Well, no, you can clearly be more banana republic than that:

* Using the justice system to corruptly punish the opposition and prevent them from competing in elections,

* Using the security/military/law enforcement establishment to simply kill the opposition,

* Using the regulatory bureaucracy, and/or the security/military/law enforcement establish, to coerce media into friendly, or at least out of critical, coverage,

* Using the regulatory bureaucracy, and/or the security/military/law enforcement establish to reward people providing personal material benefit to the leader, or to punish those not doing so,

* Using the pardon power to assure that crimes committed in the course of doing any of the preceding items are unprosecutable

Pardoning family members, by itself (provided that the standards applied are different than those that would be applied to non-family members), is certainly corrupt as a form of nepotism, but hardly the outer limit of banana republic behavior.