All that is the case

[David Casseres]

S Johnson sez
>I second the recommendation - except I couldn't let
>it pass that old-ugly is called Alex, not Ronnie.
>
>On Thu, 17 Apr 1997 Origenes at aol.com wrote:
>
>> involvement in South America. An interesting movie which I think some of you
>> might be interested in is "Walker" by Ronnie Cox, the same director that did

I was disappointed by "Walker," but then I grew up on the Costa Rican 
version of the story.  The Costa Rican participation in the fight against 
Walker is the principal tale of national military glory, and much 
commemorated.  The national airport is named after Juan Santamaria, the 
boy who, at the Battle of Rivas, ran through a hail of bullets to torch 
the wooden stockade where Walker's forces were besieged.  And so forth.

The movie is more a story of a weird but fascinating visionary than of 
the violent and destructive invader that Central Americans knew.  I once 
read a book on Walker called "Freebooters Must Die," by a former CIA 
official (!) whose name I forget.  He did a pretty good job of putting 
Walker in historical perspective and giving an account of his vision, 
which was a "Golden Triangle" of U.S. client states/colonies built out of 
Mexico, Cuba, and Central America.  He reasoned on explicitly racist 
grounds that the people of these countries could never govern them, being 
brown, and so it was a moral duty to conquer them and install North 
Americans, starting of course with Walker himself, as dictators.

Central Americans have always insisted that the U.S. government was 
behind Walker, but the documents, apparently, only indicate that although 
it made a show of trying to control him, it never interfered very 
seriously.  In any case, he only failed, ultimately, because his 
destabilization of Nicaragua interfered with Cornelius Vanderbilt's 
highly profitable shipping operation on Lake Nicaragua, and Vanderbilt 
responded by sending funds to the Costa Rican and Honduran forces that 
opposed Walker.  Eventually, after a losing campaign in Honduras, Walker 
sought refuge with an English naval captain who betrayed him by handing 
him over to the Hondurans (Honduras was a British sphere of influence) to 
be shot.

I think there's a better story in there somewhere than the movie told.  
It reduced the Central Americans to mere preterite pawns in the game, and 
the reality is somewhere between that and the heroic Costa Rican version.


Cheers,
David