The United States purchases the Santo Tomas colony

From 1843-1854, Guatemala had ceded in perpetuity a sliver of territory between Izabal lake and Motagua River to the Compagnie belge de colonisation for administration. However, the company ultimately went bankrupt and in 1854 the company withdrew.

What if the company had sold its administrative rights to the United States?

Interestingly, the nearby port of Livingston was actually named after an American who wrote a liberal judicial code that the judicial code of the Central American Federation was supposed to implement. This is unrelated to the thread aside from just being kind of interesting.


1280px-Carte_du_District_de_Santo-Thomas_%28Etat_de_Guatemala%29.jpg


Kolonie_Belg-Honduras_%28Santo_Tom%C3%A1s_de_Castilla%29.jpg


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santo_Tomás_de_Castilla
 
Becomes early Guantanamo navel base and it might get handed back to Guatemala post 1960s

that's the smart money.

My gut says that as Guatemala nationalism rises America works out a deal with Guatemala where they pay rent for the use of their base, Guatemala is pretty poor so I see them accepting the money, by modern day the area around the base makes money of American sailors and servicemen and the government uses the rent money on various programs of choice.
 
It might end up being a base for Southern filibusters in the mold of William Walker, trying to carve slave states out of Guatemala, Honduras, or El Salvador (or British Belize if they’re extremely brave and/or stupid).
 
Interesting knock-ons:

1) The colony would likely become a center of American Business operations in Latin America. There'd likely be more investment in Guatemalan plantations.
2) The Guatemalan Government (as well as the British and Belgian corporate owners of the Santo Tomas colony) tried to promote settlement in the northern transversal strip of Guatemala (essentially, the areas due west of the colony that was just north of the Guatemalan highlands) - primarily via immigration (Germans in particular, hence the mennonite colonies int he country today). US plantations might come to use more outside labor than local if they find that the Guatemalan government is unwilling to help them force locals into working for them.
3) American missionaries would probably end up promoting protestantism in Guatemala. The political knock-ons of this would be significant, as the catholic church's influence over the peasantry was a big part of support for Conservative governments.
4) Filibusters, as was mentioned above.

Perhaps these factors converge into being a political coalition of protestants, liberals, business interests, and immigrants in Guatemala?


After the end of slavery in the US, might it become a norm to bring in Guatemalan labor to work plantations in the US?




Also, this wouldn't be the only Latin American holding of the United States. The US negotiated a lease to build a canal through Honduras in 1849 and negotiated a temporary cession of El Tigre island in the Gulf of Fonseca from Honduras in the same year (in anticipation of a British occupation of the island).

The British were very concerned that an upped US presence in Honduras would be destabilizing to British Honduras (Belize) and the British Miskito Coast (caribbean-coastal Nicaragua and part of Honduras).


I wonder if Central America could end up dragged into the American Civil War.
 
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