"There's no plan of attack he hasn't studied. No strategy he doesn't know. But more than this, he knows you. Because he was you. When he was that boy on Santa Prisca. Fighting his heart out. Planning, building, strategizing. For what? Peace? No more."

Bane's home country, the Caribbean island Santa Prisca, had been in a state of perpetual war for over a hundred years at the time of his birth. Throughout the last century Santa Prisca had been colonized by multiple foreign powers; each time the indigenous population would revolt and throw out the occupiers, but soon enough someone else would come to plunder the resource-rich nation. Bane's father was the leader of one of the country's oldest rebel groups, Cielos Libres, as his own father had been before him. Bane was born on a battlefield and grew up in the militia, learning war from his first moments. Cielos Libres' symbol was a white quetzal on a black background, and Bane's father told him that one day Santa Prisca would be free like the bird when they had won peace. He would ask his son if he saw his vision of the bird; Bane could not but lie to his father and said that he did. He once took cohoba in the hopes of seeing his father's vision, but instead he saw a nightmare of a white bird with a screaming skull for a back.