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It is a US-born slur that was inspired by Honduras and has haunted Latin America for decades – a deprecatory way to describe politically volatile and economically puny backwaters ruled by erratic and venal autocrats.
But on Friday, after Donald Trump’s alarming press conference at the White House yesterday, voices across the region, from Mexico to Uruguay, delighted in lobbing the insult back at their neighbours to the north.
“Who’s the banana republic now?” wondered the frontpage headline of Colombia’s Publimetro, one of many Latin American newspapers whose editors thought the term perfectly captured the electoral turmoil playing out in the US.
Over the border in Venezuela, a columnist from the El Nacional agreed calling Trump’s behaviour “intemperate and foolish” and telling readers the US election seemed to be taking place “in a country at war, or a república bananera”.
Merval Pereira, one of Brazil’s most prominent political commentators, called his daily column “Bananas americanas” and wrote: “This is a singular event in US democratic history which puts the country in the list of banana republics, an expression created by the Americans themselves.”
The Latin American Twittersphere went bananas too, with the Uruguayan human rights defender Javier Palummo asking followers: “How do you say banana republic in American English?”
© 2015 Mutual Fund Observer. All rights reserved.
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