The podcast company Wondery has a series on the American “Filibuster” William Walker. Walker used terrorism and war to make himself “president” of Nicaragua right before the Civil War broke out.
Modern Americans know the term “filibuster” as a speech given in an attempt to block legislation from being voted on in Congress or in a state legislature. In the 1800s, Filibusters were armed groups of United States citizens organized to try to take over a region or an entire foreign country. The term comes from the Spanish work filibustero, meaning pirate or freebooter. These Filibusters launched raids into the new republics of Latin America hoping to place the lands within them under the control of white men. Many Filibusters also hoped to bring slavery to Latin American regions that had banned it when they became independent.
William Walker was a pro-slavery man of violence who hoped to subdue the “Brown” people of Mexico and Central America and establish governments in the regions that would only transact official business in English, vest all power in white rulers, and reestablish slavery. His violent attempts to conquer vast territories received widespread popular support in the American South and Southwest during the 1850s. His actions only came to an end when he was captured by the British military and executed by the Honduran government a month before Lincoln’s 1860 election to the presidency.
Walker’s Filibusters were not one-off adventures, they were part of a wider war waged by the slave-owning South against Latin America and they should be studied as an antecedent to the Civil War.
When I was in Central America during the 1980s, everyone I met knew who William Walker was and what he had done nearly century and a half earlier. When I lectured back in the United States, almost no one had even heard of him. The same Americans wondered why we were so mistrusted in Latin America.
The Wondery series is three episodes long. It is well produced, but the player is a bit difficult to understand at first. Below are three players, each with one episode on Walker. Click the orange arrow to play. Ignore the drop down menus below the orange play arrow. I tried to use other services like iTunes but found that they were even more problematic!
Episode 1 gives William Walkers background in the American South and his move West as a young man seeking to make his fortune. By the 1850s, Walker was ready to make war on Mexico.
Episode 2 sees Walker tried for making war on Mexico but acquitted by an all-white American jury unwilling to enforce the law against an American willing to steal land from Latinos. It also follows him to Nicaragua where he declares himself president and establishes a white supremacist regime that he hopes to ally with the slave-holding South.
Episode 3 sees Walker trying to establish an Anglo-led regime on the coast of Honduras in 1860. Fortunately, he was captured and executed just three months before the Confederacy was created or he might have become the Southernmost part of a vast slave-owning empire.
Bizarrely, the U.S. ambassador to El Salvador when the United States was intervening in Central America in the 1980s was William Walker.
Note: Feature illustration shows execution of William Walker.
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