ABSTRACT
The personalistic mode of politics and the disposition to engage in compromising relationships presented United Fruit and other foreign investors several opportunities to gain access to the state and to cement relations within the class of governing elites. The alliance between political caudillos and foreign interests inhibited the evolution of any coherent vision among political leaders that emphasized national interests. United meanwhile had embarked on a long-term strategy of cultivating its own coterie of Honduran political elites. The company decided to back Tiburcio Carias Andino, an aspiring caudillo politician who had become a central figure in the National Party of Honduras. The traditional precapitalist economic and social structures of rural Honduras coexisted with the export sector that was limited geographically to the North Coast. The coastal region had evolved as an "enclave" society. By the end of the 1920s, banana companies had control over large expanses of the most fertile lands in northern Honduras and employed around twenty-two thousand workers.
