The Banana Wars were a series of military interventions conducted by the United States in Central America and the Caribbean from April 1898 to August 1934 with the objective of protecting American business interests and establishing American control over tropical trade. The "Banana Wars" were so-called because American companies such as the United Fruit Company had financial stakes in the production of bananas, tobacco, sugarcane, and other commodities in Latin America, and American interventions often occurred to protect similar business interests through preventing political upheaval in America's Latin American neighbors.
The first of the "Banana Wars" occurred in 1898 with the Spanish-American War, in which the United States conquered the sugar rich Caribbean islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico from Spain while using the explosion of the USS Maine in Havana harbor as a pretext for intervention in the concurrent Cuban War of Independence. In December 1899, President William McKinley granted General Leonard Wood supreme power in Cuba, and he served as Cuba's military governor until 1902, when Cuba was given independence. However, the collapse of President Tomas Estrada Palma's government in 1906 led to President Theodore Roosevelt ordering a second occupation of Cuba to prevent the island from falling into a state of civil war and to hold free elections in order to establish a new and legitimate government. Such elections were held in November 1908, resulting in Jose Miguel Gomez's election; US troops were withdrawn from Cuba (apart from Guantanamo Bay, leased to the United States in 1903) by February 1909.
In 1912, the Afro-Cuban Independent Party of Color (PIC) rebelled against the white-dominated Cuban government, starting the "Negro Rebellion". 688 US Marine Corps soldiers were sent in to maintain order, and the rebellion was crushed after the Cuban Army massacred up to 6,000 Afro-Cubans. From 1917 to 1922, the Marines were again stationed on Cuba in the "Sugar Intervention", caused by a Liberal rebellion against the Conservative president Mario Garcia Menocal, who was re-elected under questionable circumstances. By mid-1918, the countryside protests ceased, as did the threat to American sugarcane businesses; by 6 January 1922, the US military presence on Cuba was reduced to its presence at Guantanamo Bay.
The Dominican Republic on Hispaniola was another Latin American country in whose affairs America militarily intervened in. In November 1903, US Marine Corps soldiers were landed in the Dominican Republic after Dominican rebels in Santo Domingo damaged two American merchant ships and several American-owned sugarcane plantations, but they were withdrawn once the situation was deemed stable. On 1 February 1904, a US Navy seaman was killed during clashes between Carlos F. Morales's rebels and General Juan Isidro Jiminez's soldiers in the "Santo Domingo Affair", leading to an American punitive expedition storming Fort Ozama and routing the Dominican rebels there.
Also in 1903, Panama seceded from the Colombian government amid the Thousand Days' War in a move backed by the American government, which sought to secure its possession of the Panama Canal. On 3 November, a Chinese man was killed when a Colombian gunboat bombarded Panama City, making him the only casualty of independence. The US Navy intervened to prevent the disembarkation of Colombian troops in Colon, and, on 13 November, the United States recognized Panamanian independence.
In 1907, after the Nicaraguan president Jose Santos Zelaya sent the Nicaraguan army and Honduran exiles to invade Honduras in February, the Honduran exiles defeated President Manuel Bonilla in the first battle in Central American history to involve machine guns. The United States government was concerned that Zelaya sought to establish Nicaraguan hegemony over Central America, so the Marines were sent to Puerto Cortes to protect the banana trade.
Meanwhile, the US Navy helped Bonilla defend Amapala in the Gulf of Fonseca, and the US negotiated a peaceful solution to the war at Tegucigalpa, with Bonilla stepping down in exchange for an end to the war with Nicaragua. The United States continued to meddle in Honduran affairs during periods of political and economic instability, and an uprising against President Miguel R. Davila (led by Bonilla) in 1911 led to the Marines once again landing in Honduras. Davila resigned and the US appointed Francisco Bertrand to serve as interim President. Honduras enjoyed stability from 1911 to 1920, but a general strike in 1920 led to a US Navy warship being sent to Honduras' Caribbean coast as the Honduran army suppressed the strike.
The outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 led to a border conflict between the United States and Mexico as Mexican rebels launched cross-border attacks on American ranches and telegraph lines in Texas, and the US Army was deployed to the border. In 1914, the US Navy was sent to Mexico to cut off the importation of German military supplies by Victoriano Huerta's military regime, resulting in the 9 April 1914 Tampico Affair, which, in turn, resulted in the United States' retaliatory occupation of Veracruz from 21 April to 23 November 1914. After Pancho Villa's raid on Columbus, New Mexico in 1916, the United States retaliated with the "Pancho Villa Expedition", which failed in its objective of capturing or killing Pancho Villa. In 1918, the US Army clashed with Mexican Army soldiers (aided by German advisors) at the Battle of Ambos Nogales, resulting in the construction of a permanent border wall to separate Nogales, Sonora and Nogales, Arizona.
In 1912, a nationalist rebellion broke out in Nicaragua, with Secretary of War Luis Mena leading a rebellion against the pro-American president Adolfo Diaz. The threatening of the Corinto-Granada Railway by the rebellion led to the deployment of 1,100 Marines to Nicaragua to secure the Americans' railroad interests. In 1914, the Nicaraguan government and the United States government signed the Bryan-Chamorro Treaty, which gave the USA full rights to any future canal built through Nicaragua. The United States continuously occupied Nicaragua until 1933, suppressing Augusto Cesar Sandino's rebellion before President Herbert Hoover, who was opposed to the occupation, withdrew US troops.
Following the 27 January 1914 Haitian coup d'etat which overthrew President Michel Oreste, a Marine detachment was deployed to Port-au-Prince to deter possible rebellions. On 17 December 1914, the Marines took custody of Haiti's gold reserve of $500,000 ($13 million in 2020) under pressure from American business interests who feared that Haiti would default on its climbing debts.
In February 1915, the brutal pro-American President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, who had ordered Oreste's execution, was himself overthrown and lynched by a rebel mob, and the anti-American Rosalvo Bobo, supported by the peasant Caco militias, became the new President. The USA proceeded to militarily occupy Haiti and install Philippe Sudre Dartiguenave as their puppet ruler, and the USA created a Haitian gendarmerie which, alongside US troops, enforced martial law through three US-controlled presidencies. The French recentralized power in the hands of wealthy French-cultured mulatto Haitians, and, in August 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the withdrawal of US troops from Haiti as part of his "Good Neighbor policy" towards Latin America.
The final "Banana War" began in 1916 after the Dominican Secretary of War Desiderio Arias seized power from President Juan Isidro Jimenes Pereyra; on 13 May 1916, the US Navy forced Arias to leave Santo Domingo after threatening to bombard the city, and the Marines arrived three days later and established effective control of the country within two months. President Woodrow Wilson's administration was embarrassed by a US Senate investigation which found that the American military had committed war crimes, violated Wilson's Fourteen Points, and abused captives, and the United States withdrew from its unpopular occupation of the Dominican Republic in December 1924.
The United States' withdrawal from Nicaragua in August 1934 brought an end to the Banana Wars, resulting in the continuation of United States hegemony in the Americas, as well as the replacement of President Theodore Roosevelt's "Big Stick" doctrine with President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Good Neighbor policy", which was marked by American non-intervention in Latin American affairs and reciprocal exchanges between the USA and Latin America.