XI
The real mainstay of the Honduran treasury is the East Coast, where several American fruit companies own extensive banana plantations.
It has little connection with the rest of the country. A newly instituted service by airplane now enables one to reach it from Tegucigalpa in a couple of days, but unless one can afford this method of travel, one must go by mule, and the journey takes about two weeks.
The several gringo concerns have so developed the formerly worthless, fever-stricken swamps of the Caribbean, that to-day it contains almost half the population of Honduras, and produces eighty-two per cent. of the country’s revenue, and both ratios are increasing in favor of the Coast. Nearly all the revolutions start in this region, partly because of its isolation from the Capital where the government holds sway, and partly because in cutting off the revenue the revolutionists can starve the government into surrender.
With every revolution—as in all these countries—come rumors that some American company is back of it, financing a new régime as the cheapest road to new concessions. The rumors are so recurrent that some of them are probably true. But the Honduraneans as a whole are rather fond of insurrection, whether started by foreigners or by their own countrymen. Living in a country for the most part unfertile and unproductive, whose resources can be developed only by much toil and trouble, they find it easier to leave constructive work to the gringo, while they squabble among themselves for control of the government.