The Anglo-Guatemalan Dispute

Abstract

IN the world of today the Anglo-Guatemalan dispute may seem to be a comparatively trivial matter. It is not trivial, however, to the people of the Central American colony of British Honduras; it ought not to be trivial to the Power responsible for their welfare; and it is not in the least trivial in its possible implications and consequences. Yet, as Sr. Jose Luis Mendoza has rightly observed in these pages,' few British people could say why Guatemala claims the territory of British Honduras from Great Britain, and still fewer are able to judge what substance there is to this claim. If this paper can make that task a little easier, it will have served its purpose. The dispute, however, can only be understood in its historical setting, and the story to be told is both long and complicated. It begins in the seventeenth century when an English or Scottish buccaneer settled with a few companions at the mouth of a river in a peculiarly deserted section of a deserted coast. The man's name was Wallace, called Wallis or Balis by the Spaniards. The river to which he gave his name was the Belize River, and the settlement, of which he is the semi-legendary founder, ultimately became, in 1862, the Colony of British Honduras. Of Wallace's history little is known, nor is it known whether his settlement long survived. What is certain is that later in the century the buccaneers, that international gang of privateers and pirates that infested the Caribbean, discovered the wealth to be made from the sale of logwood, a dye-wood which grew on these lonely shores and in the Bay of Campeachy; that when, towards the end of the century, the English Crown made a serious effort to suppress buccaneering, many of the buccaneers turned logwood cutters; that a settlement of these British logwood cutters on the Belize River was in existence before 1670; and that thereafter it was persistently maintained. Throughout the eighteenth century the status of these logwood cutters was one of the points at issue in the repeated conflicts and controversies between Spain and England. By the Treaty of Madrid, in 1670, Spain had acknowledged England's title to Jamaica and other de facto possessions in the West Indies or in any part of America. The English Government was apt to maintain, and the Spanish Government consistently denied, that this acknowledgment covered the Belize settlement. The logwood cutters were repeatedly attacked and sometimes driven away, and it was not, indeed, till the Treaty of Paris, in 1763, that Britain obtained from Spain a plain and public recognition of the right to cut logwood in the Bay of Honduras. The