Newsletter #99: US Imperial Hubris in Central America

By Dennis M. Hogan

The Dig’s series of episodes on Central America takes us through the deeper history of a region whose past is by turns tragic and strange, filled with stories of struggle, heroism, imperial terror, political cruelty, and popular resistance. Central America’s political development has been shaped by two overarching realities: first, the predominance of a local elite that rules over a politically disempowered population, sometimes using unthinkable violence to protect its wealth and influence, and second, the looming presence of the United States, the imperial colossus to the north that has long considered Central America its backyard.

Listeners who know something about Central America might think of recent news of migration from and through the isthmus to the southern border of the United States, of Donald Trump’s recent threats to take back the Panama Canal (which I discuss in a recent New York Times op-ed), or of the bizarre, dangerous, and headline-grabbing president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele (about whose crypto schemes read Jorge Cuéllar in New Left Review’s Sidecar and Jacobin América Latina) . Others might remember the bloody civil wars — all fought with the material support and political encouragement of the United States — or the legacy of US-sponsored regime change that helped forestall popular democracy and ensure that left-wing governments, even if they got into power, could rarely deliver on their promised reforms. 

To understand the US’s long fixation on Central America though, it’s best to go back. Long before Bukele, before the US-deposed leftist Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz, before the Nicaraguan revolutionary Augusto Sandino and Anastasio Somoza, the dictator who assassinated him, there was the original agent of regime change, the filibuster William Walker.

The nineteenth-century United States was hungry for expansion and eager to find places where its borders might be extended. The Louisiana Purchase had doubled the size of the country; the annexation of Texas and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican-American War (a war of aggression and territorial conquest) by signing over more than half of Mexico’s territory to the US. By the beginning of the 1850s, it seemed, the country looked set to expand even further south.

Enter the filibusters, private citizens who aimed to overthrow foreign governments, establish new colonies, and, perhaps, sue for annexation by the United States. Among the most consequential of these was Narciso López, a Venezuelan adventurer who twice invaded Spanish-held Cuba from the United States. López had the backing of powerful Southern interests who saw Cuba as a possible new slave state, and he commanded a private army of soldiers of fortune. Though López failed in both attempts (he was executed by the Spanish in the aftermath of the second), his example inspired others, like the Tennessee-born lawyer William Walker. 

Walker’s very first filibustering attempt, a private invasion of Baja California, Mexico, ended in catastrophe, but by 1855, Nicaraguan Liberals, embroiled in a civil war against the Conservatives, thought that an injection of men and energy might help them win. They invited Walker to bring his mercenaries to Nicaragua and fight on the Liberal side.

Walker succeeded. He succeeded to such an extent that after defeating the Conservatives, he found himself the only real authority in the land. He acted as the power behind the throne to a Nicaraguan civil government, but Walker was, by all accounts, a megalomaniac. He referred to himself in writing in the third person. He carefully managed his image in the United States, and, in Nicaragua, promised a total overhaul of society. He wanted, as he put it in his 1860 memoir, for “the American element to predominate in the government of Nicaragua.” 

But Walker’s efforts soon went off the rails. Beyond ruling Nicaragua, Walker desired to create a Central American empire peopled by Anglo-American settlers. He imported colonists by the thousands, offering them free land upon emigration to Nicaragua. He placed white American filibusters in important positions in government and administration, seized land, and appropriated it for his followers. 

Though Walker had initially enjoyed broad support among elite and popular segments of Nicaraguan society, the radical nature of his reforms combined with the white supremacist turn in his governing agenda (he sought, as leading pro-slavery voice DeBow’s Review put it, to “place a large proportion of the lands of the country in the hands of the white race”) ultimately destroyed his popularity among the Nicaraguan people. He went to war with Costa Rica, which opposed the filibuster government as an existential threat to local rule in Central America, and eventually a coalition of all the Central American republics rallied to the Costa Rican side (except Panama, which remained part of Colombia until 1903 — but that’s another story). In a bid for support from the US South, Walker reestablished slavery, promising to make Nicaragua a slaveholding society in which whites would rule, mestizo Central Americans would have limited rights, and black enslaved workers would toil under the lash. 

Perhaps most fatally, Walker expropriated the land and property of the Accessory Transit Company, a venture established by Cornelius Vanderbilt to offer passage across the isthmus for travelers heading from the East Coast to California. The gold rush was on in 1855, and before the coming of the transcontinental railroad, travelers hoping to reach California had three options. They could travel across the continent in wagons (you have died of dysentery), sail around Cape Horn, the southern tip of South America (a voyage of nearly 200 days covering over 13,000 nautical miles), or cross the continent at its narrowest point — the Central American isthmus — taking less than a quarter of the time. The most popular route was across Panama; the second most popular was across Nicaragua. 

The territory, then, had enormous strategic value: even in the mid-nineteenth century, there was talk of an eventual ship canal across the isthmus. The area was also an imperial battleground. The Spanish had only recently left, and while the United States and its commercial interests lurked, so too did the British, who ruled the nearby West Indies, exploited the markets of newly independent Latin America, controlled British Honduras (now Belize), had agents among the indigenous Miskito people in Nicaragua, and thought that they too might one day benefit from a canal. Some speculators got rich in the goldfields of California, but the real money was in getting them there. In the 1850s, anyone who wanted to cross Nicaragua to catch a California-bound ship had to buy a ticket from Cornelius Vanderbilt.

When Walker seized the transit from Vanderbilt, transferring the rights to Vanderbilt’s business rivals, he sealed his own fate: Vanderbilt began aiding the Central American coalition, and worked to close the transit altogether. With the transit route shuttered, Walker could not communicate with the Eastern United States, bring in new recruits, or purchase supplies. Beset by the armies of Central America, cut off from his friends, and without the aid of any sovereign power and unable to recruit reinforcements, Walker soon had to flee the country in defeat, surrendering to a US Navy ship with a handful of his miserable followers. 

He returned to the US only long enough to gin up publicity and attempt further invasions. In 1860, he sailed for Honduras and was captured by the British Royal Navy, who turned him over to local authorities. They shot him and buried him in a modest grave in the Caribbean city of Trujillo.

While Walker never acted on behalf of the US government, he signaled that, for Central Americans, US citizens would exercise their powers without regard to the political legitimacy of Central American governments or the wishes of Central American people. Thus Walker established a pattern that still echoes today. The United States continued to intervene, in formal and informal ways, establishing banana plantations, installing and removing local governments, alienating pieces of sovereign territory, occupying countries (sometimes for decades at a time), funding gangs, and hiding atrocities.

Few Americans know of Walker today, but he remains a major part of Central American historical memory. He was memorialized by the Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal in his poem “With Walker in Nicaragua,” based on a series of magazine articles written by Clinton Rollins, a veteran of the Walker expedition, and published in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1909. Though Cardenal’s is one of the more accomplished literary retellings of the Walker story, the most bizarre is Alex Cox’s 1987 film Walker, starring Ed Harris and with music by Joe Strummer of The Clash. Produced while US-sponsored civil conflict still raged across the region — in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala — the film offers an absurdist and postmodern critique of US empire then and now, with a pointed message about the human cost of imperial hubris. If you want a more scholarly approach, historian Michel Gobat has written the most recent, and most complete, account of Walker’s quixotic mission and ultimate downfall. Gobat’s* Empire by Invitation *details Walker’s relationship to empire, liberalism, and the Nicaraguan political system while exploding some of the most well-worn myths about Walker and his regime.

Listeners hungry to learn more about Central America will discover a world of resources to deepen their knowledge of this small region that has played such an outsize role in hemispheric history. What follows are some reading and viewing recommendations suggested by Hilary Goodfriend, Jorge Cuéllar, and me.

Broad Histories

William I. Robinson, Transnational Conflicts: Central America, Social Change, and Globalization (2003)

A synthetic history that emphasizes the region’s insertion into a new regime of global capitalism. 

Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Making of an Imperial Republic (2006) 

An influential history of US empire in Latin America with a focus on the ways techniques of violence and control are tested there first. Listen to The Dig’s interview with Grandin about the book here. Reviewed by Hilary Goodfriend in Jacobin in 2021.

Roque Dalton, Las historias prohibidas de Pulgarcito (1974)

The Salvadoran writer, poet, and revolutionary’s “unofficial history” of El Salvador. 

Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (1993)

A history of US intervention in Central America by one of the major figures of US diplomatic history.

Jeffery M. Paige, Coffee and Power: Revolution and the Rise of Democracy in Central America (1997)

A history of conflict, peace, and democracy that focuses on the 1980s and traces the roots of Central American civil wars.

Lowell Gudmundson and Héctor Lindo-Fuentes, Central America, 1821–1871: Liberalism before Liberal Reform (1995)

A short and accessible scholarly primer on Central America’s immediate postindependence history, politics, and social structures. 

The Politics of Nation-Building

Darío A. Euraque, Reinterpreting the Banana Republic: Region and State in Honduras, 1870–1972 (1996)

A history of Honduras, the country most closely associated with the banana economy that emphasizes local political development over international puppeteering. 

Jonathan Brown, The Weak and the Powerful: Omar Torrijos, Panama, and the Non-Aligned Movement in the World (2024)

A book about Panama’s role in Central American political history with a focus on the enigmatic and charismatic populist strongman who negotiated the return of the Panama Canal.

Melissa A. Johnson, Becoming Creole: Nature and Race in Belize (2018)

A book about Belizean identity and culture and the Belizean people’s relationship with their land.

Michael E. Donaghue, Borderland on the Isthmus: Race, Culture, and the Struggle for the Panama Canal Zone (2014)

A history of US governance in the Panama Canal Zone with a special emphasis on race and the uneasy relationship between the Canal Zone authorities and local actors. 

Ralph Sprenkels, After Insurgency: Revolution and Electoral Politics in El Salvador (2018)

An ethnography of the postwar period in El Salvador focusing on former members of the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN), an armed insurgent group that entered electoral politics in the wake of the 1992 peace agreements.

Suyapa G. Portillo Villeda, Roots of Resistance: A Story of Gender, Race, and Labor on the North Coast of Honduras (2021)

A labor history of banana workers who organized against the US fruit companies in 1950s Honduras.

Andrés León Araya, The Coup and the Palm Trees: Agrarian Conflict and Political Power in Honduras (2023)

A double history of Honduran state formation and agrarian struggles in the Aguán river basin.

War and Revolution

Joaquín M. Chávez, Poets and Prophets of the Resistance: Intellectuals and the Origins of El Salvador’s Civil War (2017)

An intellectual history of the Salvadoran Civil War.

Eileen Markey, A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura (2016)

An American journalist tells the story of Sister Maura Clarke, a Catholic missionary murdered by the Salvadoran army. 

Eline van Ommen, Nicaragua Must Survive: Sandinista Revolutionary Diplomacy in the Global Cold War (2023)

A diplomatic history of Sandinista foreign relations after the Nicaraguan Revolution.

Fiction and Memoir

O. Henry, Cabbages and Kings (1904)

A series of strung-together short stories that tell of schemers, fraudsters, and layabouts on the run and on the make in the fictional “banana republic” of Anchuria.

Miguel Ángel Asturias, Mr. President (1946)

A dictator novel by a Guatemalan master that portrays life under authoritarian rule in a fictionalized Central American nation.

Ernesto Cardenal, The Doubtful Strait (1995 [1966])

A book-length documentary poem by one of Nicaragua’s most influential writers. It details the Spanish conquest and fruitless search for a sea passage across the isthmus. 

Roque Dalton, Miguel Mármol (1972)

A true story of the Central American left in the 1920s and ’30s, as told to Dalton by the titular Mármol.

Rigoberta Menchú, I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala (1983)

The testimony of a Maya K’iche’ activist who published her life story amid a government-sponsored genocide of indigenous people.

Graham Greene, Getting to Know the General: The Story of an Involvement (1984)

The British novelist’s account of his unlikely friendship with the Panamanian populist leader Omar Torrijos.

Gioconda Belli, The Country Under My Skin (2002)

The author, Sandinista activist, and feminist’s story of resistance, revolution, and conscience both in Nicaragua and in exile.

Javier Zamora, Solito: A Memoir (2022)

The Salvadoran poet’s memoir of coming to the United States as an unaccompanied minor in the years after the Salvadoran Civil War.

Cristina Henríquez, The Great Divide (2024)

A new novel about the people from Panama and across the hemisphere who participated in the construction of the Panama Canal — both willingly and unwillingly. Recently reviewed by Dennis M. Hogan in Public Books.

Postwar and Neoliberalism 

Courtney Desiree Morris, To Defend This Sunrise: Black Women’s Activism and the Authoritarian Turn in Nicaragua (2023)

Details black women’s long history of political struggle in Nicaragua with a focus on their resistance to an increasingly autocratic Sandinista government. 

Ellen Moodie, El Salvador in the Aftermath of Peace: Crime, Uncertainty, and the Transition to Democracy (2010)

An ethnography of violence  in El Salvador under the neoliberal transition, where the civil war ended but gang killings continued to claim many lives. 

Adrienne Pine, Working Hard, Drinking Hard: On Violence and Survival in Honduras (2008)

An ethnography of working-class survival under neoliberalism inHonduras with a focus on labor, violence, and substance use. 

Dawn Paley, Drug War Capitalism (2014)

A book-length investigation into the many ways US capital profits from the drug wars that create new opportunities for profit.

Dana Frank, The Long Honduran Night: Resistance, Terror, and the United States in the Aftermath of the Coup (2018)

A political account of life in Honduras in the aftermath of the 2009 military coup that ousted Honduras’s left-wing president Manuel Zelaya.

Kevin Lewis O’Neill, Secure the Soul: Christian Piety and Gang Prevention in Postwar Guatemala (2015)

An ethnography of mechanisms of social control aimed at curtailing gang violence in Guatemala.

Elana Zilberg, Space of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis Between Los Angeles and San Salvador (2011)

A unique transnational ethnography of Salvadoran gang members that sheds light on the gang crisis’s origins in US prisons.

Deborah T. Levenson, Adiós Niño: The Gangs of Guatemala City and the Politics of Death (2013)

A historical study of the gangs of Guatemala City that places the maras in social and political context.

Giovanni Batz, The Fourth Invasion: Decolonizing Histories, Extractivism, and Maya Resistance in Guatemala (2024)

An account of Ixil Maya activism against the Palo Viejo hydroelectric plant that explores the longer histories of colonial extraction. 

Films

Diego de la Texera, El Salvador: El Pueblo Vencerá (1980)

A militant guerilla documentary detailing the history of El Salvador, produced early in the Salvadoran Civil War.

Pamela Yates, “The Resistance Saga”: When the Mountains Tremble (1983), Granito: How to Nail a Dictator (2011), 500 Years (2017)

A three-part film series telling the story of indigenous genocide and resistance in Guatemala. 

Christian Poveda, La Vida Loca (2008)

Details the lives of gang members in San Salvador; Poveda, the filmmaker, was assassinated after the film’s release. 

Abner Benaim, Invasión (2014)

A documentary about the 1989 US invasion of Panama and its role in Panamanian historical consciousness. 

Mathilde Damoisel, When Banana Ruled (2017)

A documentary about the origins and growth of the banana industry in the nineteenth century. 

Izabel Acevedo, El Buen Cristiano (The Good Christian) (2016) 

Documentary about Guatemalan dictator José Efraín Ríos Montt and the Raymundo family, whose lives he destroyed.

Jayro Bustamante, La Llorona (2019)

A horror allegory that tells the story of an elderly Guatemalan dictator, a fictional stand-in for Ríos Montt, who is forced to reckon with the crimes he committed while in power.