Prisión Verde

The banana zone of Honduras's Caribbean lowlands in the 1930s, where the fruit companies ran the Sula valley as a private domain. The map follows the campeños from the endless plantation rows and company camps around El Progreso, along the Ulúa river, out to the industrial city of San Pedro Sula and the export port of Tela.

Lucas Ríos

The company town, El Progreso

Part One

El Progreso stands at the centre of the banana country the book maps: a town organised around the fruit company, its commissary and its camps, where a small landowner is drawn off his own plot and into wage labour on the plantations. In the 1930s the town lived on the banana trade and the company that controlled it.

Part One

explicit El Progreso, on the Ulúa in the Sula valley, is the real town at the heart of the banana zone the novel describes; the specific commissary and camp buildings are not identifiable today, so this marks the town centre.

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Lucas Ríos

The banana plantations, Sula valley

Part One

The title's green prison is the plantation itself: rows of banana that run to the horizon, worked in company camps under overseers, in mud and heat and debt. The book turns the fincas of the Sula valley into a landscape of confinement, where workers are bound to the fruit and the firm that owns it.

Part One

inferred The novel's plantation camps are drawn from the real fincas that blanketed the Sula valley around El Progreso; no single camp is named or locatable, so this marks a representative point in the valley's plantation belt west of the town.

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