got to make sure, like, if I'm going to buy bananas, I got to start buying Del Monte's. are doles and making sure that like I get those specific ones.

You have to do brand research on your fruit. Huh? You have to do brand research on your fruit. Yeah. I got to start talking to the fucking produce guy now at the store and being like, hey, this is going to sound really weird, but I feel so much guilty of buying these chikitas than I do with the dolls. You guys got like a secret stash in the back.

Do you happen to know the country of origin and the supplying company of these, uh, this asparagus? I'm not saying a sticker on here. Can you share that? the purchasing, trace the purchasing back on these bananas? It's McCulley Colkin and Home Alone when he asks if the toothbrush is approved by the American Dental Association. The guy looks at me, I think those are chicken, just he's my face kind of something. He's like, dole?

I'm like, yes, okay, that works. Better. Better, not good, but better. Oh. All right. You got anything else? Beyond the fact that this is, I wouldn't really call it a part one, but I'm pretty interested when we start talking about these CIA operations. and there's so many countries in here

that are going to get their own episodes just because this is a microcosm of their histories that are very bloody. It's a 30-year period that we're just, yeah. All right, everyone, well, we hope you enjoyed the episode and we will catch on the next one. Peace.