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.
 * 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.

Western Animation

 * The Mummy: The Animated Series