Honduras

The country the phrase banana republic was coined about, and still shaped by that. O. Henry, hiding from an embezzlement charge in Trujillo, used the term in a 1904 book about a thinly disguised Honduras, and it stuck because it was accurate: United Fruit and Standard Fruit between them controlled the northern coast, the railways and much of the government, and American marines landed several times between 1903 and 1925. Copan, in the west, was a major Maya city whose stelae carry some of the finest carving of the classic period. The Football War with El Salvador in 1969 lasted a hundred hours and had its roots in land pressure and Salvadoran migration rather than in the qualifying matches it is named after. Honduras was the base for the American-backed Contras against Nicaragua in the 1980s, and its own army ran a death squad, Battalion 3-16. President Manuel Zelaya was removed by the military in 2009, the region's first coup in two decades. Juan Orlando Hernandez was convicted of drug trafficking in a New York court in 2024, while a former president. Tegucigalpa is the capital. Migration north is a defining fact of national life. The country has about ten and a half million people. It is the second largest in Central America. The Bay Islands off its north coast are English-speaking and were British until 1859. Hurricane Mitch killed around seven thousand people in 1998 and set the economy back years. Coffee has overtaken bananas as the main export.

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