The key to understanding the exceptionality of Honduras in the 1980s is the unique political culture that emerged on the Caribbean coast, a “noncentral region” heretofore dismissed as an appendage of fruit companies. According to Euraque, “the North Coast developed a liberal and defiant social and political culture that cut across class lines and that served as the basis for distinguishing Honduras in twentieth-century Central American history, and whose legacies affected the character of the crisis of the 1980s” (p. xx).
While Euraque conceived this monograph as a regional history, the first four chapters of Reinterpreting the Banana Republic explore national developments. Euraque then concentrates on developments in and around San Pedro Sula, which in the 1960s emerged as Honduras’s industrial capital. The industrial leaders, many of them immigrants linked to the banana industry, developed a reformist ideology, as evidenced by their support for the banana workers during the strike of 1954. The military officers who took power in 1972 adopted this “enlightened” ideology and implemented substantial agrarian reform that staved off a revolutionary movement in the 1980s.
Euraque argues that the 1972 military coup empowered only the vision of the San Pedro Sula elite. The elite influenced national politics, but they did not gain control of the government and they were certainly not “reactionary” like other Central American oligarchs. Unfortunately, Euraque does not provide enough data to complete a comparative analysis. Important family names are mentioned throughout the text, but Euraque does not identify and analyze the investment and kinship patterns of elite family networks, making it impossible to compare this study with those of Enrique Baloyra on El Salvador or Marta Casaús Arzú on Guatemala. Euraque attacks the theories advanced by Donald Schulz, Deborah Sundloff Schulz, Edelberto Torres-Rivas, and Héctor Pérez Brignoli about the absences of an oligarchy, but he never actually proves that a Honduran oligarchy exists.
He does, however, document and explain the evolution of a new bourgeoisie that owes its origins to foreign investment, a significant contrast to the coffee barons of El Salvador and Guatemala. The San Pedro Sula elite developed in association with the banana companies. However, the argument that the North Coast was never simply a “fiefdom” of Samuel Zemurray is unpersuasive. True, Hondurans were not victims of foreign capitalists, but the banana companies initiated and controlled virtually all of the industries that developed in the region.
This monograph could have been improved with some careful editing. Chapters overlap chronologically and topically, and frequent subdivisions within each chapter do not clarify the analysis. But this monograph is still the most impressive piece of historical scholarship available on Honduras; and Euraque, like Sam “the Banana Man,” has established a monopoly on the field.
