Guns Across the Caribbean

WANTED--Ten or fifteen young men to go a short distance out of the city. Single men preferred, Apply at 347 Broadway, corner of Leonard Street, between the hours of ten and four, Passage paid.

Back in the 1850s, this ad, appearing in James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald, meant not only high adventure for the men who answered it. It also meant that famed William Walker, the first & foremost of U.S. soldiers of fortune in Latin America,* was on the march.

No such ads appeared last week. But there were enough stories of Caribbean filibustering in the air to make it seem that the ghosts of Walker and his freebooters were stalking eastern and southern U.S. ports again.

Some told how in waterfront cafes in New Orleans and Miami, in hotel rooms in Manhattan and Mexico, political exiles were plotting the overthrow of half a dozen governments. The purported plots crossed ideological lines; they were against rightist regimes in Nicaragua, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, against leftist governments in Cuba, Guatemala, Venezuela. At hand in the U.S. were stacks of surplus guns, and plenty of adventurers, unemployed fighter pilots, aerial gunners and combat infantrymen who would fight at the drop of a dollar.

Most fantastic of the week's stories concerned Costa Rica, the brave little Central American democracy whose teachers outnumber its soldiers. A shadowy Costa Rican politician known only as El Viejo (the Old One) was said to have assembled 1,000 men among the volcanoes of El Salvador, and equipped his force with rifles, machine guns, light field pieces, two light bombers.

Arms & the Men. There were other tales. Awaiting trial in Baltimore sat one Karl John Eisenhardt and two ex-G.I.s caught last month with 21 machine guns outside Baltimore. Venezuela's Development Minister Perez Alfonso carefully voiced his opinion that the group was fixing to run guns into Venezuela for a revolution to be staged by the political outs. Eisenhardt had served the U.S. Board of Economic Warfare in Caracas back in Lopez Contreras' day.

In New Orleans, another group was in trouble for gun-collecting if not for gunrunning. Two men named William Marsalis and George Rappleyea had a hole-in-the-wall office in New Orleans, a houseful of guns in Gulfport, Miss., plus two landing ships, four P-38s and four tanks. They insisted that they were interested only in opening up the mahogany wilderness of British Honduras.

The FBI had watched it all, said nothing. The State Department likewise kept mum.

*In 1855 William Walker joined a revolutionary leader in Nicaragua with a band of adventurers, seized the capital, had himself inaugurated President. Two years later he was overthrown in a counterrevolution, eventually lost his life in attempting to regain power.

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