Maybe it was named after the buccaneer Peter Wallace.

Belize — our "History of" country today. It's a legend, that the Spanish pronunciation of "Wallace" was Ballis and hence Belize. Belize. Do you know where it is? It's crammed in between Mexico and Guatamala.

In places that today look like this...



... the Mayans flourished and then they were gone. We don't really know why. You can blame the Spanish. (Why not? They deserve it.) But Mayan civilization had collapsed by the time the Spanish got there. Then the English arrived, by shipwreck, in 1638. Squabbling between the Spanish and the English went on for a long time, and there was a lot of piracy and "indiscriminate logging."