Until the 1970s, the United Fruit Company – now known as United Brands – dominated Tela, a sleepy town on the Caribbean coast of Honduras. “People worked with the company, travelled on its trains, bought groceries at its stores, were treated in its hospitals and buried in its graveyards,” says Carlos Aragón.

When the company moved its headquarters away to be nearer Honduras’s main container port, however, the pre-eminent banana town of Latin America’s archetypal banana republic fell into a long decline. “Cash simply dried up when it moved,” says Mr Aragón, a former personnel manager for United, who now runs a small hotel.