1921 & Post War Events
October 1921 - Governors Island, New York
American deserter-turned-revolutionary propagandist Linn Gale was convicted of multiple crimes including publishing articles “designed to interfere with the conduct of the [world] war.” He fled to Mexico in 1917, launched a magazine as a platform for his radical ideas and bitterness against the US government, and became chief propagandist for a budding communist organization in Mexico City, Tampico, and Monterey. In April 1920, these communists petitioned President Carranza to invite the Soviet Union’s Martens Bureau to Mexico after it was deported from New York City. Gale was preparing to go to Moscow for the Third International when Carranza’s assassination terminated his refuge in Mexico. The new Mexican government facilitated Gale’s return to the Texas in April 1921, signaling the end of a five-year intelligence war between the US and Mexico. |
September 24, 1924 - Guatemala City
Former president and dictator Manuel Estrada Cabrera succumbed to “diabetes and Bright’s disease.” He died a broken man, betrayed by the diplomatic corps that promised him protection when he resigned, abandoned by the politicos that he made rich, robbed of the wealth he amassed during his dictatorship, and shattered by the suicide of his 14 year old daughter (she killed herself after being raped by a judge). New government ministers had personally tortured the old man for months for details about presumed caches of buried treasure. |
The government shipped the old dictator’s cadaver on a special train to his native city of Quetzaltenango, where the jefe politico had orders to take the remains straight to the cemetery upon arrival and bury them discreetly. However, word spread quickly and Estrada Cabrera’s hometown popularity was so enormous that President Orellana was pressured to let Don Manuel lie in state at the Municipal Hall overnight. When the coffin of el Presidente was taken to the grave the following day, 25,000 people joined the procession in the pouring rain. His legacy lived on in Miguel Angel Asturias’ 1946 masterpiece about dictatorship, El Señor Presidente.
September 1924 - Guatemala City
Guatemala revives a propaganda campaign clamoring for the territory of Belize--British Honduras. The US military attaché in Guatemala City submitted an editorial, "The Cession of Belize to Guatemala," from the newspaper Excelsior, with this analysis: " Considerable newspaper publicity has been given to a statement reported to have been made by Mr. [Frederick J.] Lisman, the prominent New York banker, while in Paris [during the post-war peace conference], to the effect that it was proposed that, in payment of her war debt, Great Britain was to turn over British Honduras to the United States, and that the United States, in turn, would turn over the territory to Guatemala, in return for the right of constructing certain naval bases."
Guatemala revives a propaganda campaign clamoring for the territory of Belize--British Honduras. The US military attaché in Guatemala City submitted an editorial, "The Cession of Belize to Guatemala," from the newspaper Excelsior, with this analysis: " Considerable newspaper publicity has been given to a statement reported to have been made by Mr. [Frederick J.] Lisman, the prominent New York banker, while in Paris [during the post-war peace conference], to the effect that it was proposed that, in payment of her war debt, Great Britain was to turn over British Honduras to the United States, and that the United States, in turn, would turn over the territory to Guatemala, in return for the right of constructing certain naval bases."
Frederick J. Lisman, a New York investment banker with connections in Central America, claimed that discussions had taken place at the Paris peace conference in 1919 in which Great Britain had offered up Belize as a partial payment to the US of her tremendous war debts. In the end, Belize would have ended up under the Guatemalan flag...
More to come...
Copyright 2020, Jamie Bisher.