No, I am not going to discuss American politics, I am going to talk
about a Costa Rican holiday and their biggest national hero.
Recently we celebrated Juan Santamaría’s birthday. Juan a drummer boy who was killed trying to
set on fire a house where some troops under an American filibusterer named
William Walker were holed up.
In case you’re trying to remember when we fought the Costa Ricans, the
U.S. government never did. What might
resolve this puzzle is that a “filibusterer” is a term for someone who fought a
proxy war.
Not our best ambassador ever.
Walker thoroughly believed in America’s Manifest Destiny and also
wanted to create new slave states in the pre-Civil War U.S. He invaded Mexico,
captured a town, and was eventually driven out by the Mexicans and I’m sure the
U.S. diplomat sincerely apologized to Mexico for our rogue nutcase. He then gathered an army and invaded Nicaragua,
at one point essentially ruling it.
After he was driven out by the combined forces of some of the neighbors,
he regrouped for another try. This time the U.S. Navy forcibly returned him to the U.S. when the caught him at sea. He made one final expedition at the behest of some British colonists in Central America, but the British regional authorities saw his presence differently. They caught him and, since we Americans clearly weren’t doing a
good job keeping him at bay, they turned him over to the Hondurans who had no
trouble executing him.
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