En la sombra de Morazán: A Central American AAR

[slothinator]

Oh wow, it's not often that you see a naturally occurring CSA! Central America is sure to feel the repercussions there.
I wonder how long Italy will remain split, I expect that it will either unify or splinter entirely.

 

[Zeogludon]

The First Maya War, 1871 to 1873​

Although affecting the entire Confederation, the First Maya War was first and foremost a Guatemalan conflict that took place almost entirely within that state’s territory and arose out of its specific and localized social tensions; tensions which were largely absent in the other Central American states.

Guatemala bore resemblance to the other members of the Confederation of Central America — El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua — in many aspects of its politics, society, and culture. In all the states, politics was dominated by a small landed elite, almost entirely White, who disenfranchised the vast majority of the population by way of a wealth requirement to vote as a ‘passive citizen’ and an even higher wealth requirement to stand for office as an ‘active citizen’. In the 1870s, this oligarchy was obsessed with the threat posed by a revolution of the disenfranchised, particularly a revolution on the model of the atheistic and radical socialist movements that had overthrown the governments of Paraguay and Peru. To guard against this possibility, the states of Central America became stricter in applying repressive measures and the ruling elite more willing to use violence to maintain the order of the society they dominated. The states’ ally in this struggle was the Catholic Church, which lauded the Centroamerican governments as protectors of the Church’s rights at a time anti-clerical policies were coming into effect elsewhere in the Catholic world, and whose upper ranks within the country were dominated by the second sons of Central America’s richest families. In all these aspects, Guatemala was much like its fellow states to the south and east.

Guatemala was most critically differentiated from the other Centroamerican states by its large indigenous population, most of them Mayans, and the fact that, even in the 1870s, it had yet to develop a major urban industrial base. In 1871, over 40% of Guatemala’s population was Maya and these communities were heavily concentrated in the western highlands along the border with Mexico. Outside of major cities, where Amerindians were a small minority, there was very little social intermixing between the Amerindian population and Ladino and White Guatemalans, primarily because few Ladinos or Whites lived where the majority of the Mayan population resided. Contact had only increased in the past decade due to the expansion of Ladino and White logging crews into the western highlands or northern lowlands and these interactions were mainly antagonistic and sometimes violent. The logging industry was another aspect in which Guatemala was unique. While logging yields had expanded in other states with the advent of mechanical sawmills, only in Guatemala had lumber grown into a major industry. Moreover, lumber was the only significant industry of Guatemala, which lacked the textile mills dotting El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Honduras.

At the turn of the 19th Century, all the states of Central America except for Costa Rica had had significant Amerindian populations. Over the following decades, however, the population identifying as Amerindian declined. Some of this was due to plague or violent repression by the colonial government, but the rapid decline in self-identifying Amerindians appears to be mostly related to decades of intermarriage and a change in social identity. Although census records did not exist at this time, baptismal certificates from the mid-1800s indicate that not only were the children of interracial marriages declared ‘Ladino’ rather than ‘Indio’, but also that many Centroamericans who were identified as ‘Indio’ on baptismal certificates were listed as ‘Ladino’ on marriage certificates, indicating a conscious shift toward a Ladino racial identity. This change was likely incentivized by both intermixing between Amerindian and non-Amerindian communities and the persistent anti-Amerindian racism of Centroamerican society. At any rate, the integration of Amerindians in El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua meant that, unlike in Guatemala, there was no large Amerindian population outside of the national state.

Pictured: A Ladino family in El Salvador, c. 1872. Intermarriage only became more frequent in the late 1800s as commercial links grew between Ladino and Amerindian communities, bringing them into regular social contact
​

The economic contrast between Guatemala and the other states of the Confederation was also striking. Ciudad Guatemala, alone among the major cities of Central America, lacked large factories or the settled working class to staff them. The effects of industrialization could still be felt in Guatemala, primarily through the railways that enabled Guatemalan hacendados and smallholding peasants alike to sell coffee and indigo at high prices and purchase cheap consumer goods. Industry, loosely defined as producing finished goods higher up the value chain, was lumber mills and these were exclusively in rural areas and often transient, moving along with their machinery and staff as the lumber frontier expanded.

The First Maya War broke out during this period of increased contact between Mayan communities and non-Mayan Guatemalans. The Guatemalan society that increasingly encroached on Mayan lands was White supremacist in outlook and generally considered the Mayans to be an ‘uncivilized’ people unworthy of title to their land or protection under Guatemalan law. This attitude played out repeatedly in interactions between the Guatemalan state and the Maya in the late 1860s, as logging companies were never punished for their encroachment on the land owned by Mayan villages and Mayans were the most frequent targets of the general campaign of judicial enslavement enacted in that period to address the shortage of wage labor for haciendas.

The First Maya War began in the spring of 1871 in the western highlands near the border with Mexico. The actual beginning of the conflict is unclear, as the only account of its origins comes from the leader of the Mayan rebels, Juan Antonio Zelaya, an educated Mayan who had briefly served in the Mexican army. According to Zelaya, he single-handedly started the rebellion by shooting dead a White landowner who had ordered him to shine his boots. While this could certainly have been the start of Zelaya’s campaign against the Guatemalan state, its origins and emphasis on personal honor make it suspect. In any case, the first other record of the war appears towards the end of May 1871 in a report by a lumberjack to a local official in Santa Cruz de Quiche that, “his camp had been attacked by a band of armed Mayans and that he had fled, not seeing his fellows since.” Other attacks on logging crews in the western highlands were reported around the same time.

What is clear is that in late June 1871, when a militia of several dozen men was dispatched from Santa Cruz de Quiche, they were ambushed by an army of several hundred Mayans commanded by Juan Antonio Zelaya, who disarmed them, stripped them, and sent them back to the town with a message demanding its surrender. It was at this point that Zelaya’s army came into focus as a threat to the Guatemalan government.

The alcalde of Santa Cruz de Quiche, Leonidas de la Torre, and the commander of the city’s garrison, Alfonso Alvaez, were both extremely disturbed by the report of hundreds of armed Maya in the vicinity of the city and ordered that a curfew be put into effect in the city for all Amerindians — Whites and Ladinos were exempt from this order — and patrols be carried out by militias of propertied citizens. Leonidas de la Torre also wrote to Guatemala’s President, Vicente Cerna y Cerna, requesting a contingent of soldiers and warning that the city could not hold out against a large army of Mayans amidst a generally hostile local population. Leonidas de la Torre received a response insisting that the existing garrison was sufficient for the defense of the city and emphasizing that any surrender to ‘savages’ would, “jeopardize the basis of civilized Christian rule in Guatemala.” Knowing that their forces were, in fact, greatly outmatched, de la Torre and Alvaez prepared to defend the city and its armory.

Pictured: Vicente Cerna y Cerna, a former military officer and President of Guatemala
​

The refusal of Santa Cruz de Quiche’s government to surrender presented a new problem for Zelaya. It was easy to motivate men to defend their homes and personal honor, but much harder to convince them to stage an assault on a city. After several other requests for surrender were refused, Zelaya left behind a small force to watch Santa Cruz and took most of his army into the countryside. Here, Zelaya presented himself as a the champion of Mayan communities, hearing the complaints of Mayan alcaldes about violations of land rights and abuse at the hands of officials and took it upon himself to correct these wrongs by evicting trespassers from Mayan land and subjecting local officials to humiliating punishments, ranging from public floggings to execution. After doling out these punishments, Zelaya or one of his officers would call out for volunteers from the crowd to join his army and ask the wealthiest men of the communities to donate to his war chest. This rural campaign continued for several months and was successful, so that when Juan Antonio Zelaya returned to Santa Cruz in November 1871, he did so at the head of a force of several thousand men, many of them with guns.

Zelaya’s attacks throughout rural western Guatemala did not go unnoticed, but President Cerna continued to underplay the magnitude of the problem. The government’s instructions to local officials were to be aggressive in striking out against Zelaya’s force, as if the issue was the disposition of the Guatemalan army. President Cerna did also send small reinforcements to a number of western cities, but not in sufficient numbers to challenge Juan Antonio Zelaya. Most commanders were smart enough to keep their soldiers in urban garrisons and those who were sent out on sorties were often ambushed and disarmed by much larger Zelayista forces.

On 23 November 1871, Juan Antonio Zelaya gave the leadership in Santa Cruz a final chance to surrender; an offer they refused on the basis that, “members of a civilized race cannot surrender to savage Indians.” Zelaya’s force then began their assault on the town, defeating the garrison and town militia after a little under two weeks of fighting. Following his victory, Zelaya held public trials in the town hall of Leonidas de la Torre, Alfonso Alvaez, and the local priest; acting as judge, he sentenced all three to death for exploiting the people of Guatemala. News of the fall of Santa Cruz and the execution of its local leadership was a shock to President Cerna and other members of the Guatemalan government, who finally had to come to terms with the fact Zelaya was waging a war against the Guatemalan establishment and was in the process of winning. If President Cerna wished to preserve Guatemala’s extremely unequal political and social system, he would need a different strategy.

Pictured: Juan Antonio Zelaya, the victor of the First Maya War
​

The capture of Santa Cruz gave Zelaya a significant windfall in the form of that city’s armory and treasury. Zelaya’s army now boasted an armament similar to the Guatemalan army and could afford to remain in the field. Juan Antonio Zelaya’s ambition increased with the strength of his force and, during his time in Santa Cruz, Zelaya began to think seriously about what Zelayista rule would look like. In this process, Zelaya obtained and read a number of banned books by liberal and leftwing European writers and exchanged letters with liberal intellectuals living in exile in Mexico. This period of introspection and intellectual exploration lasted for several months and bore fruit in March 1872 as the Plan de Santa Cruz, a pamphlet explaining and defending Zelaya’s vision for Guatemala. The Plan, which was distributed using Santa Cruz’s printing press and read aloud in public squares, called for the redistribution of land, freedom of the press and speech, the abolition of judicial enslavement, the end of the Catholic Church’s special rights and privileges under the law, and the direct election of all public officials — from the president to alcaldes and corregidores — by universal manhood suffrage without property requirements.

The Plan de Santa Cruz represented a challenge to the entire Guatemalan power structure, threatening to confiscate the land upon which the Guatemalan elites depended for their position, place them on an equal political standing with the peasantry, and attacked the special status of the Catholic Church. President Cerna and other Guatemalan politicians were not slow in recognizing this and responded by mobilizing the army and raising new units from the propertied classes of every city in the country. Many cities expelled their Amerindian residents or instituted pass systems to control the movement of Amerindians.

Guatemala’s representatives in the Confederation read aloud from the Plan de Santa Cruz in April 1872 and requested that soldiers from elsewhere in the Confederation be sent to Guatemala to assist in destroying Zelaya’s army. The other states’ representatives balked at this suggestion. While all were horrified at the proclamations made in the Plan de Santa Cruz, they doubted the capacity of Zelaya to pose an actual threat to the Guatemalan government. The consensus among the leaders of the other states was that Guatemala was simply trying to extort money from the other states to deal with a problem that was neither serious nor required outside help. The subject was dismissed, much as the other states repeatedly dismissed Nicaraguan complaints about the Miskitu.

Pictured: Jose Victor Zavala, General of the Guatemalan Army under both President Cerna and President Zelaya​

Having issued the Plan de Santa Cruz, Juan Antonio Zelaya and his army proceeded to march out from Santa Cruz de Quiche with the intention of capturing the country. Understanding that isolated garrisons in Maya-majority areas were relatively indefensible, President Cerna ordered them to be abandoned and the troops withdrawn to make a defense at Chimaltenango, where the bulk of the Guatemalan army was assembled under General José Víctor Zavala. The selection of the skilled General Zavala was immensely important because, unknown to all but his wife and closest associates, José Víctor Zavala was sympathetic to the plight of the Guatemalan poor and, when he received a copy of the Plan de Santa Cruz, found that he agreed with many of its points, even if he was neither a radical democrat nor anti-clerical. As the Zelayista army approached Chimaltenango in spring 1872, General Zavala began a secret correspondence with Zelaya, suggesting that he could be persuaded to abandon his defense of the city if Zelaya pledged not to engage in bloody reprisals against either the Guatemalan elite or the priesthood. Juan Antonio Zelaya, who was doubtful whether he could defeat Zavala’s army in an equal fight, agreed and the two made clandestine preparations for Zavala’s surrender. On 2 June 1872, Zavala ordered his army to surrender itself to the Zelayistas, opening the road to Ciudad Guatemala. Caught totally by surprise by the defection of their commander, the majority of the army either surrendered or was captured by the Zelayistas. True to his word, Juan Antonio Zelaya did not execute any members of Chimaltenango’s leadership, merely disarming the local militia and establishing a military government.

Pictured: A later Salvadoran painting of combat between the Guatemalan Army and the Zelayistas around Antigua Guatemala
​

At this point, panic really began to set in among the Guatemalan leadership: the defection of General Zavala was a tremendous blow, as he had commanded the bulk of the army. With Zavala’s troops disarmed or crossed over to Zelaya, only around two thousand soldiers remained for the defense of Ciudad Guatemala and its approaches plus whatever militiamen could be mustered. President Cerna, who himself had a respectable military background, understood the untenable position of the Guatemalan government and personally traveled to the Confederal Congress in Tegucigalpa in July 1872 to beg the intervention of the other states to rescue Guatemala. This personal intervention and Vicente Cerna’s explanation of the military situation gave new doubts to the assembled representatives, but many were unwilling to act without the permissions of their state senates, and the Confederal President, Mariano Montealegre y Romero, refused to issue any statement not backed by a consensus of the assembled delegates. Although Cerna returned to Ciudad Guatemala empty handed, his visit to Tegucigalpa had inspired greater debate within the Confederation. In particular, Representative José María Peralta of El Salvador believed that Zelaya constituted a real threat and attempted to convince the Salvadoran President, Ángel Guirola, of this fact.

President Guirola, a wealthy coffee planter and industrialist without any military background, was not entirely won over by José María Peralta, but he agreed to send a mission to Guatemala led by his Minister of War, Santiago González Portillo. When he returned from Guatemala in August 1872, Santiago González confirmed the dire situation that Cerna had described and warned that Ciudad Guatemala was in danger of falling to the Zelayistas. Sharing González’s assessment with the state’s congressional leaders, President Guirola ordered the mobilization of the Salvadoran army and dispatched instructions to the Salvadoran representatives in Tegucigalpa — José María Peralta and Rafael Zaldivar — to support sending soldiers to fight Zelaya.

Pictured: Angel Guirola, a coffee merchant, industrialist, banker, and President of El Salvador. A pacific man by nature, he was an early convert to the need for the Confederation to intervene in Guatemala​

Despite the conversion of the Salvadorans, the Confederal Congress still lacked the unanimity needed to approve funding a Confederal army: Guatemala’s representatives were obviously onboard, as were the Salvadorans, but the Hondurans were opposed to any intervention, as was Nicaragua’s Apolonio Marín. The Honduran President, José María Medina Castejón, essentially considered the Zelayistas to be a Guatemalan problem without impact on Honduras and therefore opposed intervention. Marín refused on the grounds that equal aid be provided to Nicaragua. The Confederal President, Mariano Montealegre, refused to call a vote without consensus on the issue and so no Confederal soldiers were sent to Guatemala.

Pictured: Jose Maria Medina, the President of Honduras and a major opponent of any form of Confederal intervention in Guatemala
​

While El Salvador mobilized and Honduras blocked any movement by the Confederal government to support Guatemala, Juan Antonio Zelaya continued his progress towards Ciudad Guatemala. The remainder of the Guatemalan army, supported by militias of propertied citizens from eastern cities, used the narrowness of the mountain valleys to their advantage and forced Zelaya to progress slowly and methodically past a series of fortifications. Zelaya’s advance also repeatedly halted due to conflicts between General Zavala and other commanders, during which no orders were issued until tempers could be abated. After capturing Antigua Guatemala in November 1872, the Zelayista army finally reached Ciudad Guatemala’s southern approaches in spring 1873 and prepared to take the city.

It was only at this point, when Ciudad Guatemala’s western and southern approaches were under attack, that it became fully clear to the rest of Central America that the Guatemalan government would fall to Zelaya. The reactions to this realization, however, differed greatly by state. In El Salvador, the bad news coming from Guatemala fed a debate about sending Salvadoran soldiers to Guatemala without the support of the other states; the proposal was ultimately rejected by the Salvador Congress, who argued that those soldiers were needed to defend life and property in El Salvador itself. In Honduras, the attack on Ciudad Guatemala forced President Medina to openly defend his isolationist and anti-confederal stance to a congress whose pro-intervention opposition, led by Senator Florencio Xatruch, was steadily growing in hostility. In Nicaragua, reports from Guatemala forced President Tomás Martínez Guerrero to agree to support invention when the Confederal Congress convened in Managua in September 1873.

Whether the change of heart in Nicaragua and increased dissent within Honduras would have allowed for an effective Confederal invention in Guatemala was never answered because on 3 June 1873, as fighting approached the city’s cathedral, Vicente Cerna, who had temporarily surrendered the presidency to take direct control of the Guatemalan army, agreed to abandon the city in exchange for allowing the remainder of his force safe passage to El Salvador. On 6 June, Juan Antonio Zelaya installed himself in the Plaza de Armas and declared himself the new president of a fully sovereign and independent Guatemala. This declaration was not, of course, recognized by any of the other Centroamerican states, who continued to acknowledge the government-in-exile operating from San Salvador. Nor was it recognized by Vicente Cerna, who vowed to reclaim Guatemala and restore the old system of rule.

 

[RustyHunter]

Zelaya and his revolt was quite the surprise! It looks like another weakness of the Confederation has been exposed, but the real question is whether they will reform into a true union or fall apart. I enjoyed how you conveyed the characters in this war, and I look forward to finding out what happens next.

 

[Zeogludon]

Zelaya and his revolt was quite the surprise! It looks like another weakness of the Confederation has been exposed, but the real question is whether they will reform into a true union or fall apart. I enjoyed how you conveyed the characters in this war, and I look forward to finding out what happens next.

Thanks, I'm glad you're enjoying it!
If anything when playing I was amazed that no one had overthrown my government more quickly. I mean, there are revolutions popping up everywhere in Latin America and here I am, a dysfunctional oligarchy lacking any basis of popular support and I manage to survive several decades. I kept waiting for overwhelming swarms of rebels to spawn, but.... nope.
The character research was really fun and I'm glad I got to learn about all these real historical figures (minus the fictional Zelaya and the fictional leaders of Santa Cruz de Quiche). Zelaya's portrait is real Guatemalan mestizo general Rafael Carrera who overthrew the White supremacist liberal government of Guatemala in the 1830s at the head of an Indio army and then dominated the country's politics and who's existance made other Centroamerican leaders seeth until his death in 1865.

 

[slothinator]

Zelaya's rebellion went much further than I expected!
I'm hoping he'll be able to do more but I'm afraid that a united confederation has the capability to crush the rebels

 

[Tommy4ever]

Congratulations @Zeogludon - you're WritAAR of the Week!

 

[MrReaper182]

Loving this AAP, it's very well written.

 

[Zeogludon]

I am glad that new people are still finding this AAR and enjoying it. I apologize for the substantial break in writing. I meant to update this AAR around once every week or every two weeks, but got a large amount over the last two months and had to place my focus elsewhere. Now that period has passed and I will continue the AAR, hopefully at the previously announced pace.

Congratulations @Zeogludon - you're WritAAR of the Week!

Thank you so much for recommending me for this award. I am deeply sorry that I didn't see it until now and failed to fulfill my responsibility to pass along the reward. I wanted to say, @Tommy4ever , this means a lot coming from you. Your interactive AARs are what got me into this community to begin with and the standard I try to reach for in my writing.

 

[Zeogludon]

The Free and Sovereign Republic of Guatemala, 1873 to 1876​

Although the first stage of the First Maya War was over and Juan Antonio Zelaya ruled victorious from Ciudad Guatemala, the situation on the ground remained unsettled. For starters, the Zelayistas did not control the entire territory of Guatemala. When Zelaya settled himself in the Plaza de Armas, the army encamped itself around Ciudad Guatemala or, for many of the peasant soldiers, returned home. Most of the lowlands along the Pacific coast and nearly all the settlements east of Ciudad Guatemala, therefore, remained under their old leadership and continued to receive and follow orders from Cerna’s government in San Salvador. These areas, and particularly eastern cities like Jalapa or Jutiapa, were overwhelmingly Ladino or White and, as such, had not joined in Zelaya’s revolt. While the Zelayista army undoubtedly had the strength to capture these cities and bring their authority up to the Salvadoran border, Juan Antonio Zelaya instead decided to remain in Ciudad Guatemala and focus on the other pressing issue facing the country: how to govern a truly free and democratic state.

As Guatemala’s new leader, Juan Antonio Zelaya considered his first task to be writing a constitution to govern the new democratic state he envisioned. Although committed to the principles of democracy, Zelaya saw himself as instrumental to that democratic order. As such, the writing of the new constitution was not an open and consultative process, but the one man endeavor of Zelaya himself, sometimes assisted by liberal intellectuals newly released from the city jail or returned from exile in Mexico.

Pictured: Juan Antonio Zelaya, Guatemala's first indigenous leader and the only president of the 'Free and Sovereign Republic of Guatemala'
​

In the meantime, it was largely unclear who held authority in the country. While the Zelayista army, now the ‘Army of Guatemala’, certainly had the final say, it was not present in most communities and not at all east of Ciudad Guatemala. Who held power on the ground was determined by an awkward push-and-pull between the remaining alcaldes, corregidores, and landlords and anyone who cared to band together and challenge them. In some areas, people continued bringing their disputes before the old corregidores and enforced his rulings, whereas other communities elected their own officials in impromptu elections — in many places, these different governing bodies coexisted. Guatemala remained in this political limbo for nearly 9 months before Zelaya emerged from his seclusion with the republic’s new constitution.

Meanwhile, the Confederal Congress convened in Managua in September 1873 in the aftermath of Guatemala’s shocking fall. Zelaya’s victory had created a sense of urgency within the assembly and this was reflected by the lot of delegates sent to Managua, which included some of the strongest advocates for Confederal intervention. Chief among these was Florencio Xatruch Villagra, whose strong personality won him leadership of the interventionist camp and, from them, the presidency. Whereas previous Confederal presidents had been, without exception, weak and feckless men, Xatruch was a strong and forceful leader with clear policy goals. His election marked a major turning point in the history of the Confederation of Central America as a nation.

Picutred: Florencio Xatruch, President of the 17th Confederal Congress and, later, President of Honduras​

The election of Florencio Xatruch was a reemergence of a collective Centroamerican nationalism that had largely submerged since the assassination of Morazán and that would become increasingly powerful and substantial throughout the Maya Wars and their aftermath. Xatruch framed his appeals for intervention in a deliberately Centroamerican way, downplaying divides between the states and speaking of a single nation, with a shared history and common values based on Catholicism, European descent, and the virtues of a democracy with tightly restricted suffrage.

Xatruch did not, however, succeed in leading the Confederation to war in 1873, nor in 1874. The interventionist coalition which had elected Xatruch was fatally undermined only a month into his term by the conclusion of the Second US Civil War at the end of October 1873 and the prospect of US or Confederate assistance. The Second US Civil War — sometimes called the Virginia War — was initiated by the CSA in October 1872 when, after years of negotiations over the status of West Virginia, Confederate President Louis Wigfall ordered the ‘lost counties’ to be recaptured by force, breaking the ceasefire that had held since 1867. The war was a horrible miscalculation on Wigfall's part, as the well-prepared USA demolished the Southern army, leading to Confederate military defeat and the permanent political downfall of the Southern Democrats as a party. However, the victorious North, led by President Samuel Tilden, had no stomach for an occupation or forcible reintegration of the Southern states. Instead, the Virginia War resulted in a formal peace treaty, in which the USA recognized the CSA as a sovereign and independent state. This recognition was hugely important in Central America and across the Caribbean, as the nations of the Americas quickly extended formal recognition to the Confederate States of America.

In Central America, the end of the Virginia War meant not only the establishment of formal diplomatic relations with the CSA, but also an offer of alliance. The USA had been absent from the Caribbean since 1861 and the Southern government of William Graham, newly elected after South’s loss in the Virginia War, offered an alliance to Central America along the same terms as the Havana Treaty of 1856. Central America eagerly acceded to the treaty, desirous of a strong maritime power to once again keep open the vital commercial networks in the Caribbean. Centroamerican hopes, however, went beyond a stable and prosperous Caribbean; many Centroamerican politicians also believed that the new alliance with the South could be leveraged to get North American assistance against Zelaya. Failing that, there were also hopes that, with its fratricidal conflict over, the USA could be convinced to do the same.

Neither North American nation, however, was interested in coming to Central America’s aid. The CSA was concerned about protecting the Caribbean as a commercial zone and only cared about internal turmoil in Guatemala or elsewhere if it disturbed the lucrative export of cash crops and textiles handled by Southern shipping companies. So long as Zelaya stayed in Guatemala and did not interdict the export of produce, he was of no concern to Richmond. Moreover, even had the CSA government wanted to assist Central America, the Southern people had no tolerance for another war having already suffered through two devastating conflicts. The war-weariness of the Southern people was given as an excuse whenever any member of the Centroamerican government did attempt to use the alliance to get CSA assistance against Zelaya. For its part, the USA was largely uninterested in the Caribbean and certainly unwilling to intervene abroad. The conclusion of the Virginia War did not end the long period of US disengagement from the outside world and its absence continued to be felt across the Caribbean. That this would be the case for more than another decade, however, was not clear in the fall of 1873.

Pictured: A Northern soldier examines a trench full of Southern war dead. The First and Second US Civil Wars saw both sides lose hundreds of thousands of soldiers, sapping North American economic and military strength.​

Although the hopes of North American intervention proved vain, they were a tantalizing prospect to Centroamerican leaders in 1873 and early 1874, as it provided a solution to the problem of Zelaya without requiring much expenditure on the part of the Confederation’s states. It was this hope of North American assistance that killed Xatruch’s calls for a invasion of Guatemala in 1873 and 1874, as the Nicaraguan and Salvadoran representatives favored the idea of coordinating Centroamerican actions with those of the USA or CSA, even if it required delaying the invasion. Of course, such outside assistance was never offered, so any preparations were shoved into the future. By the time that the Congress was set to go into recess in the early summer of 1874, no concrete action had been taken to invade Guatemala. Discouraged by his failure in the first half of the congressional session to organize a Centroamerican response, Xatruch largely abandoned the effort and refocused his political energies into a presidential race in Honduras against the isolationist José María Medina. When the Confederal Congress disbanded after accomplishing nothing of substance, Xatruch assumed his new position as President of Honduras.

Back in Guatemala, the new Constitution was finally promulgated in March 1874. The brainchild of Zelaya, the document introduced universal manhood suffrage, direct election of all executive positions — from alcalde to president — and direct election of a single unicameral legislature. In most jurisdictions, the executive continued to also exercise judicial authority. The president was a pure executive, but, by act of congress, could be declared a temporary dictator with the right to rule by decree. The 1874 Constitution also bestowed a range of civil and political rights that had either never previously existed in Central America or had been snuffed out with the death of the Federation: freedom of assembly, of the press, of speech, of association, and of worship. Zelaya set a date for when this new system of government was to come into being, with elections to be held in August of that year.

Now emerged from his constitution-drafting isolation, Zelaya was not content for the country to continue running on an ad hoc basis and, stepping into the role of provisional president, he appointed provisional governors and alcaldes to govern until the elections were held. The elections of 1874 were a momentous event, as they represented the first time elections had been held in Central America without property requirements for suffrage and, thus, the first time many Guatemalans could ever vote. The outcomes of the elections were not, however, as radical as might be expected. Juan Antonio Zelaya won an uncontested presidential race and all of his provisional governors were confirmed in their positions. The major cities of the east — Ciudad Guatemala, Antigua, etc. — voted conservatively, usually reelecting the alcalde of the old government, while nearly all Maya officials who had supported Zelaya were confirmed in their positions. In only a minority of elections were politicians from truly novel backgrounds, from among the peasantry or former servants, elected to public office. The election of any of these ‘radical’ politicians was, however, remarkable. For a peasant to exercise public authority over hacendados or an Amerindian to judge cases involving White men was a radical overthrow of Guatemalan societal norms and unthinkable under the old regime.

News of the elections of Mayan peasants as corregidores and congressional deputies was widely reported in the other states of Central America, where it scandalized and inflamed public opinion, demanding that action be taken against, as La Época declared in an editorial, “the anarchistic and unnatural order set up by the savages squatting in Guatemala, where the wise and worthy are oppressed and the least capable rule.” These stories were joined by even more salacious reporting, some of it almost certainly false, of outrages committed against the Catholic Church and its priests. Zelaya had stripped the Church of all its institutional power in Guatemala, something not even Liberals in the Federation had dared to do, and allowed freedom of worship. Although he had stopped short of punishing the Catholic hierarchy for complicity in the previous regime, there were many incidents of priests being beaten by soldiers or publicly flogged on spurious charges. These stories provided grist for the sensationalist headlines of Centroamerican newspapers.

Responding to this public outrage, at least from the enfranchised and literate elite, Honduras’s President Xatruch and the newly elected President Fernando Guzmán Solórzano of Nicaragua mobilized their states’ armies and placed them on a war footing. The delegations sent to the 1874-75 Confederal Congress in San Salvador reflected the bellicose mood of the state senates and the body elected another prominent interventionist, Nicaragua’s Pedro Joaquín Chamorro y Alfaro, as Confederal President. Pedro Chamorro was an accomplished administrator and determined to lead the Confederation into war against Zelaya’s Guatemala — as an ally of President Guzmán, he had no ambitions in Nicaragua to distract his attention — but his task, to craft a common war plan between the three Centroamerican republics, was still daunting.

Pictured: Pedro Joaquín Chamorro y Alfaro, President of the 18th Confederal Congress​

Even though the delegates of the 1874 Confederal Congress were largely agreed that Central America needed to invade Guatemala and that invasion should be planned on the assumption that no North American assistance would be provided, and President Pedro Chamorro was willing to take action on the basis of majority vote rather than consensus, the Congress was now faced with the thorny issue of who would lead the new Confederal force. Prior to this point, there was no single Confederal army, with each state instead retaining a distinct military command. The question of who was to command this new Confederal army, therefore, brought out the worst regionalist and localist tendencies of Central America. El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua all favored leadership by their own generals, while Vicente Cerna demanded that he lead the force himself.

That the issue of military command did not wreck hope of a Confederal invasion in 1874-75 as had the prospect of North American assistance in 1873-74 was largely due to Pedro Chamorro’s own methodical and indefatigable efforts. Over the course of months, Chamorro met with his fellow Confederal representatives, state presidents, state senators, and military officers to hash out terms that were at least minimally acceptable to all parties. The parties were willing to compromise, but the bickering was constant and haggling over every single command in the prospective army took months. It was only in April 1875 that the Confederal Congress passed its proposal to create a single Confederal army composed of 5,000 Salvadoran soldiers, 3,500 Hondurans, and 2,000 Nicaraguans, each state accepting the financial burden of fielding its component, and commanded by Santiago González of El Salvador, with Vicente Cerna as his deputy. This proposal was then approved by all four state congresses, including Guatemala’s congress-in-exile, and, in June 1875, General González led the Centroamerican army off to war.

On Guatemalan insistence, the goal of the campaign was the recapture of Ciudad Guatemala and Antigua Guatemala. To make preparations for the march through the mountains to Ciudad Guatemala, the Centroamerican army encamped in the loyalist city of Jutiapa and sent parties ahead to Santa Rosa Cuilapa and Jalapa to make preparations. Zelaya did not give them time to prepare for this offensive, however. Assuming, correctly, that the Centroamerican armies would march due west, Zelaya sent his forces south to the coastal plain and then had them move quickly east. Cernista farmers in the region made attempts to warn the Centroamerican army, but González’s aides-de-camp said the general was too busy planning his offensive, refusing them access and withholding the crucial intelligence. On 30 June 1875, Zelaya’s army attacked the camp at Jutiapa from the south, catching the Centroamerican army completely off guard. Despite Centroamerican numerical superiority, Zelaya’s southern approach forced the Central Americans to fight on unfavorable terrain to reopen their supply lines to El Salvador. Once the supply road was open, the Centroamerican army was forced to retreat east, surrendering both the coastal plain and the eastern cities to Zelaya in a humiliating military blunder.

The defeat at the Battle of Jutiapa led to a split in the Centroamerican military camp, as politicians, including Salvadorans, and his fellow officers demanded that Santiago González resign his command of the joint force. González, however, gave newspapers and friendly politicians his own account, that his leadership had only been ineffective because of insubordination from the Honduran and Nicaraguan soldiers and active sabotage by Vicente Cerna. These accusations and the infighting that followed paralyzed the Centroamerican army and caused it to actually split, as the insulted Hondurans and Nicaraguans moved their encampment several miles north of the one established by González and his Salvadorans.

Pictured: Centroamerican forces engaged in battle against the Zelayistas in an outlying village near Jutiapa. This rare image also shows the high rate of injuries in the fighting, many of them proving fatal due to lack of proper medical treatment
​

The disunity in the Centroamerican camp likely would have yet further delayed any action against Zelaya, or perhaps been the end of any effective coalition, had not Zelaya made a mistake of his own. The invasion of the combined Centroamerican army had convinced Zelaya of the permanent hostility towards his regime emanating from the rest of Central America. Assuming that his government would never be accepted and that El Salvador and Honduras would remain enemies and, therefore, threats, Zelaya determined that the new order he was constructing in Guatemala would never be secure unless the hostile regimes in San Salvador and Tegucigalpa were whipped. Seeing his success at Jutiapa as evidence that Central America was a paper tiger, Zelaya decided to push his advantage and invade El Salvador.

While Zelaya’s overall strategy made sense, its execution was ruined by poor intelligence. Prior to launching his counter-invasion, Zelaya received reports from scouts of the size and disposition — around 4,000 men with low morale — of the Centroamerican army encamped near the border. Reckoning that he could beat such a force, Zelaya ordered his army to cross the border and attack González’s camp on 18 September 1875 with the object of then continuing on to take Santa Ana. Zelaya, however, was unaware of the split that had occurred within the Centroamerican camp and had not received reports of the separate Honduran-Nicaraguan camp to the north. When Zelaya began his attack on the Salvadoran camp, the Honduran and Nicaraguan forces under command of Vicente Cerna marched south and surprised the left flank of the Zelayista army. Zelaya’s invasion turned into a rout and hundreds of Zelayistas were killed or captured. In a display of brutality that would be a harbinger of what was to come, Cerna ordered all of the Zelayista prisoners shot dead.

Quick to capitalize on Zelaya’s defeat, the Centroamerican army, provisionally placed under the command of Vicente Cerna because the Confederal Congress could not agree on a formal replacement for the obviously-unacceptable Santiago González, trailed Zelaya’s retreating forces, who were forced to fight constant rearguard actions as they retreated back into the mountains of Guatemala. Although the landscape of the mountains favored defense, the Centroamerican army had a decisive numerical advantage and the Zelayistas also began to experience issues with morale; the Zelayistas remained a mostly Maya force and were unwilling to fight hard to retain control of Ladino-majority cities like Jalapa.

By the beginning of 1876, the Zelayistas had been pushed back to a defense of Ciudad Guatemala, which was recaptured on 3 February 1876. The recapture of Ciudad Guatemala caused jubilation in the Confederation, as politicians proudly proclaimed Centroamerican military victory. When Cerna, instead of returning to the Guatemalan presidency, directed the Centroamerican army to clean the road to Escuintla, he was rebuked by the Confederal Congress and ordered to give up his command — which was, after all, legally provisional — to Honduras’s General Domingo Vásquez Toruño. Cerna instead tore up the order in a fit of rage and ceased all communication with the Confederal government. Ignoring repeated orders that he relinquish command, Cerna drove the army forward into pitched battles towards Antigua Guatemala, which was recaptured on 7 March 1876. Undoubtedly, Cerna would have continued to press toward Chimaltenango, but by mid-March his fellow officers had become wise to his dispute with the Confederal government and abandoned him, taking their Salvadoran, Honduran, and Nicaraguan forces along with them. Left with only a small force of around 1,700 Guatemalans, Cerna was forced to stop his offensive and leave the Valle de Guatemala as the western frontier of the Guatemalan state.

 

[Tommy4ever]

We shall see if the Zelayistas can hold on. It would be interesting to see a Maya or Maya-led state survive in the long run. I’m also intrigued to see how the survival of the CSA effects things. In the medium term they will surely look to make the Caribbean their personal domain and May end up being even more interventionist than the OTL Americans were.

Nice to see you comment on my old Interactive AARs - they feel a long time ago now!

 

[slothinator]

It’s a shame that Zelaya’s new Guatemala is struggling out of the gate. Some of the comments make me fear that he will not last much longer.
Interesting to have a permanently split US. That should give the USCA some political breathing room once the homeland is pacified

 

[Zeogludon]

The Panic of 1876, 1876 to 1880​

The Centroamerican recapture of Antigua Guatemala from Zelaya in March 1876 and the subsequent rift between Vicente Cerna and the other Centroamerican leaders generally marks the end of the First Maya War, although it is easy to argue that 1876 to 1880 simply marked a low point in one continuous conflict between the expanding Guatemalan colonial state and resistant Mayan communities organized under Juan Antonio Zelaya. At the least, the period between 1876 and 1880 was a lull between what are referred to as the First and Second Maya Wars. In many ways, the continuation of Maya and other indigenous resistance to Guatemalan and Mexican colonialism well into the 20th Century can be considered to be part of the same conflict as the Maya Wars of the 1870s and 1880s.

Subsequent historiography aside, at the end of the First Maya War in March 1876, the border between Zelayista and the Cernista control of Guatemala was at the Valle de Guatemala, with Zelayista forces controlling the upland passes to the west of Antigua and all the highlands settlements between this point and into a substantial part of what was officially Mexican territory. While Zelaya did not actively wage war against the Mexican authorities in Quetzaltenango, he did not, in his position as President of the Free and Sovereign Republic of Guatemala, recognize Mexican control of Los Altos nor did he command his forces to respect Mexican borders. Zelaya’s message of uplifting of the oppressed Amerindian peasantry and overthrowing the wealthy urban elite was eagerly received in the Mexican highlands and Zelaya was able to use the Mexican territories in both the highlands and coastal lowlands to train and quarter soldiers, organize supplies, and draw from the financial and material resources of a, mostly Maya, community far larger than the territory under full Zelayista control. The Mexican government of the 1870s was unwilling and largely unable to effectively restore control to this portion of its territory; President Porfirio Diaz’s disputed election in 1871 was the beginning of a long period of political turmoil and erosion of democracy in Mexico; Chiapas, into which the territories seized from Guatemala had been incorporated, was low on the list of Mexican priorities.

Absent the support of their Salvadoran, Honduran, and Nicaraguan backers, the Cernistas lacked the manpower needed to bring a successful battle to the Zelayistas arrayed between Antigua and Chimaltenango. Prevented from reconquering the remainder of Guatemala, Cerna and his allies instead turned their repression upon the portions of Guatemala under their control. The Fuerte San Jose, an infamous fortress constructed in the 1850s outside of Ciudad Guatemala, was filled with those who had collaborated with Zelaya or been reported to have done so and had not been wise enough to retreat as the Cernistas advanced. Cerna himself is reported to have wanted all collaborators shot, which would have involved the massacre of hundreds, but demurred under strong opposition from the Speaker of the Guatemalan Congress, Manuel Francisco González, and some members of his Cabinet. The only official executions were a handful of military officers who had defected to Zelaya and were sentenced to death by courts martial.

Pictured: Fuerte San Jose, the infamous prison outside of Ciudad Guatemala that, since the 1850s, held most of Guatemala's political prisoners​

The impact of the Cernista backlash depended greatly on social class. Those wealthy, educated, and enfranchised citizens who had cooperated with Zelaya out of political belief, foremost among them the scion of the fabulously rich Barrios family, Justo Rufino, were locked in the Fuerte San Jose and their writing suppressed. The peasants who had dared to stand in the 1874 elections or otherwise made enemies of the local landowners were confined in prison for only short periods and then given exemplary punishment, typically public flogging or periods of penal servitude. These humiliating punishments were done with the same intent as Zelaya’s floggings and killings of corregidores and priests during the start of his insurgency; the difference being that Zelaya sought to use violence to signal a subversion of the existing social order, whereas the Cernistas used these methods to reaffirm the social order and emphasize that it would be defended with violence.

The end of the First Maya War coincided roughly with the Panic of 1876, which began in June 1876 with the collapse of the North and South Wales Bank, the first of a series of European banks to face runs during the summer of 1876. The panic triggered a period of recession, called the ‘Long Depression’, which lasted until the mid-1880s. Europe was, and would remain, the beating heart of capital in the 19th Century and the financial panic that gripped London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna could not fail to trigger runs and subsequent bankruptcies in New York, Havana, Medellin, and San Salvador. The root causes of the financial panic were the rising indebtedness of cotton plantations in the CSA and the secular over-leveraging of European banks to American farmers. Huge amounts of European capital had for decades been tied down in small-scale lending to American farmers, and indeed the principal function of many banks across North, Central, and South America was the procurement of loans from Europe to then distribute to local farmers with the profits from the next crop as collateral. Throughout the 19th Century, farm loans in the Americas were the single largest plurality of investment in the world and the lack of sophistication in American banking systems meant that they were frequently the source of financial panic.

Pictured: The collapse of the Vienna Stock Exchange on 30 June 1877, one of the major components of the Panic of 1876 in Europe​

The Panic of 1876 was deeper and longer than previous financial crises because its trigger was the collapse of the single most profitable agricultural industry in the Americas: Southern cotton. Southern slave plantations had been heavily indebted for decades and dependent on high yields to retain solvency. With the CSA’s defeat in the First US Civil War and the permanent closing of the Western territories to slavery, Southern planters were cut off from supplies of uncultivated virgin lands and forced to continue cotton production on increasingly depleted fields, lowing yields and compounding their indebtedness. When a particularly strong hurricane battered the Gulf coast in 1875, the resultant destruction pushed many plantations over the edge and into default. These bankruptcies impacted the entire Southern economy, initiating a mass default of plantation owners, merchant companies, exporters, and banks across the CSA, starting a financial contagion whose effects were soon felt in Europe and, from there, the world.

The Panic hit Central America harder than most of South America, as its economy was the most integrated into the global market and its financial sector, concentrated in El Salvador, was comparatively large. The Banco Primero de Cultivadores, the largest bank in the country, began calling in loans in December 1876, triggering runs on smaller banks and taking down much of the Centroamerican financial system. Bank capitalization would not recover to 1876 levels in Central America until 1884.

The effects of the financial panic were felt most strongly by Centroamerican industry, as industrial ventures were more heavily indebted than cultivators. Faced with suddenly due loans and temporarily cut off from financing, only Centroamerican companies with sufficiently large reserves of cash were able to remain solvent, which in effect meant the largest and most established firms in the industrial heartland of Honduras. The result was a concentration of Centroamerican industry both geographically and sectorally. El Salvador and Nicaragua both experienced large scale factory closures and mass layoffs; in Nicaragua, industrial employment fell a staggering 75% between 1876 and 1880, the most severe of any region in Central America. The economic downturn also disproportionately impacted less established industries, in particular the cement industry, which had previously employed thousands in Honduras and El Salvador. By 1881, only a single cement factory, Percival & Lopez S.A., remained in operation. The economy that emerged from the crisis was even more dominated by Honduras and its textile industry.

Pictured: Railroad workers expanding a line in El Salvador. The workers were likely former factory workers from San Salvador or San Miguel forced into the dangerous and unpleasant work of railway construction​

The effect of the economic crash and the subsequent concentration of capital in Honduras was not to sharpen regional divisions in the Confederation, but actually to provide the impetus for further cross-border integration. After decades of integration, the economies of Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala, and Honduras were tied together, a fact recognized by the politicians of the time. There was resentment felt toward Honduras for its role as the regional industrial hub, but this paled in comparison to the desire to gain access to that same wealth. The clearest road forward was to further integrate the Confederation, particularly through the standardization and rationalization of business regulations. Excepting a few areas, like railroad standardization, almost no laws bound together the states of the Confederation; not only did state laws supersede confederal law, but almost no confederal law existed. Aided by the opportunities for coordination provided by the telegraph, Centroamerican congressmen worked together to develop common standards to facilitate easier flow of commerce within the Confederation, beginning in 1877 when the Confederal Congress passed a law requesting member states to transition to the metric system. This cooperation also had the side effect of facilitating frequent communication between members of different national congresses, helping to create a more cohesive political culture across state lines.

Centroamerican agriculture, particularly coffee and fruit, was less strongly impacted by the financial crisis and recovered more quickly, returning to pre-crash levels within a year. In fact, Centroamerican agriculture not only recovered but returned to its pre-1876 growth trajectory, with production increasing 80% over the course of the 1870s and more than doubling again during the 1880s. This tremendous growth was primarily due to the fact that Centroamerican agricultural products — particularly coffee, although to a lesser extent also bananas, pineapples, and citrus fruits — were considered a staple of household consumption across the globe. Coffee not only had a huge European market, where its consumption had become increasingly common even among the lower classes, but wherever European colonialism went, coffee followed. This meant that by the 1870s and 1880s, coffee was now a staple in markets across Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. As a result of this global consumer demand, average farmer income in Central America increased consistently in the late 19th Century from both global price increases and increased yields due to the introduction of new coffee cultivars in the 1870s.

Pictured: Railway workers near Chinandega pose next to a massive crop of bananas ready for export​

The expansion of coffee production, the beginning of the ‘coffee boom’ that would last into the 1890s, was facilitated by improvements in railroad and steam engine technology in the 1870s. Whereas previously trains had lacked the power to climb steep grades, improvements in steam engines meant that, by the late 1870s, trains could be built capable of making their way up the relatively steep hills where coffee was cultivated. This meant that, not only was it easier and cheaper to transport coffee for export, but also that new areas previously remote could be brought into profitable cultivation. Foremost among these were the interior mountains of Nicaragua and Guatemala’s Verapaz highlands.

Both the Nicaraguan highlands and the Verapaz had long been peripheral areas largely inhabited by Amerindians and of little interest to the colonial governments in Ciudad Guatemala and Managua. The coffee boom changed that, as the possession of these lands now attracted the attention of the great hacendados of Guatemala and Nicaragua. Neither government paid much attention to Amerindian land title and good agricultural lands were frequently seized by the government and sold to major landowners or land speculators back in the cities. In Guatemala, this process of dispossession brought the state again into conflict with the Zelayistas. In Nicaragua, the dispossession of the Matagalpa and related peoples started a new conflict between indigenous peoples and the Nicaraguan state, the brief ‘Matagalpa War’.

The conflict began with a series of non-lethal attacks on railway camps and sabotage of the lines themselves in the fall of 1875. These attacks came after a number of attempts by Amerindian leaders to petition the alcalde in Matagalpa to address the illegal seizure of their communal lands. To his credit, the local alcalde, Juan Alberto Torrellas Macedo, did try to bring these complaints forward, but was ordered to desist by order of the Nicaraguan Supreme Court. Torrellas also took his story to the newspapers and generated a minor scandal for the government over its conduct in the highlands, although ultimately failing to prevent the theft of Amerindian land or their subsequent mistreatment.

The government of President Fernando Guzmán responded to these attacks with a heavy hand, sending in hundreds of soldiers under the command of General Joaquín Zavala Solís. Making a base at the nearest railhead, General Zavala pursued the population-centric military strategy for which he would become so infamous. Examining the plot of the future railway extensions, Zavala ordered that all Amerindian villages within 3 kilometers of the railway should be destroyed and their inhabitants prevented from returning. As soon as General Zevala’s strategy was announced, it was condemned as cruel and unlawful, including by a number of congressmen. The outcry was not enough, however, to force President Guzmán to immediately recall Zavala and, in the meantime, the general put his strategy into action, evicting entire villages and killing the livestock of any who resisted. When soldiers were fired upon from a village, Zavala demanded that the entire male population of the village be killed. The refugees of these expulsions trickled into the region’s few towns, where many died of malnutrition. In December 1876, the Nicaraguan Congress did threaten to hold a vote officially condemning the army’s conduct in the highlands, causing President Guzmán to preemptively withdraw Zavala from command. By this time, however, the path for the railroads had been cleared and Amerindian resistance had already been crushed.

Pictured: Matagalpa peasants leaving their village under General Zavala's orders. The village in question was later burned to prevent their return.​

The conflict in Guatemala reached no such decisive conclusion. Vicente Cerna’s refusal to listen to the Confederal Congress had cost him a lot of political support in the rest of the Confederation and, even if he had been popular among his fellow presidents, the Panic of 1876 further reduced the willingness of the other states to send funds to Guatemala. As a result, President Cerna was left to fight Zelaya on his own using only the resources of eastern Guatemala, which, as it turned out, were insufficient to retake even Chimaltenango. As president, Cerna dedicated the full resources of the state to fighting Zelaya, but faced the predicament that, by drawing on the resources of supporters in Chiapas, the Zelayistas were able to field a similarly sized army to hold back the Cernistas.

The beginning of the coffee boom and the newfound interest in the Verapaz highlands opened up a new front in the war for Guatemala. Of the many valuable lands under Zelayista control, and thus up for grabs if the Cernistas won the war, one of the places holding the most interest in 1876 was the Verapaz, which was sparsely populated, lightly defended, and ideal for growing coffee. All that was needed to bring the highlands into productive and profitable cultivation was to kick the Zelayistas out and build a railroad connecting the highlands to a port. The Cernistas had never seriously contested the remote territory since losing control of Salamá and San Jerónimo in early 1872, but that did not mean that it could not be retaken.

The hacendados and bankers supportive of seizing the Verapaz highlands organized themselves into the Verapaz Railroad Company and began lobbying Guatemalan congressmen to support an offensive to retake Salamá and the highlands. The board of the railway company managed to secure a meeting with President Cerna in October 1876, but he was adamantly opposed to the idea, insisting that the main theater of war remained between Antigua and Chimaltenango and that any expansion into the Verapaz would be sideshow that would drain valuable and limited military resources. Some congressmen were sympathetic to the scheme, but all considered Cerna’s word to be final and encouraged the businessmen to abandon their scheme.

The investors of the Verapaz Railroad Company did not, however, abandon their plan to seize the Verapaz. Since the Cernista government was unwilling to help, they decided to raise a private militia and conquer the Verapaz themselves. Paid for out of their own private fortunes, the backers of the Verapaz Railroad Company recruited around 300 mercenaries, primarily veterans of the US Civil Wars, and outfitted them to clear a path for a railroad into the Verapaz. The expeditionary force met at Livingston, which was to become the entrepot for the new coffee plantations, in May 1877 and steamed up the Rio Polochic to Panzós. The militia’s assembly in Livingston and movements up river were rapidly reported to the Zelayista authorities in Salamá, which sent an army detachment to confront the expedition. On 22 May 1877, the expedition fell into an ambush prepared by the Zelayistas — pressed against the Rio Polochic, the expeditionary force was torn apart, with under 40 men escaping back to Livingston. The firsthand accounts of the survivors, some more embellished than others, were widely published and the ‘Massacre on the Polochic’ became a public outrage across Central America. Even though it was a private venture deliberately rejected by Cerna, many Centroamerican newspapers reported the disaster as evidence of a broader failure of the current government, both in Guatemala and within the Confederation, to defeat Zelaya.

Pictured: Mercenaries on the payroll of the Verapaz Railroad Company on their way upriver from Panzós in May 1877

​

The public perception of the ongoing conflict in Guatemala depended on military success and, after the conclusion of the First Maya War in March 1876, the conflict had turned into a stalemate punctuated by occasional defeats suffered by the Cernistas, of which the Polochic expedition became a public example. This escalated into a sense of crisis in October 1878, when Zelayista forces seized control of Quetzaltenango from Mexico. After years of building strength and de facto control of rural areas in Los Altos, Juan Antonio Zelaya decided to press the weakness of the Mexican government and officially reclaimed Los Altos for his Guatemalan government. The Mexican government could not, of course, turn a blind eye to the loss of a major city and dispatched an army to reclaim the city and restore the governor’s representative. Rather than fight a temporary Mexican force, Zelaya withdrew from Quetzaltenango before the Mexican army arrived, emerging to again exercise effective control of the area after it left.

For Central America, the fall of Quetzaltenango to the Zelayistas, even though temporary, was a profound shock. After years of fighting, the Zelayistas appeared as strong as ever, contested territory with the Cernistas, and were able to wrest land from Mexico. It was plain that the Cernistas were losing the war and that, without a change in strategy, the existential threat posed by Zelaya would never be vanquished.

This shared sense of crisis, which had formed in the early 1870s as the true scope of the threat posed by Zelaya was gradually realized, provided the basis for a sense of nationhood in Central America. Forced to confront the Zelayistas, Central Americans became more aware of their commonalities and paid less attention to their differences; in other words, Central Americans increasingly thought of themselves as a single nation. The common characteristics of this nation were those same things threatened by the Zelayistas: it was a Christian civilization that traced its origins to the Spanish conquests, in which the position of the Catholic Church was protected, European culture was elevated above all others, there existed was a racial order dominated by Whites, and society was governed democratically by the wealthiest citizens who therefore had the most stake in its preservation. By 1878, every president in Central America espoused a belief in a common Centroamerican identity based on these principles.

The formation of this collective Centroamerican identity radically changed the public perception of the war against the Zelayistas. Whereas the opinion in 1871 had been that it was a Guatemalan problem that did not concern any of the other states, by the late 1870s, the Zelayistas were considered a threat to the entirety of Central America; a loss in Guatemala was a collective defeat of a single Centroamerican civilization. An attack on this Centroamerican civilization demanded a collective response not limited to the resources of Guatemala. Yet, at the same time, Cerna’s refusal to listen to the Confederal Congress in 1876 had poisoned his relationship with the other Centroamerican leaders and there was little support for sending more money or men to be disposed of by Cerna as he saw fit. The solution brought forward was a permanent Army of Central America that would be appointed by the Confederal Congress and exist outside the hierarchies of any individual national military. This new army, drawing on the resources of all of Central America, was proposed as the force to liberate all Guatemala.

The proposal for a common Centroamerican army generated a lot of pushback from conservative circles, particularly from national militaries. The remaining regionalists opposed such a project on principle, while military officers worried it would undermine their own status as soldiers of national armies. The coalition army that had fought back Zelaya in the First Maya War clearly demonstrated the difficulties of getting Centroamerican officers to cooperate. The Zelayista capture of Los Altos in October 1878 intruded on this debate. The current plan was not working, nobody wanted to send arms or men to be controlled by Cerna alone, and the only other proposal at the time was the creation of a Centroamerican Army. The actual specifics of creating such a force required several months to hash out and, as expected, one of the most controversial questions was who would exercise overall command of the new army.

The question of overall command concerned both senior military officers, many of them currently serving as senators or congressmen, who wanted the position for themselves; and civilians, who wanted a military commander loyal to their political faction or over whom they had influence. One candidate came quickly to the forefront, however, largely thanks to his own talent for self promotion: Joaquín Zavala Solís. Championed by Nicaragua’s representatives in Confederal Congress, who wanted an ally of Fernando Guzmán in charge of the army, and by the Guatemalans, who respected his credentials from the Matagalpa War, General Zavala was appointed the Commander of the Army of Central America upon its establishment in July 1879.

Pictured: Joaquín Zavala Solís, commander of Nicaraguan forces in the Matagalpa War and the first commander of the Army of Central America​

Joaquín Zavala had returned from his victory in the Matagalpa War as a controversial figure in Nicaraguan and Centroamerican politics. Centroamerican commentators could not help but draw comparisons between Zavala’s rapid and overwhelming victory against the Matagalpa and the prolonged ulcerous conflict against the Zeyalistas in Guatemala. At the same time, his conduct during that war and his open discussion of collective violence against civilians as a means of waging war shocked the public. In 1879, however, Joaquín Zavala seemed like the nation’s premier candidate to retake Guatemala. After years of failing to make meaningful headway against the Zelayistas, combined with the threat of part of Chiapas coming fully under Zelayista control, there was a demand for a decisive military action. A consummate politician, Zavala proclaimed to the press that he alone was capable of defeating Zelaya and retaking Guatemala. His rise was helped by the fact that his callous disregard for civilian life was not met with the same abrobium in Guatemala as elsewhere in Central America; many educated Guatemalans, still seething at the brief period of Zelayista rule, were perfectly willing to see everyone who had ever supported Zelaya hang.

Tactically, Zevala agreed with Cerna about the axis of advance and spent the remainder of 1879 and several months of 1880 preparing the newly formed Army of Central America to break through Zelayista lines at Chimaltenango and drive into the heart of Zelaya’s republic. The Centroamerican Army would begin its offensive in May 1880, initiating the Second Maya War.

 

[RustyHunter]

It looks like Zelaya could be in danger, but he's done much better than I expected! And perhaps he can win another ambush and save his regime? Overall, it's nice to see a real nation is beginning to come together.

 

[Tommy4ever]

Interesting hearing about the economic changes in Central America. It seems hard to escape a future as a plantation economy.

 

[Zeogludon]

The World of the 1870s
​

The Americas

In North America and the Caribbean, the 1870s were characterized by a strongly felt absence of US power. Beset by continued conflict with the CSA, including the Virginia War, and a series of devastating wars with Amerindians on the Great Plains, the USA all but vanished from the world stage. In the Caribbean, this fact was clearly demonstrated by the refusal of the USA to intervene in the Centroamerican war against Juan Antonio Zelaya or to force the Haitian government to recognize old debts.

Pictured: Royal Hawaiian soldiers in front of the seized house of a US citizen, June 1875. The US was also absent from the Pacific, where it took no action when the Kingdom of Hawaii expelled all foreigners in June 1875 in response to an attempted coup by several US citizens against King Kalākaua.​

Other powers took advantage of US withdrawal and moved in to exercise more influence in the hemisphere than the USA would have ever otherwise allowed. Britain was particularly bold, becoming the lead trading partner and key creditor for Venezuela and Colombia, and even intervening militarily in the middle of a war between Peru and Ecuador over control of a region of the Amazon. When Peruvian forces, having defeated the Ecuadorian army, threatened to also seize portions of the Amazon claimed by Colombia and Venezuela in retaliation for their support of Ecuador, Britain warned Peru’s President Manuel Pardo that an invasion of Colombia would trigger a military response from Britain. A squadron of British marines was disembarked at Barranquilla to show resolve and Peru abandoned its aggressive plans. This was the first European intervention in the Americas since the 1830s and a sign of how much the USA had retreated from the world.

If US retreat was the dominant geopolitical trend in the Americas, the CSA and its cotton industry were central to defining both hemispheric and global economic trends in the 1870s. As already discussed in the main narrative, the CSA was at the epicenter of the Panic of 1876 and the cotton industry in the South never recovered from this shock. The economic devastation resulted in the skyrocketing popularity of the maverick Populist Party, which represented the interests of poor Whites against the planter class. Under the leadership of Populist President Barzillai Chambers, the CSA went on to abolish slavery in 1880. That a state founded to protect slavery could abolish the practice only 20 years later was a consequence of the ‘Long Depression’ and the sharp downward pressure it had on already low wages for poor Whites in the CSA. Poor Whites correctly saw that their wages were less than their Northern counterparts because they had to compete with enslaved labor and, radicalized by the Panic of 1876 and the crushing debt burden of two wars, they attacked and destroyed the institution of slavery. The end of slavery had the expected result on cotton production, which fell sharply in 1880, resulting in a general shortage of cotton on global markets and a prolongation of the ‘Long Depression’.

The Rio de la Plata remained at the forefront of political radicalism, as Uruguay was the site of the world’s first successful Marxist revolution in April 1876. Having seen the democratic Mayista movement in Paraguay repeatedly fail to either stay in power or affect substantial change, a group of socialists from across the Rio de la Plata decided that the only way for a socialist movement to be successful was if the transition to socialism was controlled by a vanguard party of organized, professional revolutionaries. This type of organized party, and the dictatorship it imposed in Uruguay when it seized power in 1876, would became the basis for socialist revolution across Europe and the Americas.

Foreshadowing trends elsewhere, the Rio de la Plata also quickly demonstrated the internationalist character of the socialist revolution. Within months of coming to power in Montevideo, the Marxists used the city to funnel money and guns to allied Marxists who overthrew of the Paraguayan government. The conservative powers of Argentina, Buenos Aires, and Brazil then joined together in support of the ousted Paraguayan President Jose Fecundo Machain, who, with their material support, successfully toppled the Marxist government in Asuncion in 1878.


Europe

The aggressive foreign policy pursued by Italy’s King Vittorio Emanuele II continued to shape European politics in the 1870s. Angry that France had allowed the 1864 Austro-Hungarian invasion and seeking another powerful ally, King Vittorio Emanuele decided to court the Russians and so sent Italian warships to fight the Ottomans alongside Russia in 1870. The plan failed on multiple fronts: Italian support for Russia spooked the French and Austro-Hungarians so much that the former enemies entered into an alliance in 1870; the Italian navy, wary of fighting the British in the Black Sea, never engaged the Ottoman Navy and instead occupied Crete and Cyprus; and Tsar Aleksandr II, who disliked Vittorio Emanuele personally, rebuffed all of Italy’s diplomatic overtures. The only result of Italy’s intervention was that it had now also earned the enmity of Britain and the Ottomans. Seeking to silence the intense criticism that these foreign policy blunders created, Vittorio Emanuele suspended the constitution, disbanded parliament, and imposed widespread censorship in March 1873.

Prussia again tried to impose its will on its hostile southern neighbor, placing Bavaria at the epicenter of Europe’s largest war since the death of Napoleon. In a move prompted by Prussia’s previous invasion, Bavaria announced in 1874 that it would conclude an alliance with Austria-Hungary. Furious that Bavaria and Austria-Hungary could act as a potential counterweight to Prussia within Germany, King Wilhelm I of Prussia claimed that Bavaria’s membership in the Deutscherbund -- forced upon it in the 1868 war -- prohibited outside alliances and declared war upon Bavaria to force them to rescind the pact. Emperor Franz Joseph honored the new alliance and was joined by King Louis Philippe II of France, who feared Prussian expansionism should it control the industrial powerhouse of Bavaria. On the other side, the conflict drew in Ottomans, who were eternally opposed to Austria-Hungary and with whom Prussia maintained an alliance, and Britain, which sought to buoy Prussia as a counterweight to France on the continent. Italy joined slightly later, invading Austria-Hungary in March 1875 to grab at Venetia.

Pictured: French naval gunners defending Brest from British attack, 1877. British involvement in the war, particularly its attempted invasion of Brittany, rekindled the bitter rivalry between Britain and France.
​

The Second Bavarian War lasted for five years, ending with a series of peace treaties between the exhausted powers in spring 1879, and left the governments of all involved weakened and exposed. On only one front of the war was fighting decisive: France and Austria-Hungary crushed Italian forces in the Po valley in 1875 and forced Italy to pay a massive indemnity subsidizing their war effort. Everywhere else, the decisive advantage of defensive weaponry in a world with accurate small arms but inaccurate artillery showed, and fighting was painfully slow. At the end of the war, Prussia was victorious in its objectives and more, forcing an exhausted France to cede Alsace-Lorraine, Bavaria to cede Kaiserslautern, and Austria-Hungary to renounce its alliance with Bavaria. In the end, however, the war had no victors. The war severely destabilized its combatants; in Prussia, the war would lead to the 1880 German Revolution, in which all of its wartime gains were lost.


Asia

European colonialism in Asia reached into new areas in the 1870s, as Britain and France established a series of colonies in the islands of the Pacific, then known as the ‘South Sea Islands’. The European demand that their subjects not be subject to local courts had cast a shadow of colonialism over the Pacific for several decades, but the move toward direct colonial rule only began in 1874 when Britain approved Seru Epenisa Cakobau’s request that Fiji became a British colony. This annexation coincided with the renewal of fierce Franco-British tensions during the Second Bavarian War and so the Pacific was transformed into an arena of imperial rivalry between Britain and France. The two empires courted and intimidated the kingdoms of the Pacific islands to cede power to Queen Victoria or King Louis Philippe II primarily so that that island might be denied to its imperial rival.

Pictured: Fijian King Seru Epenisa Cakobau cedes power to Queen Victoria at an official ceremony with Arthur Gordon, the colony's first governor, in 1874.​

Britain’s Indian colony expanded its influence east during this period, bringing mainland Southeast Asia firmly within the British sphere. Irked by new tariffs imposed on British imports to the country, the British governor in India determined to end Burma’s independence, invading and conquering the kingdom in 1873. In the same year, the default of the Nguyen court on several debts to British merchants led Dai Nam, under threat of bombardment of its coast by the British navy, to cede control of the Mekong Delta to Britain. From this position of strength, Britain exerted immense pressure on the Kingdom of Siam and the Malay princes.

Japan made its first move into European-style colonialism at this same time. Taking advantage of the pressure Emperor Tu Duc was facing from Britain, Japan demanded that its merchants be given the same trading rights as those of Europeans at Dai Nam’s open ports and that its nationals be similarly exempt from local jurisdiction. As elsewhere, these privileges then served as a gateway for colonial rule. In 1879, claiming that Dai Nam had violated the terms of the 1873 treaty, the Japanese Consul in Hue demanded total control over the administration of the city’s port. When Tu Duc refused, Japan seized not only the city but the entire coast up to Vinh, henceforth ruled as Japan’s first colonial possession.


Africa

The Caucasian War, which began in 1869, continued into the early 1870s, pitting Russia against Britain and France, both defending the sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire. The war was massively bloody, particularly in the fighting of the Franco-British expeditionary force in Suxumi, with hundreds of thousands dying, most from improper medical care. Unwilling to continue dedicating soldiers to carnage on that scale, Russia, Britain, and France agreed on a compromise in August 1870 that they then imposed on the Ottoman Empire: Russia would renounce the exceptional rights it claimed in the Treaty of Kucuk Kaynarca and, in exchange, the Ottomans would grant formal equality to their Christian subjects. In additional, Russia had the right to choose the ruler of the Kingdom of Romania, a new state formed from the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia. As for the coup in Egypt that triggered the war, the defeats inflicted on the Ottoman army along the Danube were too severe for it to launch a successful campaign against Ahmed Urabi’s Egypt and Sultan Abdulaziz was forced to accept the end of his North African empire.

Pictured: Construction underway on the Suez Canal, c. 1871. Britain had been ceded the land to attempt the construction of a canal at Suez back in 1868 by Sultan Abdulaziz. Ahmed Urabi's government made the wide choice to not contest this grant.

​

The European powers were quick to move into the void left by the declining Ottomans and assert their own influence in North Africa. France abrogated the last vestiges of independence enjoyed in Algeria, bringing the country fully under French rule and extending that rule up to the edges of the Sahara. Spain, under the pretext of assisting its French ally against Algerian guerrillas hiding under Moroccan protection, seized control of the entire border with French Algeria in 1875, limiting Sultan Hassan of Morocco to only that portion of his country northwest of the Atlas and south of the Rif.

(**picture** Britain wasted no time in coming to terms with the new Egyptian government for the construction of a canal at Suez, connecting Britain more closely to its Asian colonies. Construction was started in 1871. )

 

[RustyHunter]

This is a really fascinating world that's shaping up. I'll be curious to see just how different things get now that the US is declining so steeply.

 

[eoncommander]

This world feels quite a bit more chaotic than ours. Probably good for our Central American friends, allowing them to sort out their internal differences without outside interference.

 

[Chilango2]

I sometimes wonder if the current world is the result of some central american liberal wishing for the Central American States to stay united on a monkey's paw, because as others have mentioned, its a rather messy world out there, especially with the void of the US. The loss of the ACW is turning out to be a defining moment across the world.

 

[Zeogludon]

The Second Maya War, 1880 to 1882​

The Second Maya War occurred amidst an atmosphere of intense fear among the Centroamerican ruling class. Indeed, the willingness of Central Americans to select Joaquín Zavala Solís as the commander of the new Army of Central America, and later to either endorse or tolerate his conduct in that war, can be largely explained by this intense sense of danger. In the year 1880, Central America appeared isolated, alone, and under threat. The dream that the end of Spanish rule would bring about peaceful and prosperous republics had been decisively shattered decade after decade as most of the Americas were wracked by cycles of revolution and despotism. Even the USA, upon which the liberal revolutionaries of Central America had based their hopes for the future, had seen its republic be torn apart by bloody conflicts over slavery. Central Americans of the period were intensely aware that most of their fellow republics had collapsed, degraded into dictatorships, been overthrown in popular revolutions, or all three. The great concern that troubled Central Americans was that their republics would not be exceptions. Already, to those who were looking for them, the signs were all there: a hostile army dedicated to social revolution, at least as well armed, trained, and generalled as themselves, occupied large swathes of Guatemala and threatened to sweep away over 300 years of Hispanic civilization.

Pictured: Control of Guatemala in 1880, with the Confederation of Central America in blue, Zelaya's Free and Sovereign Republic of Guatemala in red, and Mexico in green.​

Central America falling to Zelaya or to a peasant revolt inspired by him would not have been an aberration in the last quarter of the 19th Century. Contemporaries had plenty of examples to choose from, most recently from the victories of Communist militants on the north bank of the Rio de la Plata. The German Revolutions of 1880, which saw returning soldiers and striking workers toss out the government of every German state save Bavaria, only added more fuel to the fear of revolution burning in the hearts of the Centroamerican ruling class. Now, there are very good reasons why no similar revolution occurred in Central America – the relative wealth of the smallholding Centroamerican peasantry, the stigmatization of Zelaya’s revolution as an ‘Indian revolt’ to be opposed by White and Ladino peasants – but none of these were apparent to or recognized by Centroamerican politicians and commentators of the 1880s. To contemporary Central Americans, it seemed them were living through a tumultuous period in which their system of ordered democratic life would be swept away like so many others.

This fear of internal revolt, most likely in the form of a Zelayista victory, was compounded by the decay of the old alliance systems. The Havana Treaty had already been recognized as a dead letter, but this was only given more confirmation in 1880 during the Cuban debt crisis. Devastated by the steep decline in export trade during the ‘Long Depression’, Cuba had been forced to default in its debts at the end of January 1880, triggering threats of armed intervention from Britain. Seeking protection from this threatened – but never realized – invasion, Cuba requested confirmation from the US Consul in Havana that the USA would honor its treaty obligations, but was instead told that the USA, “would base its decision upon a judgement of its national interests.” Meanwhile, the very alliance meant to supplant the Havana Treaty, that made with the CSA, was now also dead in the water, the CSA government admitting that, amidst the devastating depression and social upheaval following abolition, it was in no position to assist anyone.

The diplomatic effort to replace the Havana System began back in the mid-1870s, when it first became clear that the North Americans were unwilling to assist Central America against the Zelayistas, but experienced their most successful chapter in 1880. The issue was the result of three facts: (1) Central America’s interests were based around the Caribbean and thus shared only with other Caribbean powers, (2) there were few countries with interests in the Caribbean and the capabilities to defend them, and (3) most of those countries with interests in the Caribbean had conflicting interests with Central America. With the North Americans out of the picture, relying on the Cubans or Dominicans alone was hopeless, as both nations had depended on the USA and could not sustain a military expedition on their own. Unfortunately, the only other power with significant interests in the region was Britain and those interests, namely support for the Miskitu Kingdom, were in direct opposition to Nicaraguan territorial claims. Territorial disputes, this time over Los Altos, also ruled out any alliance with Mexico. Colombia seemed like a good prospect, but its alliance with Mexico and close ties with the British led the Colombian ambassador to politely close the matter in 1875. British pressure on Venezuela led that country to similarly decline further talks in the late 1870s.

This left only one country as a potential ally: Costa Rica. As a neighboring state, Costa Rica had no issues with force projection; its authoritarian government had the same general outlook as those in Central America; and its relations with Britain and Mexico were frosty, for the mirror-image reason that those countries supported Colombia. For all those factors in the credit side, Costa Rica was a difficult ally because of the bad feelings still lingering from Costa Rica’s divorce from the Confederation in 1868. This bad blood took several years to patch over, as the delegates haggled over disputed borders with Nicaragua and the exact conditions of when internal strife could trigger the defensive alliance. This slow process neared completion in 1880, likely helped along in that year by a series of eye-witness accounts of revolution brought back from the handful of Centroamericans in Vienna or Berlin. The alliance was signed on 12 December 1880, with surveying for border demarcation to move forward at some later date. That this alliance with a weak and backwards neighbor was the greatest success of Central America’s search for allies speaks to the difficulty of the diplomatic and international environment in the Caribbean.

The Army of Central America that marched through Antigua Guatemala and up to the front lines in May 1880 was the best funded, largest, and most robust force that Central America had yet fielded against the Zelayistas. However, this still left it outdated by international standards, with its ancient colonial-era artillery and the decades-old Springfield rifle – the later purchased as surplus from the USA – all supplied and distributed in an irregular and ad hoc way. This outfitting was to prove decisive in the first stages of the conflict against the Zelayistas, as their looting of the armories at Santa Cruz and Quetzaltenango had left them with virtually identical equipment. As the Europeans had discovered in the 1870s, well-entrenched soldiers armed with long-range rifles are extremely difficult to dislodge without accurate long-range artillery. The handful of massively inaccurate cannon belonging to the Centroamerican Army was nowhere near fulfilling this need.

In agreement with the Guatemalan Army under Vicente Cerna y Cerna, General Zavala was to add his force to the main frontline between Antigua and Chimaltenango and push through in a single line of advance to Chimaltenango and, from there, to Patzicía and Tecpán. It became clear without the first weeks of the Centroamerican Army’s presence on the frontlines that the additional soldiers were not sufficient to break the frontlines. During the previous 4 years of stalemate, the Cernistas and Zelayistas had adjusted to static warfare and fortified the mountain passes between Chimaltenango and Antigua with dugouts and earthworks. To his credit, it took only a few companies being torn to shreds by rifle fire for Zavala to realize the futility of general frontal assaults on Zelayista positions. A new stratagem was not quick to come, however, and Zavala and his soldiers settled down behind the earthworks alongside the Cernista army.

Pictured: Cernista soldiers sitting in rifle pits dug between Chimaltenango and Antigua. With access to accurate long-rifles and without accurate indirect fire from artillery, fortified positions like this dugout were extremely difficult to assault.​

The inaction and stalemate did not sit well with either general and, having both failed to come up with a new way of attacking the Zelayista positions, Zavala and Cerna expressed their frustration by quarreling with each other and with the governments of the three eastern states. The resulting disagreements were those to be expected from any army unsuccessful in the field: complaints of insufficient men and materiel and of insubordination or incompetence from officers. Both general wrote several letters to the presidents and leading senators of Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua requesting additional funds and promising that the stalemate could be broken if only more funding and more arms and more men were placed at their disposal. Likewise, both received the same long letters back explaining that this what not possible due to the dire economic straits of the Confederation. In the winter of 1880/1881, the letters from politicians begin to become more acrimonious, insisting to Joaquín Zavala that his army is the utmost that Central America can provide and chastising him for not having succeeded with the force he was given.

By 1881, the generals also began to seriously feud with each other. During numerous meetings – at which both revealed their inability to come up with any new way of taken fortified Zelayist positions – Joaquín Zavala and Vicente Cerna had spent enough time together to become aggravated by the other’s habits; Cerna felt indignant that the younger man was not more deferential to his experience fighting Juan Antonio Zelaya, while Zavala was irritated by the other general’s overbearing and patronizing manner. The working relationship between the general only worsted as 1881 progressed, as discussions began back east about removing Zavala from command and replacing him with someone who would conduct the campaign as expected, possibly Cerna. It is very unlikely, looking at the deep ill will that Cerna’s refusal to follow civilian orders had embedded in Tegucigalpa and Managua, that Cerna would have ever been selected to lead the Army of Central America, but the fact that his name was even discussed made Zavala suspicious and uncooperative, to the point that meetings between the two generals stopped by the late spring of 1881.

The situation was made all the worst by the fact that, according to his private diaries, by May 1881, Joaquín Zavala had decided that the only way to break through the Zelayista lines was a massed frontal assault and would require accepting the high casualties that such an attack would involve. The issue was that high casualties, particularly among officers, would be a target for criticism and potentially the cause for his removal. Moreover, whatever forces were held in the reserve would have the opportunity to surge past the broken frontlines and, thus, proclaim themselves the victors. Now communicating with Cerna solely by letter and camp courier, Zavala proposed this new assault with Cerna’s Guatemalans as the vanguard. Although there is no evidence to claim that Cerna aspired to command of the Centroamerican Army nor that he shared Zavala’s insights into tactics, it was certainly clear to him that this battleplan involved his soldiers taking the brunt of the casualties and Zavala’s army remaining relatively unscathed. Assuming that his Cernistas were simply being used as cannon fodder, he returned a letter sarcastically approving the plan but suggesting that Zavala’s “superior forces” comprise the vanguard while the Cernistas remained in reserve. This, of course, perfectly played into Zavala’s anxieties, leading him to instead abandon the plan entirely and focus his efforts on disparaging Cerna in a series of letters dispatched to political allies.

The lack of a breakthrough at the front also fed political discord back in the state capitals, a tense situation exacerbated by the dire economic situation. Excepting the agricultural sector, the economy had yet to bounce back from the Panic of 1876 and actually experienced another major blow in 1880 as a result of the CSA’s abolition of slavery. As discussed previously, the businesses that best weathered the recession were large, established firms in the textile industry, primarily in Honduras. It was this same sector, however, that was most heavily tied to the CSA economy, depending on the CSA for nearly all of its cotton imports and most of its coal. With the abolition of slavery, the CSA’s cotton economy fell apart while planters and freedmen struggled to hash out a new system of labor relations. The resultant social turmoil meant that the 1881 cotton crop was a fraction of the size of the 1880 crop and, with most of it earmarked to the massive textile mills of Europe, Central American importers faced severe shortages, cutting production by over 70% in most major mills and forcing nearly all smaller mills to shutter entirely. Even though the cotton supply situation did improve over time, by 1884, textile production remained only 60% of what it had been in 1880.

This worsening of the economic crisis in the early 1880s produced new forms of government support for business that would change Central America’s economic landscape. These schemes will be discussed later as they took years to come to fruition; the importance of the economy in 1880 and 1881 was that it made Centroamerican politicians even less willing to part with their money and it injected a new source of discord into politics. The two issues – who was to blame for Central America’s dependence on CSA imports? and who was to blame for the stalemate in the war against the Zelayistas? – consumed Centroamerican politics throughout 1881 and made sure that nothing substantial was accomplished save a number of abandoned schemes to replace Zavala as commander of the Centroamerican Army.

While the military and political leadership of the Confederation of Central America were occupied with infighting, Juan Antonio Zelaya had been planning his next move in his war against the despotic regimes of Central America and Mexico. Having seen in 1878 that the capture of major cities in Mexico triggered a hefty response from an otherwise neglectful government in Mexico, Zelaya decide to continue using Mexico as safe haven in which to recruit and collect taxes and concentrate militarily on recapturing Ciudad Guatemala for his own republic. Unlike his Centroamerican counterparts, he managed to come up with a military plan to circumvent the dug-in Centroamericans outside Antigua. Not burdened by concern for international sentiments, Zelaya intended to gather his forces at Mazatenango and cross the border into Guatemala to threaten the cities of the coastal plain.

Zelaya launched his offensive in August 1881, diverting thousands of soldiers from the mountains onto the plains and marching them towards Escuintla. Although the area was garrisoned and generally hostile to the Zelayistas, Zelaya scrupulously avoided entering settlements and, their homes unthreatened, faced few units willing to attack his much larger force. Knowing that his invasion had been reported up the chain of command and either Cerna or Zavala would be marching down to meet him in battle – a correct assumption – Zelaya decided to lay a trap based on his failed invasion of El Salvador in 1875. Zelaya sent out his cavalry to ride quickly east towards San Salvador, hoping to distract the Centroamericans by this feint while his main force actually took Escuintla and approached Ciudad Guatemala via the southern passes.

The plan work brilliantly, with local telegraph offices reported the rapid progress of the Zelayista cavalry to San Salvador and triggered a panic in the city. Under direct order from the Salvadoran Minister of War, José Rosales Herrador – an order reaffirmed by Nicaraguan President Fernando Guzmán – Zavala uprooted the bulk of his force and marched east to chase the Zelayista cavalry. This, of course, was exactly the response Zelaya was counting on as he, without any knowledge of whether his feint had actually worked, led the main body of his army in an assault on Escuintla, which surrendered under generous terms on 5 September 1881. From Escuintla, the Zeyalista army then progressed northward through the mountain passes, arriving at Lago de Amatitlán and the southern approaches to Ciudad Guatemala before any serious resistance could be mustered. By the second week of September 1881, Zelaya had succeeded in establishing a new front against Ciudad Guatemala and cut off the Cernista forces now trapped at Antigua.

Pictured: Telegraph office in Barberena, Guatemala, c. 1890. The installation of telegraph lines throughout Central America in the 1870s allowed for instantaneous communication, tying the country closer together and also changing how the army fought​

Zavala received word of the Zeyalista attack on Escuintla via telegraph, but continued to lead the majority of his force against Zeyala’s feint despite recognizing the cavalry maneuver as such. This is one of the few instances where, despite his reputation for boldness, Zavala bowed to political pressure and civilian authority. The Salvadorans, with the support of Honduras and Nicaragua, insisted that any threat to their countries be prioritized over the war in Guatemala. Zavala appears to have, against his own military judgement, acceded to this demand out of a feeling that his position as commander was precarious and that making the right military decision to turn back and intercept Zelaya at Escuintla or Amatitlán might cost him command of the Centroamerican Army. As someone who had spent the better part of a year fighting off schemes – real or imagined – to unseat him as commander, Zavala was willing to demonstrate political loyalty at the expense of military operations.

Although it may have saved Zavala his job, listening to the politicians resulted in a major loss against the Zelayistas. With Zavala’s Army of Centroamerica marching to defend El Salvador, the Centroamerican forces around Ciudad Guatemala were left in a weak position. The bulk of the Cernistas were entrenched in Antigua, now cut off from supplies and reinforcements and facing an enemy at their unguarded rear. Only a small force had been kept in reserve in Ciudad Guatemala and this alone, combined with a militia of propertied residents, was responsible from defending the capital from a 2,000-strong Zelayista army. The arrival of the Zelayista army caused a panic in Ciudad Guatemala as, again, residents packed up all their belongings and fled on the road east. Pressing his numerical advantage over the defenders, Zelaya sent his men to repeatedly flank the city, forcing its Cernista defenders to retreat to avoid encirclement until, on 29 September 1881, the Zelayistas completed a push into the northern section of the city and chased the Cernistas out of the valley altogether.

The threat toward El Salvador that had justified Zavala’s absence proved to be illusory. The Zelayista cavalry division crossed into El Salvador and skirmished with some army units in the vicinity of Sonsonate before retreating back west upon Zavala’s approach. They then proceeded to lead Zavala’s army on a chase towards the Mexican border, crossing into Mexico to his great frustration. This incident, even more than the initial invasion coming from Mexican territory, caused immense aggravation in Central America and the Confederal Congress issued a resolution at the end of September demanding that Mexico cease allowing its territory to be used by forces hostile to Central America. The Mexican Ambassador in Tegucigalpa, responding to the resolution, was placed in a difficult position, trying to communicate the honest wish of the Mexican government to take action against Zelaya without publicly admitting that Mexico lacked effective control over large portions of its own territory, including much of rural Chiapas.

Pictured: Riots and labor unrest in Leon, Mexico, c. 1885. Mexico experienced severe upheaval throughout the 1870s and 1880s as multiple groups tried to overthrow the dictator Porfirio Diaz. His embattled government effectively abandoned control of many areas of the country, such as Chiapas.​

At the start of October 1881, the Zelayistas had against reached a high-water mark of territorial control in Gauatemala and their recapture of a – mostly uninhabited – Ciudad Guatemala made the politicians back in San Salvador, Tegucigalpa, and Managua white with terror and impotent rage. Despite furious demands that something must be done, Zavala was largely unable to do anything to dislodge Zelaya. The mountain passes surrounding Ciudad Guatemala protected it from attack and Zavala was unable to assault the city or relieve the forces trapped in Antigua with the some 4,000 soldiers available to him. Cerna, trapped in Antigua with his men; Zavala; and the politicians in the eastern capitals could only watch and seethe as Juan Antonio Zelaya again assumed residence in the Plaza de Armas as the capital of his own republic.

With hindsight, the intelligent decision for the Zelayistas in the fall of 1881 would have been to finish starving out the Cernistas at Antigua while fortifying the approaches to Ciudad Guatemala. Fortunately for the Cernistas and their Centroamerican allies, Juan Antonio Zelaya allowed ambition to get the better of him and made the folly of facing Zavala’s Army of Central America in open battle. Assured by his recapture of Ciudad Guatemala that he was a tactician vastly superior to his opponents, Zelaya was determined to follow victory with victory and so march east towards El Salvador. Tactically, his logic was that the Centroamerican Army had to divide its forces to guard the multiple valleys going away from Ciudad Guatemala, meaning that a concentration of Zelayista forces in any particular location would result in localized numerical superiority and Zelayista victory. While this was a good idea, and one Napoleon Bonaparte and used on many different occasions, it neglected the establishment of a telegraph network through eastern Guatemala in the late 1870s, an advantage that would give Zavala advanced warning of where the Zelayistas were concentrated.

On 8 November 1881, President Zelaya led his army out of Ciudad Guatemala to the east, a situation telegraphed to Zavala from the post in Barberena. He sent out instructions for his dispersed forces to assemble in the area, but not engage the enemy, and, leaving the provincial capital of Cuilapa with a small force, Zavala faced down Zelaya on the road between Barberena and Cuilapa. Believing he was facing only this small force, Zelaya attacked. When they heard the sounds of gunfire, the other wings of the Centroamerican Army advanced from the north and south, pinning the surprised Zelayista army. The Battle of Cuilapa was a bloody defeat for Zelaya, with his army seeing high casualties and most of the rearguard encircled and captured. In a display of brutality to become typical of the Second Maya War, Zavala accepted their surrender only to have all of the men shot regardless of rank.

Pictured: A painting commemorating the Battle of Cuilapa, at which Zavala defeated Zelaya. This artist has captured the poor quality of outfitting given to even the Army of Central America, portraying many of the soldiers as lacking shoes. ​

General Zavala followed up his victory at Cuilapa by harrying the retreating Zelayistas back toward Ciudad Guatemala. Now in a complete route and with most units having become separated from their officers, the Zelayistas were unable to mount an effective defense and continued their retreat toward Ciudad Guatemala. The natural defenses of Ciudad Guatemala now became a trap for the Zelayistas, as they were pursued into the valley and found the remnants of Cerna’s army blocking their westward retreat. Unwilling to let his forces be trapped and massacred, Zelaya ordered his soldiers to abandon their few cannons and most of their supplies and join him on a difficult march through the northern mountains towards the Rio Motagua beyond.

News of the victory at Cuilapa and the recapture of Ciudad Guatemala on 12 November 1881 was greeted with jubilation by the Confederal Congress in Tegucigalpa and in the streets of the eastern capitals. It also placed the Centroamericans in their strongest military position in years. Now reunited with Cerna and with Zelaya in flight, Zavala decided to press his advantage and attack the fortified lines at Chimaltenango. To resolve the previous issue of who would constitute the vanguard and who the reserve, Zavala leveraged his political capital to force the vanguard position upon Cerna. In a dramatic letter sent to the presidents of Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador, Joaquín Zavala threatened to resign unless Cerna was forced into subordinating his own forces to Zavala’s overall command. Not wanting to lose the general who had given them their last major victory over the Zelayistas, Presidents José Francisco Montes, Jose Maria Rivas, and Fernando Guzmán all responded by sending threatening letters to Vicente Cerna, warning that – although he was the sovereign leader of Guatemala leading his own nation’s army – if he did not submit to Zavala’s authority, it would become the goal of the Confederation’s most powerful men to exile him to the political wilderness forevermore. Already worried about plots within the Guatemalan Congress – still meeting in San Salvador for safety – to replace him, Cerna submitted to Zavala’s bullying and resentfully agreed to a plan in which his Guatemalans served as the vanguard of an attack.

The political infighting between the generals over whose men bore the brunt of the assault was unnecessary, however, as the Zelayista camp was in disarray. News of the terrible defeat at Cuilapa had gotten through, but so had unfounded rumors of Zelaya’s execution at the hands of the Cernistas. When Zavala and Cerna launched their assault on Chimaltenango on 30 November 1881, they found that resistance was lacking and that many of the dugouts were abandoned, either by deserting soldiers or having been stripped of defenders during Zelaya’s push east. Once the Cernistas had made it through the fortified line at Chimaltenango, they were able to easily advance into the unguarded interior of Zelaya’s Free and Sovereign Republic of Guatemala. Resistance faded away before the Centroamerican Army, as Zelayista soldiers and administrators fled or went into hiding to avoid the bloody reprisals awaiting them. Those soldiers who did not strip off their uniforms upon hearing of the advancing army fled into the northern mountains towards Santa Cruz. By the end of January 1882, the Centroamerican Army had occupied Tecpán and restored control over the border with Mexican Sololá.

The return of Cernista rule in early 1882 was accompanied by the expected reprisals. Most of the men elected since Zelaya’s revolution had the sense to flee to Santa Cruz or to friendly towns in Mexico, leaving most communities without their elected leaders. Those few who stayed behind were captured by the Cernistas and subjected to humiliating public punishments, particularly flogging. The minority arrested by detachments of the Army of Centroamerica, which quartered itself in the cities rather than occupying the villages, were summarily shot. Alongside the armies came the hacendados and the old alcaldes, who quickly installed themselves back in their estates and villas and acted as the local instigators for reprisals against those who had supported Zelaya.

Encamped with the remnants of his army in Santa Cruz, the city of his first conquest, Zelaya consulted with his political and military advisors on how to reverse his recent losses. The Zelayista position in 1882 was weak, but still stronger than it had been at the start of his revolution in 1871; the Zelayistas controlled the Verapaz and the upper reaches of the Rio Motagua, and could move freely throughout Chiapas. Zelaya was determined to retake the central highlands and, eventually, all Guatemala and made preparations for an invasion to be launched in early 1883. While these preparations were underway, Zelaya approved several small operations to secure his base in Santa Cruz from attack, including an attack on Livingston. Livingston was the only area north of the Rio Motagua under firm Cernista control and had previously been used as a staging ground for the private army of the Verapaz Railroad Company, so it was an obvious target for any army trying to prevent an invasion the Verapaz.

Although the plan was in place in the first months of 1882, Zelaya’s supporters were scattered and trickling in and many of their pack animals had been abandoned during the retreat and new ones had to be acquired. This meant that no army was assembled for the Livingston campaign until June 1882. A force of around 500 men was assigned to capture Livingston and led by Serapio Cruz, an old Guatemalan liberal and army officer who had left exile in Mexico to support President Zelaya. Approaching from the north, Serapio Cruz and his men easily forced the town’s small garrison into a few strong houses, but not before much of the population had fled by boat. Two days into his attack, and still unable to take the last strong houses, Cruz was alerted to the presence of armed Centroamerican steamers approaching the coast. Fearing, correctly, that these were reinforcements to relieve the city, Cruz called off the attack, set fire some of the city’s warehouses, and retreated. The fire then spread quickly through the abandoned city and burned Livingston entirely to the ground, a sight witnessed by multiple steamers and widely reported in the Centroamerican press as a deliberate act of savagery by the rebels.

Picture: A painting of the Burning of Livingston in June 1882. The fire spread from warehouses to the city itself and the fire that consumed the wooden town was witnessed by hundreds on boats in Amatique Bay.​

 

[Chilango2]

Your ability to capture the nasty small wars and make them take their place of importance to all the parties involved continues to impress me.