Víctor Interiano (aka Dichos de un bicho)

Created in the aftermath of the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Banana Republic: 100% Product of the U.S.A. by Salvadoran-American artist Víctor Interiano reclaims and reverses one of the most charged phrases in the political lexicon of the Americas. When former President George W. Bush condemned the riots as behavior “typical of a banana republic,” Interiano—writing and drawing under his alter ego Dichos de un bicho—answered with biting irony. His digital poster situates the United States as the original “banana republic,” architect and beneficiary of the political instability it long exported across Latin America and the Caribbean.

In the image, a relaxed Uncle Sam reclines above a map labeled “United Fruit Company Caribbean Empire,” carelessly discarding banana peels onto Central America. Each peel lands on a nation historically entangled in U.S. corporate and military interventions—from Guatemala and Honduras to the Dominican Republic—turning the entire region into a dumping ground for imperial waste. The smiling cartoon bananas amplify the poster’s Pop sensibility, exposing how humor, branding, and propaganda have been used to sanitize histories of violence and extraction.

Interiano’s work operates in the lineage of Latinx political cartooning, digital satire, and diaspora critique. The banana here is both weapon and witness—an absurd commodity that carries the weight of the empire's contradictions. By collapsing U.S. self-image with its colonial underside, Banana Republic reveals the persistent asymmetries of power masked by the language of democracy. The result is a poster as sharp as it is colorful: a visual meme of resistance that reminds viewers that the fruits of empire still rot in full view.