It was great to have the exceptional film Queimada flagged up for essential viewing in Kino Eye (Solidarity 611), but the article missed relating the film’s positive ending following on the execution of the revolutionary leader Jose Dolores.
As the cynical British agent William Walker makes his exit from the island, he encounters a black dockworker who reminds him of his first meeting with Dolores. This time Walker gets his come-uppance when the docker stabs him to death. The end “message” of the film is that the people have learnt a valuable lesson through struggle and their fight goes on.
The screenwriters for the film based their villainous character in part on the real life William Walker, a notorious filibuster who invaded parts of Central America in the 1850s. Walker operated in the interest of the plantocracy of the southern USA who dreamt of building a slave owning empire in the region as an economic counterweight to the increasing industrial might of the Northern US states.
Walker organised several military interventions into Mexico and Central America with the aim of reintroducing slavery there, and even managed to usurp the Presidency of Nicaragua for eleven months in 1856. The Central American states combined against him, and he eventually faced a firing squad in Honduras in 1860. Thus we have a positive ending to the dastardly William Walker in real life as well as fiction.
Bas Hardy, Liverpool
