Thursday, February 13, 2020

Churchill and Orwell



At the end of Thomas E. Ricks' Churchill and Orwell: the Fight for Freedom (www.amzn.com/0143110888) he delivers a startlingly Orwellian conclusion: "In most places and most of the time, liberty is not the product of military action."  Ricks continues to expand his point, "Rather, it is something alive that grows or diminishes every day, in how we think and communicate, how we treat each other in our public discourse, in what we value and reward as a society, and how we do that."



But the lives of Churchill and Orwell are a shining refutation of Ricks' point.   Both men believed in the sanctity of the human individual.  Both were were men of letters who committed themselves to battle on behalf of their convictions.  Both men were heroes in the 20th Century's struggle against totalitarianism.  Both men put their very lives on the line in defense of human liberty.  Orwell volunteered to serve with the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War.  His Homage to Catalonia (www.amzn.com/1618952730) is a classic work on the Spanish Civil War.  In 1937 Orwell was shot through the neck and nearly killed by a fascist bullet.  He writes, "I took it for granted that I was done for.  I had never heard of a man or animal getting a bullet through the middle of the neck and surviving it."  Fortunately for world literature, he did survive his grievous wound and went on to write Animal Farm and 1984.  After the outbreak of WW2 Orwell, despite his poor health, joined the Home Guard.

Winston Churchill Gravesite
Bladon, UK
Winston Churchill, born in Blenheim Palace, grew up playing with toy soldiers.  He attended Sandhurst and became a cavalry officer much to the annoyance of his father Randolph Churchill who resented the fact that Winston did not test well enough to qualify for the less expensive infantry.  In 1898 he rushed off to Cuba to cover the Spanish-American War.  Later that same year he joined the 21st Lancers and fought at the Battle of Omdurman in the Sudan.  He participated in campaigns with the British Army in India and Africa.  In 1899 he was captured by the Boers in South Africa after the armored train that he was traveling on was ambushed.  He managed to escape from captivity and wrote about his many youthful adventures in My Early Life (www.amzn.com/0684823454).  This daring escape led directly to his first successful run as an MP for Oldham in 1900 and launched the political career that eventually raised him to the premiership in 1940.  Winston Churchill was truly a Hero of the British Empire.


In 1911 Churchill became first lord of the admiralty in charge of the Royal Navy.  In World War I, after his humiliation in advocating or the disastrous Gallipoli campaign, Churchill would serve as a lieutenant colonel with the Royal Scottish Fusiliers in the trenches on the Western front.  Imagine if Donald Rumsfeld had been busted down to serve as a battalion commander in Fallujah after resigning as Secretary of Defense following his disastrous advocacy for the 2003 Invasion of Iraq.  But Churchill served in the muck and mire of brutal trench warfare.

Ricks makes the point that although Orwell and Churchill sprang from radically different backgrounds and held very different political opinions they had much in common.  Churchill, the son of Lord Randolph, had an aristocratic background while Eric Blair (Later Orwell) was a the son of an officer in the Anglo-Indian Army.  Blair was a scholarship student at Eton.  While most of his peers graduated to Oxbridge Universities, Blair instead went to Burma where he served as a policeman.  In Burma he was exposed to the seamier side of the British Empire.  Blair experienced the seamy side of urban life writing about it masterfully in his 1933 book Down and Out in Paris and London (www.amzn.com/015626224X).

Note the African Sailor at Left
Nelson's Column, Trafalgar Square, London 

The British Empire was not without its flaws.  It fought many wars, some of them unnecessary (the Opium Wars in China for example).  It exploited lands (Ireland, India, etc.) and people under its sway.  It was far from perfect.  But it also did do a tremendous service to humanity.  The famous explorer Livingstone called slavery the "open sore of the world."  In 1807, two years after Nelson's triumph at Trafalgar, the British parliament abolished the slave trade throughout the British Empire.  This single act "redeemed it in the eyes of the Africans, and vilified it in the eyes of the Boers." (Source: Hero of Empire: Millard, Candice, p 240, Anchor books, 2016, www.amzn.com/0307948781).  Had the Royal Navy not controlled the seas it could never, of course, been capable of enforcing the will of parliament.  It was precisely Nelson's decisive victory over the Franco-Spanish fleet at Trafalgar that laid the groundwork for the passage of the Slave Trade Act of 1807.  Nelson Mandela was named in honor of Horatio Nelson.

Battle of Britain statue
"The Few" 
Moreover, the British Empire, in its final days lent all its strength to the destruction of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.  In the death agonies of the Empire it truly can be said to have lived "its finest hour" as Churchill so eloquently put it.  In the dark days of 1940 Britain and her Commonwealth Empire stood alone against the Nazi Blitzkrieg that engulfed continental Europe. It was Winston Churchill who provided the essential spark of leadership saying, "I was not the lion, but it fell to me to give the lion's roar."  The British Empire, for all its many flaws, helped to liberate the Nazi death camps and to end the horrors of the Burma Railway in 1945.

We Americans are acutely conscious of the failings of the British Empire.  We had our doubts about George III back in 1776.  My favorite complaint from those listed in our Declaration of Independence is, "For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us."  Bit like a rude AirBnB guest that does not pay!  On the battlefields of Saratoga and Yorktown we Americans learned that liberty is indeed the product of military action.  We taught old Georgie a thing or two...

Abe knew that Liberty could only be purchased with blood
And in the US Civil War, America's costliest war, we paid a blood sacrifice to learn that liberty could only be purchased with blood and sacrifice.  We Americans had a few failings of our own with the peculiar institution of slavery being chief among them.  Slavery was our national birth defect present at our glorious founding.  We had to painfully relearn the lesson that liberty is the product of military action at places like Shiloh, Gettysburg, and Antietam.

Animal Farm reminds us of the Nazi-Soviet Pact
that guaranteed the start of WW2

Following WW2 with the start of the Cold War, Winston Churchill as a private citizen warned that "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent."  Meanwhile Orwell's Animal Farm (www.amzn.com/0451526341) and 1984 (www.amzn.com/0451524934) were read avidly by Americans who had fought Hitler's brand of totalitarianism and now faced the challenges of Stalinist Russia, Mao's China  and the Cold War.  "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."  On one side of the Iron Curtain, egalitarianism became a meaningless shibboleth used to club the heads of those who disagreed or stood in the way of the creation of a Socialist Utopia -- in Budapest in 1956, Prague in 1968, in Cambodia's Killing Fields and so on.  Orwell would dub his hero in 1984 Winston Smith -- a tribute to Churchill.

Orwell was a man of the working class Left.  Churchill was an aristocrat with Right-leaning sympathies.  Yet both were passionate advocates for individual liberty who put their very lives at risk in its defense.  Both men committed their lives to the proposition that liberty must be paid for and upheld with blood.  Both men opposed totalitarians of the Left and Right equally.  Hitler and Stalin were two sides of the same totalitarian coin that trampled on individual liberty, slaughtered millions and glorified war for war's sake.


Orwell's grim dystopian vision of endless wars and the surveillance society in 1984 continues to be relevant long after the end of the Cold War.  Apple Computer famously expressed its own non-conformist commercial vision through an Orwellian lexicon in a Super Bowl commercial.

Churchill and Orwell
took up arms for the sake of Liberty

Churchill and Orwell's commitment to fighting for the sake of liberty is not merely an Anglo-American perspective.  How many Algerians today would assert that the liberty purchased from France was ''not the product of military action"?  How many Vietnamese would agree with Ricks' position with regard to the history of their own homeland?

In 1984 Big Brother tells us that, "War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength."  Yet in the 21st century Thomas Ricks opines that liberty can be won with kind words and without military action...?  With apologies to Aldous Huxley, it seems to me that Ricks would like his readers to slip on a Soma mask and to forget the meaning of our blood stained history.



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Tuesday, February 11, 2020

Invading Panama!

Commander K.
Invades Panama
Welcome to the Jungle!
In America Invades (www.americainvades.com) English historian Stuart Laycock and I documented American Fighting in Panama from Marines, to Canal building to...Watermelons.  Here is the Panama chapter...

"John Quincy Adams, our sixth president, recognized the strategic importance of Panama in the 1820s and even helped to set up an isthmian canal company. Though, obviously, a lot of time was yet to pass and a lot of Frenchmen were going to be disappointed before a Panama Canal was finally built.
John Quincy Adams
However, even without a canal, people were using the isthmus to travel between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. With the finding of gold in California, for instance, many Americans crossed overland through Panama on their way to and from the gold fields (For more detail on William Walker's invasion of Central America see...https://americanconservativeinlondon.blogspot.com/2020/02/costa-rica-invaded.html).

And, as an indication of our major interest in the strategic isthmus, in 1846, we signed with Colombia, which was then the national power in Panama, the Mallarino-Bidlack Treaty. We got free travel for our citizens across the isthmus, and in return, we guaranteed the neutrality of the area and Colombian sovereignty over it. Our strategic interest in the isthmus, and the deeply divided nature of politics in Panama for much of the nineteenth century were going to keep our military very busy over the coming decades.


Worth Fighting For?

 Almost as soon as the ink on the treaty was dry, in 1847, New York businessmen started the Panama Railroad Company. The Panama Railway, financed by Americans, was opened in 1855.
And already, by 1856, our troops were being deployed in Panama. In that year, the Watermelon War broke out, though it was really more of a Watermelon Riot, which was triggered by an intoxicated American railroad traveler who took a slice of watermelon from a Panamanian fruit merchant and refused payment. Fifteen Americans were killed in Panama City, and we sent our troops in to restore order and protect American citizens.

In 1860, the USS Saint Mary’s, a twenty-two-gun sloop of war, sent sailors and marines ashore in order to protect the Panama Railway from insurgents.

Our troops were deployed again in 1865, this time to protect Americans during a revolution.

In 1873, more of the same, really, as local groups clashed and American troops moved in to protect Americans.

And all the while, people had been thinking about the possibility of a canal between the Atlantic and the Pacific. After the US Civil War, the United States tried twice (1867 and 1884) to build a canal through Nicaragua.

Ferdinand de Lesseps
In 1880, Frenchman Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had tackled the Suez Canal, began building a Panama canal. By 1889, however, the venture was out of money, and construction stopped with the canal incomplete (over 20,000 workers had been killed by malaria and yellow fever).
Pedro Prestan
Meanwhile, in 1885, Pedro Prestan led a revolt in Panama, which formed part of Columbia at the time. The rebels burned the American consulate in Colon and destroyed considerable property. A force of six USN warships and the full East Coast complement of US marines (about two thousand) were dispatched to Panama where the Columbians requested their intervention against the rebels. A derby-wearing Prestan was hanged in front of a large crowd.
Panama Canal

In 1901, we sent in troops once again to keep transport owing and protect American property, and it was about now that America also began a serious push to build a Panama canal. Soon after, the US government began to think it would be easier to build such a canal through an independent Panama, rather than continuing to deal with the Colombian government.

Teddy Roosevelt (3rd from left)
Mount Rushmore, South Dakota
Consequently, in 1903 when Panama revolted against Columbia, this time the United States, led by Teddy Roosevelt, sided with the Panamanian rebels. TR dispatched two USN ships (Nashville and Dixie) in support of the rebels. A battalion of marines commanded by Major John Lejeune landed at Colon. A bribe of eight thousand dollars was paid to the Colombian commander to hasten his exit from Panama. TR would later (in 1911) claim, “I took the Canal Zone.” Surely it was Teddy Roosevelt who provided the inspiration for the palindrome, “a man, a plan, a canal, Panama.” The US government recognized the new Panamanian nation and negotiated a treaty to control the Canal Zone. The treaty gave the United States extensive rights in the Canal Zone that extended about five miles on either side of the canal and some rights in Panama outside the Canal Zone and was to be a source of some tension between Panama and the United States in the years ahead.


Major John Lejeune
USMC
And the years ahead were also to see more deployments of US troops.

For instance, in 1918, US marines were sent to Chiriqui Province to quell local disturbances.

In 1925, US troops were used, at the request of the Panamanian government, to disperse a mob of rent rioters.

 The outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 and rising tensions around the world only increased the strategic importance of the canal. Matters were complicated by the fact that, for the early part of the war, Panama was ruled by the fascist-leaning Arias. However, he was handily toppled in October 1941, before Pearl Harbor. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, fears of subversion or a Japanese naval strike intensified, and indeed, both Germans and Japanese developed plans to attack the canal. In response, we organized a deal with the Panamanian government to allow us to occupy additional sites to protect the canal.

In 1977, the Torrijos-Carter Treaty was signed that provided for the return of the Panama Canal Zone to Panama in 1999...
George H. W. Bush
Houston Airport
In 1983, Manuel Noriega, a cocaine kingpin, became the president of Panama. He had also been the CIA’s man in Panama from the 1960s until 1988 when he was indicted in Florida. President Reagan and George H. W. Bush had tried to dislodge him by covert means and failed. It would take an invasion to remove this former American friend from power in Panama.

On December 16, 1989, an off-duty US marine was shot and killed at a Panamanian Defence Forces roadblock. A line had been crossed.



In December 1989, only a month after the Berlin Wall fell, President George H. W. Bush launched Operation Just Cause to drive Manuel Noriega from power. A force of twenty-five thousand troops overwhelmed the Noriega’s Panamanian Defence Force. Twenty-three Americans were killed in the fighting. The Panamanian strongman sought refuge in the Vatican embassy where US soldiers blasted him with rock ’n’ roll hits, such as “The End” by the Doors, “Welcome to the Jungle” by Guns ’n’ Roses, and “All I Want Is You” by U-2, among others. Noriega was extradited to Miami where he was convicted of drug trafficking, racketeering, and money laundering.

Commander K. at Panama Canal
In more recent years, we have maintained assorted military links with Panama, for instance, taking part in joint exercises. US warships still travel through the Panama Canal. The Missouri National Guard is partnered with Panama."  (Source: Panama, chapter of America Invades,  www.americainvades.com)



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Monday, February 10, 2020

Costa Rica Invaded!

Commander K.
National Museum of Costa Rica
San Jose Costa Rica

The central thesis of our 2017 book, America Invaded (www.americainvaded.com), was that multiple waves of invasions have hit American soil since the first arrival of the Europeans right to the present day.  English historian Stuart Laycock and I tried to document how this fighting -- from multiple conflicts with indigenous people to the 9/11 terrorist attacks -- has shaped the USA in ways large and small, molding it into the nation it is today.



What is true about the USA is equally true for every other country in the world as well.

Figueres smashing the Army Barracks
December 1, 1948
 San Jose, Costa Rica
Let's take Costa Rica for example.  This is a nation that prides itself upon its pacifism.  Its constitution bans the formation of a national army which was abolished in 1948 following a brutal civil war.  José Figueres Ferrer, the President of Costa Rica famously took a hammer to the military barracks in San Jose to smash the military establishment in his country.  So Costa Rica has no army with which to invade any of its neighbors.  But its territorial integrity has been largely protected since 1948 thanks to international law and an informal alliance with the USA.  But this does NOT mean that Costa Rica has never been invaded.  Far from it.  In fact waves of invasions have crashed onto the shores of Costa Rica molding and shaping it into the nation it is today.

Pre-Columbian Warrior
Pre-Columbian Gold Museum
The natural biodiversity of Costa Rica was "Invaded" very roughly 15,000 years ago by humans migrating from Asia across the Bering sea.  The jaguars and tapirs of Central America were, no doubt, disturbed and hunted by the new arrivals.  The archaeological record is clear that plenty of fighting must have taken place among the clans or tribes in what is today Costa Rica.  This area was not part of a larger and more well know Pre-Columbian empires such as the Aztecs, Incas or Mayans.  Smaller tribes or clans such as the Matambú, Bribri and Calecar dominated in the area we now know as Costa Rica.  Pre-Columbian warriors wore a dazzling array of golden armor into battle examples of which may be found today at the Pre-Columbian Gold Museum in San Jose.



The Spanish invasion of Costa Rica would be led by an Italian or, more accurately, a Genoese captain.  Our 2015 book Italy Invades: How Italians Conquered the World (www.italyinvades.com) included a short chapter that documents the surprising Italian "Invasions" of and influence on Costa Rica...
Columbus' 3 ships Nina, Pinta, Santa Maria
National Museum of Costa Rica
"On September 18, 1502, Genoese Christopher Columbus turned up, to be followed by other Italians as the Spanish imposed colonial control on the area.

Francisco Morazán

One person of Italian descent who played a huge role in the wars and politics of Central America in the early nineteenth century was Francisco Morazán, whose grandfather had been Corsican. Morazán was, from 1830–1839, president of the Federal Republic of Central America. Having fled into exile after defeat in battle in 1840, in 1842 he invaded Costa Rica in an attempt to take over the government there. In April of that year, he landed with about five hundred men and five ships at Caldera in Costa Rica. After negotiating with the military forces opposing him, he entered San José and took power. But Morazán did not have long ahead of him in power in Costa Rica. In September, a rebellion broke out. After bitter fighting, Morazán was eventually captured and put in front of a firing squad. Allegedly, he gave the order to shoot.

Italians were among the nationalities that immigrated to Costa Rica in the nineteenth century. Giovanni Leggero, who had taken part in the Defense of the Roman Republic in 1848, moved to Costa Rica and ended up losing an arm in fighting against William Walker’s forces.

Still, as the Second World War erupted, tensions rose between Italy and Costa Rica. In April 1941, for instance, Italian and German sailors in a Costa Rican harbor learned that the Costa Rican government was about to seize their ships, and the ships were set on fire instead.

And after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Costa Rica declared war on Germany and Italy on December 8—two days before the Unites States.

San Vito de Java
Costa Rica
The war did not end close contact between Italy and Costa Rica. For instance, Vito Giulio Cesar and Ugo Sansonetti, sons of an Italian admiral, established a community of Italians known as San Vito de Java in the south of the country."  (Source: www.italyinvades.com).

Spanish boot on the Indigenous people of Costa Rica
National Museum of Costa Rica

Christopher Columbus may have led Europeans into Costa Rica but it was the Spanish who followed.  With a vengeance.  Diseases brought by the Conquistadors decimated the Indigenous people in what is now Costa Rica.  They also brought the Roman Catholic faith to the region.

Costa Rica was invaded by the Catholic Church

In 1821 Costa Rica, along with Mexico, declared its independence from Spain.  Costa Rica was a land of coffee and banana plantations.  Juan Mora Fernández became the first Costa Rican head of state in 1825.
Banana Republic?
Pre-Columbian Gold Museum
San Jose, Costa Rica
The US government has never really invaded Costa Rica but some Americans, led by William Walker of Tennessee, did.



There is a surprising connection to the recent Super Bowl and this astonishing American Invasion of Costa Rica.  Super Bowl LIV featured the San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs.  The 49ers' name is derived from the fact that gold was discovered in California's Sacramento Valley in 1849 sparking a massive gold rush.  At this time there was no transcontinental railway linking the east and west coast of the Untied States and there was no Panama Canal.  Transit overland across the continent was long and hazardous.  The fastest and safest way to journey from New York to San Francisco was to purchase a ticket on a paddle wheel steamer to Central America, cross the isthmus of  Panama or Nicaragua overland and take another steamer up the west coast to San Francisco.



William Walker was a doctor, lawyer, journalist and adventurer from Nashville Tennessee.  Walker made his way to San Francisco but he did not begin panning for gold.  Instead he organized an expedition of America Filibusters (armed adventurers) and proceeded to invaded Nicaragua.  Walker was an entrepreneur who recognized the enormous value of the transit route from the Caribbean to the Pacific.  Anyone who controlled Nicaragua could charge a toll for passage between the oceans and amass a fortune off of the would be gold miners.

"On October 11, 1856, he and his supporters arrived in the paddlewheel steamer La Virgen at Granada, Nicaragua’s capital. The next day, his forces captured the town and soon after established their own republic of Nicaragua. In June of 1856, Walker was elected president of Nicaragua, receiving over 68 percent of the vote in a four-way race. His government was recognized by President Franklin Pierce and received support from US ambassador John Wheeler. His supporters referred to him as the “grey-eyed man of destiny.”" (Source: www.americainvades.com)

But Walker made one fatal mistake.  He established his transit monopoly across Nicaragua to facilitate travel from east to west but he refused to do business with Cornelius Vanderbilt. The New York railway tycoon was immensely rich and financed the destruction of Walker.  Vanderbilt subsidized the armies from Costa Rica and other countries neighboring Nicaragua to destroy Walker's little empire.

National Monument of Costa Rica
San Jose, Costa Rica

On March 20, 1856 Walker was defeated at the Battle of Santa Rosa inside Costa Rica.  The National Monument of Costa Rica in San Jose's National Park depicts the defeat of Walker and his Filibusters by General Juan Rafael Mora (a subsequent President of Costa Rica).  Mora would subsequently become President of Costa Rica.

In 1948 a Civil War erupted in Costa Rica claiming thousands of lives.  Ultimately, this led to the abolition of the National Army by José Figueres Ferrer.

National Stadium of Costa Rica
The most recent "Invasion" of Costa Rica seems to by the Chinese flexing their soft (economic) power.  The Chinese provided around $100 million of the construction of the National Stadium of Costa Rica in 2011 -- by many accounts the best in Central America.  The inaugural match played in this stadium in march 2011 featured a team from Costa Rican and the Chinese national team and ended in a politically correct 2 to 2 tie.  Today the stadium is festooned with banners promoting Huawei -- the Chinese cell phone company.  Around the same time San Jose's Student Avenue was renamed and converted into a six block Chinatown.

Chinatown San Jose

Soft Power invasions, much like those hard invasions of past, will continue to shape and mold modern Costa Rica.  Xi must be obeyed in Central America and around the world (https://americanconservativeinlondon.blogspot.com/2019/09/xi-who-must-be-obeyed.html)!



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Thursday, February 6, 2020

Invading Costa Rica


Commander K. "Invades" Costa Rica
Parque Nacional Braulio Carrillo

Judging by the horrendous lines I encountered in the immigration lines at San Jose airport, it has become very popular for American tourists and many others to "Invade" Costa Rica.  And no wonder.  It is easy to see what draws tourists to Costa Rica.  This small country has immense natural beauty that includes two coastlines with white sand beaches, volcanic mountains, lush jungles and a pleasant tropical climate.  The locally grown coffee is delicious.  The bananas are cheap (around 20 cents a piece).  The locals, who call themselves Ticos (Ticas female), are very friendly and welcoming.

Banana Republic
National Museum of Costa Rica

Ticos are justifiably proud of their nation's history.  In 1948, following a brutal civil war (more later) they disbanded their national army and constitutionally outlawed its re-establishment.  Since that time the nation has been free of civil wars and and has not suffered the brutal Cold War violence that befell neighbors such as Nicaragua.  In that time the Costa Rican economy has soared and life expectancy has risen dramatically.  While Costa Rica still grows bananas and coffee, it is now a diverse service based economy led by tourism.  What Costa Rica saves on defense spending has been put to good use on education; literacy rates have soared to around 98% as of 2015.  An army of teachers were hired to replace the national army that was abolished.

San Jose Police
Giving Free Pony Rides!

Violence consumed much of Central America during the Cold War in neighboring nations such as Nicaragua and Honduras.  An informal alliance with the USA, however, prevented incursions from neighboring states allowing Costa Rica to be disarmed except for its police force.  On my walks through a big park in San Jose I spied the friendly local police giving pony rides to children!

Christopher Columbus Plaque
San Jose, Costa Rica

In 1502 the Genoese explorer Christopher Columbus cruised off the Caribbean shore of what is now Costa Rica.  Columbus believed that this land would be rich in gold, hence the name "Costa Rica" meaning "Rich Coast".   He was not entirely correct about the plentiful gold but the Spanish came anyway bringing with them diseases that decimated the indigenous populations.




In 2014 Stuart Laycock and I published America Invades which examines American military involvement in almost every country on earth (www.americainvades.com).  Costa Rica, lacking an army, has not invaded her neighbors but fighting has taken place here and American military involvement with this nation dates back to the 19th century.  In recent years it is an "army" of American retirees that have launched a friendly "invasion" of Costa Rica drawn in by the climate, cheap real estate, good health care and a low cost of living.

This is what we had to say in the Cost Rica chapter of America Invades...


Costa Rica Map
National Museum of Costa Rica

"Ah, Costa Rica, sandwiched between Panama to its south and Nicaragua to the north. “Costa Rica” means “Rich Coast.”

Many American observers in the nineteenth century had high hopes for Costa Rica considering it to be “the New England of Central America.” Some believed that Costa Rica was free from the contagion of revolutionary sentiment that afflicted much of Central America.

War Against the Filibusters
Guerra Contra Los Filibusteros
National Museum of Costa Rica

Costa Rica played a leading role in the alliance of Central American nations against William Walker’s  filibuster movement in Nicaragua. It was Costa Rica’s General Joaquin Mora, the brother of President Mora, who led his allied troops against the Yankees in 1856. Many of the Costa Rican officers were the European-educated sons of coffee barons and excellent horsemen, and their raw conscripted troops wore white trousers and shirts with straw hats circled with red bands.

President Moro
San Jose, Costa Rica

General Walker’s force of mostly American filibusters invaded Costa Rica from Nicaragua. On March 20, 1856, the Battle of Santa Rosa was fought, which resulted in the deaths of nineteen Costa Ricans and fifty-nine of Walker’s men. The filibusters had been driven from the field by a peasant army.
William Walker Plaque
Nashville, Tennessee

After Walker’s subsequent defeat in Nicaragua, USN ships, such as the Decatur and St. Mary’s, helped to evacuate Walker filibusters from Costa Rica. Lieutenant David McCorkle was assigned the duty of marching three hundred filibusters from Nicaragua to Punta Arenas in Costa Rica.
The USS Decatur celebrated July 4, 1857, at Punta Arenas where they  red a salute, which was answered by a Chilean warship, and a marine from the Decatur who had drunk too much ended up being jailed for breaking down a door.

In 1921, as tensions rose between Panama and Costa Rica over a border dispute, we sent ships to both sides of the isthmus to calm things down.

Costa Rica joined the allies along with other Central American nations on December 8, 1941, and German business interests were seized by the government. Costa Rica wasn’t exactly a major focus of our military interest during the war, but at one stage, the USAAF (US Army Air Force) considered building an airbase on Cocos Island to protect the Panama Canal. In the end, it was never built. We did put early warning radar on the island, though.

José Figueres
National Museum of Costa Rica
In 1948, Costa Rica experienced a month-long civil war, which claimed about two thousand lives. We did not intervene directly in the conflict, but we did have a clear preference in the outcome. The existing Picado regime was supported by the Popular Vanguard Party—a Communist party. The Truman administration, concerned about the spread of Communism in North America, mobilized our forces in the neighboring Panama zone and sought to cut off supplies to the Picado regime.
José Figueres eventually became the victorious rebel leader who toppled Picado in Costa Rica. Figueres had initial CIA support for his activities. He served three times as president of Costa Rica between 1948 and 1974. In 1959, however, Figueres would send arms to Fidel Castro in Cuba. And some have alleged CIA operations against him.

Since 1949, Costa Rica’s constitution has banned a standing army. In the 1980s, the Contras had some presence in Costa Rica.

In 2010, a decision by Costa Rica to allow US military access to Costa Rica caused some local controversy, and in recent years, the US has been heavily involved with helping Costa Rica fight illegal narcotics smuggling.

We’ve also been involved in a number of emergency relief operations there. For instance, in 1968, the USAF’s southern command helped evacuate people put at risk by Mount Arenal’s eruption and  ew in emergency supplies to help those suffering. Again in 1970 and 1978, the US Air Force helped when  floods hit.

The New Mexico National Guard is partnered with Costa Rica."

Commander K says plan your own peaceful "invasion" of Costa Rica today!

For much more on American Invasions around the rest of the world see America Invades (www.americainvades.com).

Museos Banco Central de Costa Rica

Tourist Notes: The National Museum of Costa Rica is an excellent place to learn more about the history of this beautiful country (http://www.museocostarica.go.cr/en_en/historia-del-museo/historia-del-museo.html?Itemid=56).  There is also a splendid Gold Museum in San Jose run by the central bank (https://museosdelbancocentral.org/en/exhibitions/current-exhibitions/pre-columbian-gold-museum/).  Don't forget to take in some of Costa Rica's greatest treasures which can be found in her many national parks!

Commander K and friends at
Parque Nacional Braulio Carrillo



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