#Guatemala banana

[phillypeel]

11.20.24, Septa Station, 7:40 am

from Guatemala to Germantown

[thashining]

Overlooked History

[icollectfruitstickers]

banana stickers!!!!!!

[saltyfilmmajor]

Choco-banana mi querido

[peggyrose19]

i need everyone to understand that the us colonized hawaii for its pineapples. like that wasn't the only reason, another was its strategic military location re: pearl harbor. but the pineapple plantation was a major one!

I don't think it's a radical ideal for the want of Hawai'i to become their own independent country. It should have never been taken over by the US in the first place. For a country whose entire foundation is based upon "separation from a colonial country" it's laughable that they made an entire population that was self governed into a state. It's insulting. It's already blatantly obvious that this whole country was based on lies and blood, and it only continues to perpetuate that. I'm shocked that the Hawai'ian sovereignty movement isn't mainstream even though they have been fighting for it since 1997. Fuck the American government.

[motsimages]

Hello, owner of Memoriae-Lectoris here. To answer your question, when I look for "Ladino", I get 3 results. 1- The Index (Ladino Class), without further description. 2- The one from the sentence from the excerpt you left a comment on. 3- This part, soon after the initial excerpt: "Estrada was overthrown in 1920. Five more rulers followed, until 1931, when General Jorge Ubico took office. Ubico had won an election but instantly assumed absolute power, changing the country’s laws to give him an unlimited term in office. Ubico’s attitudes toward Guatemala’s peasants were practically schizophrenic. He nursed the country through the Depression, holding town meetings in the indigenous villages and listening so patiently to complaints that people living in the places he visited began to call him “father.” At the same time, Ubico issued edicts that made him, even today, one of the cruelest rulers in Latin American history; he required most Indians to work for landowners—United Fruit owned or controlled the vast majority of Guatemala’s cultivated terrain—for a minimum of one hundred days annually. He created a secret police force. Most notoriously, Ubico passed laws that imposed the harshest penalty on any non-Ladino who failed to follow orders when he was working: The offender could be murdered on the spot." I wanted to thank you because I did not know it was about Jewish people since I never came across the term before and the book did not explain it. I did not update yet my booklist, so in case you wanted to know the full reference, here it is: Koeppel, Dan. Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World (English Edition) (p. 121). Penguin Publishing Group. Sorry for the long answer!

Thank you for the message!

It is so interesting, because through context, it just seems to be "Spanish origin people", so I looked up the main Spanish dictionnary to find definitions about this and here's what I found:

The first definition is "clever, cunning". It could be related to an idiom that goes "This person speaks latin" to mean that the person is clever and knows their way around things. But I don't know if it could be some anti-semitic derivation in any other way.

In El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and Nicaragua, a ladino is a mixed-race person who only speaks Spanish, or just a mixed-race person. So this would be the one in your book. It could just be related to "latin" as in "latin languages" and not related to the Jewish history of it all (now that I think of it, Jewish people would not run away to America in the 15th-16th Century as it was still Spain and the law would be the same, but I don't know enough about this diaspora to be firm on this). This definition would make sense given the history of colonisation. At some point, I think the 17th Century, they wanted to categorise people in very specific classes according to how and with whom they married and who their parents were, so very likely, a mixed-race* person who only speaks Spanish could be trying to pass as the elite. *In this dictionnary, they actually send back to "mestizo", which now generally just means "mixed-race", but at that time, it was white person mixed with native person. I don't know how Guatemalan would interpret it in 1920, though.

Ironically, other definitions of ladino are about people who speak fluently several languages.

And finally, the one I knew about this Jewish-Spanish people and culture.

So yeah, some perspective in the power dynamics and colonisation for your book :)

[super-ultra-mega-deluxe]

every time someone in the imperial core- especially the US- does whatever outrage theatre about potentially losing access to imperial benefits like cheap and universally accessible bananas- primarily from Guatemala- i think about all the imperial boons that aren't even stated. Brazilian lumber. Congolese copper. Colombian coffee. Indian gemstones. Malagasy vanilla. Mexican liquor. Ecuadoran shellfish. Vietnamese textiles. Peruvian gold. motor vehicle parts, unrefined petroleum, raw aluminum, leather, plastics, vegetable oils, cement articles, furniture, and on and on and on, exploited and stolen at gunpoint the world over. the enormity of violence that buys their comfort is practically impossible to overstate, as is its ubiquity. an endless cavalcade of invasions and coups and unpayable loans and structural adjustment policies and legal and economic advisors preaching austerity. it is an imperial benefit in itself to be capable of ignoring something so omnipresent and overtly insulting to immediately launch into a "woe is me!" act whenever they can't

[imsobadatnicknames2]

What does the "banana republic is a fucked up name for a store" post you reblogged mean? I'm afraid of looking dumb.

The term "banana republic" was originally coined to describe countries in Central and South America (mainly Honduras and Guatemala) whose economies were rendered dependent on the production and export of bananas (among other agricultural goods, but mainly bananas) by American fruit corporations leveraging the power of the U.S. government, the U.S. military and the CIA.

Throughout most of the of the 20th century, American corporations such as United Fruit, Cuyamel, and the Standard Fruit Company owned large portions of these countries' lands, to the point that in some cases they controlled their railway, road, and port infrastructure, and they engaged in a variety of imperialist actions to lower production costs, such as violence against labor activists and anti wage reform lobbying.

The pinnacle of this phenomenon was the 1954 Guatemalan coup, when United Fruit convinced the goverment of US president Dwight D. Eisenhower that the elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz (who had expropriated some of the company's unused land and given it to Guatemalan peasants) was secretly working with the Soviet Union, resulting in a CIA coup which deposed the Árbenz government and replaced it with a thirty-year right-wing military dictatorship which effectively acted as a puppet government to protect the interests of United Fruit and the U.S. government.

Nowadays the term has broadened to refer to any small, economically unstable country with an economy which has been rendered dependent on the export of a particular natural resource due to economic exploitation by a more powerful country.

[txttletale]

I'm asking this genuinely, as a 19 yo with no education in economics and a pretty surface level understanding of socialism: can you explain the whole Bananas discourse in a way someone like me might understand? In my understanding it's just "This is just a product we can give up to create better worker conditions and that's fine" but apparently that's not the full picture?

alright so some pretty important background to all this is that we're all talking about the fact that bananas, grown in the global south, are available year-round at extremely low prices all around europe and the USA. it's not really about bananas per so--the banana in this discourse is a synechdoche for all the economic benefits of imperialism.

so how are cheap bananas a result of imperialism? first of all i want to tackle a common and v. silly counterargument: 'oh, these ridiculous communists think it's imperialist for produce to be shipped internationally'. nah. believing that this is the communist objection requires believing in a deeply naive view of international traide. this view goes something like 'well, if honduras has lots of bananas, and people in the usa want bananas and are willing to pay for them, surely everyone wins when the usa buys bananas!'.

there are of course two key errors here and they are both packed into 'honduras has lots of bananas'. for a start, although the bananas are grown in honduras, honduras doesn't really 'have' them, because the plantations are mostly owned by chiquita (formerly known as united fruit) dole, del monte, and other multinationals--when they're not, those multinationals will usually purchase the bananas from honduran growers and conduct the export themselves. and wouldn't you know it, it's those intervening middleman steps--export, import, and retail, where the vast majority of money is made off bananas! so in the process of a banana making its way from honduras to a 7/11, usamerican multinationals make money selling the bananas to usamerican importers who make money selling them to usamerican retailers who make money selling them to usamerican customers.

when chiquita sells a banana to be sold in walmart, a magic trick is being performed: a banana is disappearing from honduras, and yet somehow an american company is paying a second american company for it! this is economic imperialism, the usamerican multinational extracting resources from a nation while simultaneously pocketing the value of those resources.

why does the honduran government allow this? if selling bananas is such a bad deal for the nation, why do they continue to export millions of dollars of banans a year? well, obviously, there's the fact that if they didn't, they would face a coup. the united states is more than willing to intervene and cause mass death and war to protect the profits of its multinationals. but the second, more subtle thing keeping honduras bound to this ridiculously unbalanced relationship is the need for dollars. because the US dollar is the global reserve currency, and the de facto currency of international trade, exporting to the USA is a basic necessity for nations like honduras, guatemala, &c. why is the dollar the global reserve currency? because of usamerican military and economic hegemony, of course. imperialism built upon imperialism!

this is unequal exchange, the neoimperialist terms of international trade that make the 'global economy' a tool of siphoning value and resources from the global south to the imperial core. & this is the second flaw to unravel in 'honduras has a lot of bananas' -- honduras only 'has a lot of bananas' because this global economic hegemony has led to vast unsustainable monoculture banana plantations to dominate the agriculture of honduras. it's long-attested how monoculture growth is unsustainable because it destroys soil and leads to easily-wiped-out-by-infection plants.

so, bananas in the USA are cheap because:

the workers that grow them are barely paid, mistreated, prevented from unionizing, and sometimes murdered

the nations in which the bananas are grown accept brutally unfair trade and tariff terms with the USA because they desperately need a supply of US dollars and so have little position to negotiate

shipping is also much cheaper than it should be because sailors are chronically underpaid and often not paid at all or forced to pay to work (!)

bananas are cheap, in conclusion, because they're produced by underpaid and brutalized workers and then imported on extortionate and unfair terms.

so what, should we all give up bananas? no, and it's a sign of total lack of understanding of socialism as a global movement that all the pearl-clutching usamericans have latched onto the scary communists telling them to stop buying bananas. communism does not care about you as a consumer. individual consumptive choices are not a meaningful arena of political action. the socialist position is not "if there was a socialist reovlution in the usa, we would all stop eating bananas like good little boys", but rather, "if there's a socialist revolution in the countries where bananas are grown, then the availability of bananas in the usa is going to drop, and if you want to be an anti-imperialist in the imperial core you have to accept that".

(this is where the second argument i see about this, 'oh what are you catholic you want me to eat dirt like a monk?' reveals itself as a silly fucking solipsistic misunderstanding)

and again, let's note that the case of the banana can very easily be generalised out to coffee, chocolate, sugar, etc, and that it's not about individual consumptive habits, but about global economic systems. if you are donkey fucking kong and you eat 100 bananas a day i don't care and neither does anyone else. it's about trying to illustrate just one tiny mundane way in which economic imperialism makes the lives of people in the global north more convenient and simpler and so of course there is enormous pushback from people who attach moral value to this and therefore feel like the mean commies are personally calling them evil for eating a nutella or whatever which is frankly pretty tiring. Sad!

tldr: it is not imperialism when produce go on boat but it is imperialism when produce grown for dirt cheap by underpaid workers in a country with a devalued currency is then bought and exported and sold by usamerican companies creating huge amounts of economic value of which the nation in which the banana was grown, let alone the people who actually fucking grew it, don't see a cent -- and this is the engine behind the cheap, available-every-day-all-year-everywhere presence of bananas in the usa (and other places!)

[realityfragments]

Lazy Sunday: From Mangos to Economies.

My mind is a bit cluttered. Sometimes I simply vegetate somewhere and blank it off, and sometimes I go through my mind, taking things out and examining them one by one. Sundays are good days for that. It’s also sort of like a roundup. I have a thunderstorm playing on Youtube for ambience and the sun has crept up. Mangoes Maryanne posted about National Mango Day in the U.S. – and there were…

[pixelfoodie]

Espumilla is a light and fluffy meringue dessert that is especially popular in Ecuador, although it can also be found in Venezuela, Colombia, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Guatemala. It typically consists of egg whites, sugar, water, and puréed fruit. Guava is the most common fruit option, but other fruits can also be used, such as lemon, banana, mango, raspberry, and blackberry. Once prepared, espumilla is traditionally served in ice cream cones and topped with sprinkles, shredded coconut, or blackberry syrup called arrope de mora. In Ecuador, espumillas are usually sold by street vendors, although this refreshing dessert might also be made at home. src.: https://www.tasteatlas.com/espumilla ref photo.: https://www.reddit.com/r/52weeksofcooking/

[fatehbaz]

all the time, gotta walk away, for a moment, take a break, infuriated, when reading about European implementation of forced labour, particularly and especially thinking about nineteenth and early twentieth centuries plantations, whether it's sugarcane or rubber or tea or banana, whether it's British plantations in Assam or Malaya; Belgian plantations in Congo; French plantations in West Africa; Dutch plantations in Java; de facto United States-controlled plantations in Haiti or Guatemala or Cuba or Colombia. and the story is always: "and then the government tried to find a way to reimpose slavery under a different name. and then the government destroyed vast regions of forest for monoculture plantations. and then the government forced thousands to become homeless and then criminalized poverty to force people into plantation work or prison labor." like the plantation industries are central (entangled with every commodity and every infrastructure project) and their directors are influencing each other despite spatial distance between London and the Caribbean and the Philippines.

and so the same few dozen administrators and companies and institutions keep making appearances everywhere, like they have outsized influence in history. like they are important nodes in a network. and they all cite each other, and write letters to each other, and send plant collection gifts to each other, and attend each other's lectures, and inspire other companies and colonial powers to adapt their policies/techniques.

but. important that we ought not characterize some systems and forces (surveillance apparatuses, industrial might, capitalism itself) as willful or always conscious. this is a critical addendum. a lot of those forces are self-perpetuating, or at least not, like, a sentient monster. we ought to avoid imagining a hypothetical boardroom full of be-suited businessmen smoking cigars and plotting schemes. this runs the risk of misunderstanding the forces that kill us, runs the risk of attributing qualities to those forces that they don't actually possess. but sometimes, in some cases, there really are, like, a few particular assholes with a disproportionate amount of influence making problems for everyone else.

not to over-simplify, but sometimes it's like the same prominent people, and a few key well-placed connections and enablers in research institutions or infrastructure companies. they're prison wardens and lietuenant governors and medical doctors and engineers and military commanders and botanists and bankers, and they all co-ordinate these multi-faceted plans to dispossess the locals, build the roads, occupy the local government, co-erce the labour, tend the plants, ship the products.

so you'll be reading the story of like a decade in British Singapore and you're like "oh, i bet that one ambitious British surgeon who is into 'economics' and is obsessed with tigers and has the big nutmeg garden in his backyard is gonna show up again" and sure enough he does. but also sometimes you're reading about another situation halfway across the planet and then they surprise you (because so many of them are wealthy and influential and friends with each other) and it'll be like "oh you're reading about a British officer displacing local people to construct a new building in Nigeria? surprise cameo! he just got a letter from the dude at the university back in London or the agriculturalist in Jamaica or the urban planner from Bombay, they all went to school together and they're also all investors in the same rubber plantation in Malaya". so you'll see repeated references to the same names like "the British governor of Bengal" or "[a financial institution or bank from Paris or New York City]" or "[a specific colonial doctor/laboratory that does unethical experiments or eugenics stuff]" or "lead tropical agriculture adviser to [major corporation]" or "the United Fruit Company" and it's like "not you again"

[quill-of-thoth]

Can't walk much so have a story: how I fell down a mountain and got my 'rescuers' stranded

(It's temporary) (The not walking and the stranding) Backstory: I periodically can't walk because my feet are, to use a technical term, flat ass bitches. I discovered this near the end of my second semester of college by getting a raging case of tendonitis that felt like someone was trying to drill a hole in my foot. Instead of taking another ice pack from the campus nurse, I promptly got a pair of too tall crutches and swung my way to finals with a 104 degree fever, scaring my philosophy professor badly enough that he threw out my final and just wrote in an A. Which is lucky, because. I sat down to analyze The Odyssey and woke up writing about The Tempest.

A doctor, physical therapy, a pair of custom insoles and three months later, I went back to college. With some amount of optimism because hey, I was 19. 19 year olds make full recoveries. Also the reason why I was a failure at gym and my feet hurt a lot had been figured out so I was probably going to get BETTER at, you know, being fully vertical for extended periods of time. Once I worked up to it.

And then for reasons known only to 19 year old me, a person who took a Spanish minor largely because I felt I should use 16 free credits somehow, I signed up for a month long trip to Guatemala during winter break.

Which is how I got to the mountain, but not how I fell down it.

The class was technically an econ course, but Profe. Ed was a closet anticapitalist and every year he dragged about 20 young people to Guatemala to

1) make business majors less insufferable by giving them a "cool" way to pad out econ credits while making them meet the realities of the world and how capitalism doesn't, you know, feed people well, 2) Distribute some American cash directly to the locals, via the purchasing power of said hungry young people who were willing to pay the equivalent of the price of a nice dinner for a single frozen chocolate banana because to us it was like 50 cents

and

3) let his advanced Spanish students do immersion by the sink or swim method. I was a member of group number three. I was in charge of speaking Spanish to guide my group of 4 around. I was also on uh. An amount of painkillers. Enough that it was not recommended that I do any drinking. Nobody warned me about doing any walking up a mountain though because they figured I was smart enough to know that already. Anyway we made it to the first stop and my group was charged with finding the new location of the weavers' collective, with whom our college's chapter of Amnesty International intended to deposit over a thousand quetzales. (So... maybe a hundred USD?) We did not find them on the first day. We were at over 5 thousand feet (and as midwesterners we were used to an elevation whose distance from sea level is a rounding error), we were jet lagged, we were working in a second language, and we didn't know how to find anything without, you know, an address. Also, we thought the directions we did get were to somewhere on the other side of town and my limp had become the fifth member of our party. We pulled out our instructions sheet, hopped back on the Lancha (a boat serving as a bus), took some dramamine because everyone working public transit in Guatemala drives like they're in mario cart, and I told the driver that we were returning via Las Lomas at Tzununa. I felt like I had gotten a second wind.

I remember being a little lightheaded but I thought it was heat exhaustion. Or possibly the moment of second language fluency that feels like either enlightenment or a stroke.

Anyway we were dropped off at Tzununa and pointed up. We walked. Increasingly slowly as I discovered that sometimes instead of being in increasing pain your nerves do an end run around your consciousness to make you EXTREMELY spacey. We saw a parking lot that said "Las Lomas" and went. Past it. Slowly. Until we found a cow and decided we should probably locate a human to ask for directions. At which point we were directed three or four miles up the private driveway we had skipped because we'd been told to follow the calle, a word I only knew as 'road'. The thing is that despite feeling like I was legitimately going to fall apart, and also barf, and probably also faint, I had to keep it together because I was the primary Spanish speaker, damn it. The token guy in our group for machismo safety was like, two classes behind me on a Spanish minor. Also if I didn't have something to do I was gonna hurl. So I cracked a lot of jokes that landed very poorly due to me looking kinda half dead and kept going until we finally reached Las Lomas, the place we were supposed to be over an hour ago. They told us, and I quote, "follow the path through the maize over the ridge and you'll come down right at the edge of town." Which was on our agenda. They also told us "you should be able to make it before dark" which was optimistic even if our group hadn't included me, current winner of the global misery award. They did not tell us that they had their own private dock with ten million stairs. Which was where we were supposed to dock.

I would not have been able to climb them. I was barely able to descend them. But. If we had known they existed we would have known three things: 1) We were now about two hours and five miles late for our original itinerary.

2) The alleged two mile mountain hike across the ridge had not yet begun

3) We could get back on the fucking Lancha from here. So when the hike turned out to be on an 8 inch wide dirt scuff through a field of maize that looked ALL the way down into the extremely sharp and rocky beach we might have thought of getting back on the boat instead of towing my - now violently shivering - top-heavy carcass in a conga line of suffering across the mountain. Hand in incompetent hand we crept like a concussed centipede around the point of the mountain only to see yet another ridge with a huge rock slide crossing the path between us and it. We tried to cross the gravely bit. I promptly slid fifteen feet, ripped the entire butt off my shorts, and kinda passed out for a second. At which point we decided to call Profe. Ed.

This was before international cell phone plans, or even good sim cards, or possibly the existence of cell service anywhere in Lago Atitlan that wasn't populated by American and European expatriates. "Profe Ed we're lost, the trail is washed out, Quill has like broken her ankle or something-"

"Tendonitis! It's actually not the bone -"

"-And the sun is going down and it's like. A million miles back to the lancha. Are there any wild jaguars around here? I hope there aren't jaguars."

"Pretty sure we need to worry more about freezing to death." (When in peril I become a font of extreme helpfulness.)

"GET BACK TO LAS LOMAS YOU HAVE 45 MINUTES TO CATCH THE LAST LANCHA AT 6 PM." The concussed centipede returned the maybe half a mile back up the mountain, at top dragging speed, with one fourth of its underwear on display. I only nearly fell twice. The time was 5:30.

It was decided that two of the team, Token Guy who spoke a bit of Spanish, and French club girl, who were cross country runners, would run and try and delay the lancha while Amnesty International treasurer girl would be my human crutch and keep me from going into shock or something with a water bottle and a bag of chips. The last I saw was of Token Guy literally jumping over a wheelbarrow as they sprinted... down the four mile driveway... to the town of Tzununa.

Whose last lancha was, unbeknownst to us, at 5:45 pm. Because we didn't know about the secret, private dock. And because not a single one of us could estimate distance well enough to realize that we had started by getting off at the wrong stop.

Someone at Las Lomas saw that I was an American in distress and offered their phone. And an English speaking front desk worker because my Spanish had been reduced to me duele las pies, which is less than grammatical, and my English had gotten kinda thin.

All I really remember is the phrase "we have a dock and you can flag the lancha from there" and then. Hundreds of millions of stairs. Uneven. winding. with handlebars added haphazardly to prevent me from just pitching off into the water. You can slide down a handrail on your armpits if you have to but not if it's broken up by a thousand turns. And then we were on the boat and Amnesty went up and down looking for Token Guy and French Club before realizing: they were not on board. We had the cell phone. The time was 6:15 pm and nothing we said could induce the lancha driver to turn around, though he did offer that we could get off in the middle of the lake if we wanted.

We crawled into our hotel at 7 and a new chunk of Profe. Ed's hair spontaneously went white while we tried to explain, in tears, what had happened. At least there (probably) weren't jaguars on the driveway from hell. "I'm going to make some calls" he said, in a voice that was reserved for crises, not the aftermath of dumbassery, and Amnesty dragged me, by way of a bottle of naproxen, to dinner where we sat in silent, guilty, treacherous misery, poking at the fish and wondering exactly how much shit we had just stranded our friends in. Everyone else, who had gotten in hours ago, was talking about the shaman, who was going to come and give us a lecture about how the world was not going to end this year.

No, it was just Amnesty and I who were going to end this year, because if the tendonitis didn't get me, leaving Token Guy and French Club on the side of a foreign mountain was going to do me and Amnesty in. Profe Ed was going to send us back to America, because we were dirty rotten traitors who split the party.

Meanwhile everybody sat playing with the candles until it was very dark. Amnesty and I had procured a blanket and sat under it like two hermit crabs trying to hide in the same guilty shell. Profe. Ed's dinner was attracting mosquitoes.

Until finally in a blaze of flashlights, the Shaman appeared, with French Club and Token Guy carrying like seven bags of his stuff between them.

[bow-of-aros]

Come Back For Me

Summary:

They're on the staircase, guns pointed at each other, but it goes a little differently this time around. (Or - I wanted them to yell at each other more. I'm an Owen Carvour apologist first and foremost)

This musical has taken over my entire life. One Step Ahead is the only song that exists to me right now. I wanted more of a confrontation that what we got BUT I also wanted Owen to not die so this is what resulted from that. Hope that y'all enjoy <33

There they were. After years of grief and rage and praying to God for the chance to go back and change that night, Owen Carvour and Curt Mega stood on a staircase, pistols loaded, pointed directly at each other.

It was familiar, in a way. If they shifted their aim a few scant inches to the side, they were back in Italy, Japan, Finland, Guatemala, working as a team. Watching each others backs.

Owen hasn’t had anyone watching his back for a long time.

Let’s just say that it didn’t work out very well for him in the past.

“Owen,” Curt started, and Owen had to will his hands to remain steady, for his aim to stay true. Four years and it was still the same goddamn voice.

The same voice he’d argued with on their first assigned mission together, the one he’d found so arrogant and grating coming from the brash American he’d been stuck with. The same voice Owen had started to grow fond of, as time went on and the arguing shifted to bickering, light-hearted jabs as they tore through everything in their paths. The same voice that had whispered sweet nothings in his ear on the rare quiet morning where they could play at a domestic life.

He’d trusted that voice.

He’d loved that voice.

Owen was falling again, slipping on that damn banana peel and staring up at his partner as he crashed to the ground. Curt had called his name, he could remember that much.

That voice was the last thing Owen Carvour ever heard before everything inside him that mattered died.

“Please. You don’t have to do this.” And suddenly he was back in the present, Curt on the steps below him, staring up pleadingly. As he spoke, Curt’s target moved from Owen’s head to his heart and, well, wasn’t that just fitting?

He wanted to cry. Owen wanted to fall to his knees and weep about how unfair it all was, to let the rot that had been festering inside him spill out and infect everything around him.

Instead, he opted for a sneer, “Oh, don’t I? Humour me, love, what would you have me do instead?”

The old pet name found its mark with brutal accuracy and Curt flinched as though he’d been struck. Normally, this is when he would explode, when he’d close his eyes and start swinging without any regard for the consequences.

That didn’t happen. Curt took a deep breath and looked right back at Owen, eyes alight with an old fire.

Owen found himself slightly unnerved.

“You could come back with me,” Curt inched forward, freezing as Owen refocused his gun at the movement, “We could take down Chimera together. We could make things right.”

One of the fine threads holding Owens composure snapped.

“Come with you? Why on Earth would I come with you?! You left me.” Owen’s shoulders heaved and his eyes were bright, but his voice continued to hold that cold, calm fury. “Do you have any idea what they did to me? How long I was down there thinking Curt will save me. Curt will come back for me?”

“They asked me about you, you know. The great Curt Mega,” He spat out Curt’s name like poison. “I didn’t tell them shit. I knew how proud of me you’d be for not breaking but you never showed up.”

Curt’s face had gone pale, all bravado leaking out of his voice as he stammered out, “Why— Why didn’t you, uh…”

“What? Why didn’t I sell you out?” A sharp, humourless laugh escaped him, “Maybe because we were fucking partners, Curt. Maybe because, no matter what, we were supposed to have each others’ backs. Maybe it was because I was foolish enough to believe that you were only moments away from breaking down that door right up until I managed to claw myself out of there.”

Despite all Owen’s efforts, his voice hitches and he can feel the tears he’d been willing away start to roll down his cheeks.

He can count the amount of times he’d cried in front of Curt on one hand. Mostly from when Curt had to stitch up something that Owen couldn’t reach, once from a few too many drinks and the crushing weight of the lives he hadn’t been able to save.

Never because of Curt.

Not until that night, at least.

Curt’s voice comes out fractured, “Owe, I—”

“Don’t call me that.”

The shaking anger in Owen’s voice must shock Curt into silence, because he freezes with his mouth half-formed around some empty platitude. As if mere words could fix the agony that consumes Owen’s every waking moment, the lingering ache where bones had broken and never set properly.

As if words could fill the gaping chasm in his chest where love used to keep him warm and chase away the cold that had settled into his bones.

“Only people who don’t leave me to die get to call me that. Only people who stand by me no matter what get to call me that.” Owen pauses, ensuring that what he says really sinks in, “You don’t get to call me that.”

The anymore echoes unsaid between them.

Once, hearing that name fall from Curt’s lips had filled Owen with what could only be described as starlight. Something bright and beautiful, but unlike the sun where it burned if you looked for too long. He’d always adored the stars, would’ve watched them every night if given the opportunity, tracing the constellations and sitting in awe of the stories that surrounded them.

That’s how Curt had made him feel, something to be in awe of, something that could be gazed at forever without every getting tired.

Now, that name burned. It prodded at tender bruises and reopened festering wounds, dangling everything Owen had lost in front of him and then snatching it away before he could even begin to reach for it.

“Owen,” Curt corrected himself, and Owen felt that sense of loss all over again, “I swear that I wanted to come back for you, but mission protocol dictates—”

“Mission protocol?” The words were drenched in disbelief, “You know what else mission protocol dictates?”

Owen started numbering things on his fingers, angry enough to take one hand off his pistol, “Mission protocol dictates that you don’t drink on the job. It dictates that you don’t leave anything with DNA evidence behind, like a banana peel. It dictates that we set the detonation time with enough space for us to make our escape. It dictates that we keep each other safe.”

“Now, tell me again about mission fucking protocol.”

Instead of answering, Curt takes advantage of Owen’s loose grip on the gun and shoots it out of his hand. He’d always been a better shot than Owen, even though he was loathe to admit it, but he couldn’t argue that it had helped them out of tight scrapes before.

The bullet didn’t even graze his hand, hitting exactly where it had intended and leaving Owen unarmed.

Leaving him vulnerable.

“I can’t let you do this,” Curt’s voice shook, but his hands remained steady, every angle lined with determination. “I loved you. I still love you, Owen. I love you so much that I spent every night drinking myself to sleep and hoping that I wouldn’t wake up the next morning. The only time I was ever��actually happy was for that brief moment after waking up and I didn’t remember that I had killed you.”

Owen opened his mouth to speak, but it snapped shut when Curt cut him a sharp look, “No. It’s my turn. I need to say this. I need you to hear this.”

And, well, what else could Owen do but nod? This is what he’d dreamt of every since he’d realized that Curt had left him behind, the knowledge that it had destroyed him as much as it had destroyed Owen.

“I was a coward. Is that what you want to hear? I was a fucking coward when I left you behind. I made a mistake and it cost me everything that mattered, and I couldn’t face it. You died, and I died with you.”

They were both crying now, years of emotions finally rising to the surface.

Curt wasn’t done. “But you’re here and you’re alive, and it’s everything I’ve been dreaming of for years. You lost everything, your beliefs were shattered, and I know it’s all my fault, but it’s not too late.”

The pistol lowered, not pointed away, but no longer aimed at his heart.

“Come with me, Owen. Please.”

And he wanted to. Despite everything, Owen ached to return to Curt, to let him fight for Owen’s trust, to fall into his arms and try to believe him when he said that everything was going to be alright.

“I can’t.”

The mask that Owen had so carefully cultivated had surely crumbled to dust by now, leaving the desperation and heartbreak he was feeling on prominent display for anyone to see.

“I’m too far gone, Curt.” He had to make Curt understand, he had to, “I’m broken. They took me apart and put me back together wrong. I have nothing to go back to, I’m a traitor to my country and dead to everyone else. You left me.”

He felt like a broken record, but when something turns your life to ash and is the foundation upon which you rebuild everything you are, it’s hard to let go of it.

“I don’t know if I can forgive you. You were everything, and then you took everything.” Owen flung his arms out to the darkness around him, “This is all I have left! I have to do this.”

Curt’s face shuttered, and Owen knows what comes next. It’s what this whole thing was leading up to, no matter how much he pretended that he could change the story.

“You know that I can’t let you do this, Owen.” Curt tightened his grip around the pistol, and something like relief washed through Owen.

Finally.

“Shoot me then,” What was meant as a taunt came out more like a plea, “Finish the job you started four years ago and just fucking kill me.”

As Curt raised the gun up higher, Owen couldn’t help but laugh.

“I always did say that you were going to be the death of me, love. Can’t say I imagined it turning out quite like this.”

And of all things, that is what made Curt falter. Maybe it was the reminder of Owen’s last words before he fell, maybe it was what Curt had said after.

I’d never let you down.

The click of the safety being engaged sounded throughout the room, and Owen watched in an odd combination of wonder and despair as it was placed back in its holster.

“What are you—”

“I won’t do it again.” Curt wouldn’t even allow Owen the decency of confusion, the fire in his voice burning through everything he thought he knew, “I will not kill you again, Owe.”

There it was. That damn name.

Owen didn’t say anything.

“I know you. I know that you are good. I know that, buried under all the hurt and the betrayal, you still want to make the world a better, safer place. And I know that you just need to remember that.” Curt stepped out of his way, tucking his hands in his pockets and leaving Owen a clear path to leave, “I know that you’ll make the right decision. You always do.”

Cautiously, bracing for an attack that never came, Owen walks past Curt, making it down the stairs and walking towards the door.

“Oh, and Owen?” Curt calls after him.

He stalls, not turning around, he’s not willing to cede that yet, but also cocking his head to the side ever so slightly to show that he was listening.

“I’ll come back for you this time. I’m never going to stop coming back for you until we’re back on the same side again, I promise.”

There were a million things Owen could say to that, from scorn to despair to turning around right then and laying all his broken pieces at Curt’s feet.

In the end, he didn’t say anything and pushed through the door, leaving Curt to his decision.

But, as Owen heard footsteps echo behind him, he finally let himself hope.

[smytherines]

Oh my god this got so long. I swore to myself that I was going to be normal about this and not just dump all of my headcanon immediately but like

Do you ever think about the fact that in the 1950s & 1960s there just were not that many nuclear weapons blueprints out there (and most of the document stealing was done by long term plants, not high risk guys like Curt & Owen)

If you were a spy during the Cold War you were most likely doing regime change. You were arming, training, and supplying coups. You were helping set the stage for American or UK capital to set up shop and repress and enslave Indigenous populations and export every drop of wealth possible from the global south. You were fighting a proxy war against "communism" (which often just meant workers striking for better conditions, at least intially) all across the globe.

With that context I think a lot about the coup in Guatemala in 1954, where the CIA trained and armed the coup and overthrew the democratically elected president of Guatemala (Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán) at the behest of the United Fruit Company. Árbenz was left of center, and he had land reforms planned that would compensate UFCO for their land, appropriate it, and redistribute it to workers. Guatemala offered to pay the value listed on UFCO tax documents (1.2 million), but UFCO demanded 16 million

If I start talking about this I'll never stop, but long story short UFCO had spent 50+ years gobbling up all the land in Guatemala, grew Bananas and exported them for massive profits, and terrorized or outright massacred Indigenous workers to keep them in line. The 1954 coup and the subsequent I think its 36 years of civil war in Guatemala is all down to the CIA doing a coup because the head of the CIA (Allen Dulles) was on the board of United Fruit and they wanted that blood money baby. It was a genocide.

Hard swerve back into it here: I don't know about Owen, but at least Agent Curt Mega had a *very* good chance of participating in the 1954 coup. In creating a literal Banana Republic (a puppet government controlled by US interests). I tend to think Owen was there too because it's more interesting that way. I think it's a mistake to focus exclusively on the Russian cat vs mouse and ignore the larger geopolitical context of the cold war.

Owen "dies" because of Curt's hubris- not just the drinking and talking him into risks he isn't comfortable with, but with his job at A.S.S., because someone else points and Curt shoots. In my headcanon Curt helped to create a banana republic that harmed and killed an incredible number of people, and he is just as careless when he leaves his banana peel on the stairs and "kills" Owen. Curt is absolutely firm in the belief that he is one of the good guys. And I think Owen was prolly the same way- until his body got wrecked and he got abandoned by the man he loved and he had a long, long time to think about the foreign policy of his government and what he and Curt really *did* on their fun lil spy jaunts.

If Owen was in Honduras (where they staged the Guatemala coup), then he has to reckon with the fact that he "died" due to *his own* hubris as well. He has to process that he joined the intelligence game because he grew up during the Blitz, during WWII, but that post WWII Britain was doing the same imperialist bullshit the US was. That Owen wasn't saving the world, he was destroying it. He was crushing half the planet under the thumb of British power. He was enacting the very genocides he joined up to prevent. That's why he wants a world with "no more agencies, no more spies, no more secrets."

So when Chimera offers Owen the chance to undermine US & UK interests, to take the power out of their hands by using and discarding a ridiculous n*zi, Owen just goes for it. I don't subscribe to the Chimera brainwashing theory, I like to think Owen joined Chimera because post-banana he became ideologically aligned with Chimera.

I imagine Chimera pulled him out of the rubble and got him back on his feet, and whispered in his ear about US/UK imperialism. We can argue about whether the ends justify the means, whether he goes too far, whether Chimera has pure intentions (doubt), but Owen isn't just some nightmare monster. He tells Curt "you've been blind" and "no one's innocent." He calls Curt a "caveman" and what is it, an "arrogant brute?" He has a rationale. He believes he is right. He's kind of a dick about it, but he has radicalized in a way Curt hasn't.

I think Owen sees Curt as clinging to cool guy spy shit (and the macho straight guy facade) instead of seeing the world for what it is. I think he probably also thinks about Alan Turing, about the UK arresting gay men- men who had previously been considered national heroes- for doing what Owen does (loving a man). I think he thinks about the US doing an elaborate and very public witchhunt of communists and gay people and anyone else who doesn't conform to good ol American capitalism. I think he insults Curt because he has been through a lot of shit that has changed his perspective, and he cannot believe that Curt *still doesn't see it*

I know there's the whole "DMA killed 1147 people, mostly girls from ages 14 to 22" kickstarter joke, but I'm sorry as much as I love Cynthia it'll be a cold day in hell before I believe anything the US state department says.

I don't think Agent Curt Mega is a perfect adorable babygirl who has never done anything wrong, I don't think Owen is (and has always been) a cruel and sadistic comic book villain. I think these are two men who loved each other in a time where it was very difficult, in a profession where they are literally the property of their respective governments. Where they could be arrested and forced into conversion therapy if they were discovered.

I think they were flawed (Curt cocky and careless, Owen condescending) but loved and respected each other as best they could, and when a massive trauma hits them they break different ways. Curt remains the lawful good, but Owen reframes his sense of right and wrong. I tend to think he did legit torture a lot of people, and even enjoyed it, but I think it was people related to these proxy wars, people related to these coups. People who could advance Chimera's objectives

I think Owen tortures Curt because he hates him, and he doesn't kill Curt (despite having soooo many chances) because he loves him. Owen has so much hesitation in the staircase scene. When Curt brings up their relationship he wavers and his face softens and his gun drops. He brings the gun back up, but despite having Curt at gunpoint for like 3 minutes he doesn't kill him. He hates him, but he loves him. If Curt takes the chance to talk to Owen, then maybe...

But Curt is convinced he is the good guy, which makes Owen the bad guy. And bad guys get put down like dogs. The ideological split is something Curt can't handle, so he shoots and kills his unarmed ex-lover. He just needs a win. He needs it to be over.

I don't have anything against anyone else's headcanon, I think it's a testament to how good Spies Are Forever really is that nearly 8 years later so many people still spend so much time taking apart this comedy musical about gay spies. But for me, it's more compelling if Owen is traumatized and flawed and ideologically opposed to the heroes of our story. I think it's more interesting that Curt kills the man he spent 4 years pining for because he can't accept the possibility that he could be the baddie.

Oh god I have to stop this is too much. But yeah. I've got feelings.

[tooies]

the entire country of guatemala could be like hit by a drought and a hurricane and a huge swarm of hell demons all at once and people will be posting like AMERICANS: here's how you can survive the current banana shortage