Latin Land
South of South of the Border, this is the rest of Spanish, Portuguese and a small French speaking chunk of America in fiction. That in case there is a Portuguese speaking one, because everybody knows that The Capital of Brazil Is Buenos Aires, right?
A place of old, rustic buildings, military dictators and more American missionaries (doctors, etc.) than you can shake an M16 at. Also a good place to find great big wildlife, be it of Earth origin- or extra-terrestrial.
The Banana Republic part is now highly inaccurate in Real Life - Your Mileage May Vary about Honduras being the only military dictatorship left, and even that is a recent development. The South American countries are, generally speaking, stable democracies. It's rather a historic penchant for getting in this kind of situation that created the trope.
See also: Useful Notes On Latin America. Compare Spexico.
Comic Books
- The Marvel G.I. Joe comics featured the fictional Banana Republic of Sierra Gordo.
Film
- Moon Over Parador
- Salvador
- Predator
- The same Banana Republic of Val Verde appears in Commando and Die Hard 2
- Bogota got this treatment in Mr. and Mrs. Smith. The locals were not very pleased.
- San José, Costa Rica in Jurassic Park. Because certainly a small modern city in the middle of a valley surrounded by mountains looks like a Hawaiian beach resort.
- On the other hand, the book does take care in portraying Costa Rica as a stable nation and leading economy in the region with notable achievements in nature conservation and health care. And, well, an Airforce, too.[1]
- The Dancer Upstairs (John Malkovich's directorial debut)
- Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
- Lima: Breaking the Silence
- Vilena in The Expendables
- On the 2007 movie The Reaping, the Chilean city of Concepcion is depicted as a tropical location inside a Banana Republic.
- Romancing the Stone
Literature
- Agualar in the second Finnegan Zwake book is one of these.
- One Hundred Years of Solitude, written by an author who actually comes from Colombia, is set in a unnamed Banana Republic with all the trappings (dictatorships, rebels, old decrepit towns, and an actual banana plantation) plus An Aesop about why capitalism is bad.
- Actually those vague descriptions fit with pretty much all Latin American countries - Except of course, the dictatorships which were common back in the time García Marquez wrote the book but not anymore -. Gabriel García Marquez was certainly trying to appeal to all such nations.
- Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
- On Heroes and Tombs: set in Buenos Aires, but inverted to non-Hispanics in that the descriptions would fit New York very well. "City of the Pessimists"
Live-Action TV
- MacGyver, a number of occasions.
- Airwolf
- The Sentinel
- An episode of JAG takes place in the American embassy in Peru.
- Played for laughs with Catalina's unnamed native country in My Name Is Earl.
- The new show "Off The Map" begins- Somewhere in South America.
Music
- Swedish singer/poet/whatever Evert Taube had many songs set in Latin Land (especially Argentina)
- Chicago-based alt-rock band The Biochem Wars has two songs (See the Red Sun and Waves and Rocks, Sea and Fire) set in Costa Rica, inspired by a hiking excursion the lead singer took there.
Tabletop Games
- The board game "Junta" is set in "La Republique De Los Bannanos" and revolves around various high-level functionaries in the place trying to get as much foreign aid money into their secret Swiss bank accounts as possible.