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I've got some personal experience with this vis. living there, and there is something to it.
I lived in a place with good relations with the U.S. 'cause they didn't get caught up in the initial fruit wars and otherwise had no useful resources to extract and are extremally tourist friendly; and everyone on the ground knows that their economic success is 90% attributable to the grace of good 'ol Uncle Sam.
The neighboring country has the Same geography, same racial makeup, same culture, same language, same resource distribution, was inhabited by the same group pre-Spanish settlement, was Conquista'd in the same period, was managed as one administrative unit by Europe during the colonial period, and gained independence within the same Year, month, and day, and had the same style of government after that independence.
Literally the only difference between these countries is that they were slightly richer pre-1900's, and were involved in the first set of Banana wars.
100 years latter, the poor country is doing pretty well, the neighboring rich country occasionally has refugee convoys getting out just ahead of the death squads and has a currency valuation that is doing sick trampoline acrobatics.
It's had to assign the separation point to anything but U.S. colonial ambitions in the 1910-1930's.
Thanks for sharing. I'll dig a bit into what happened in the early XX century.
I recommended Smedley Butler's book, and just general research on the Banana wars, our anti-communist actions in SA during the cold war, and the knock-on effects of plantation economies on modernization.
It's also just mad interesting, IMO.
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