Caste war

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The so-called caste war ( Spanish Guerra de Castas ) was a temporarily successful, but ultimately failed war of independence of the Mayan population on the Yucatán peninsula in the years 1847 to 1901, which formally began with the capture of the last independent Mayan base of Chan Santa Cruz by the Mexican Troops ended.

history

background

Even after the independence of the republics of Latin America, the Mayan rural population found itself in a situation of harshest exploitation by the white upper class, which ruled alone ( taxes , forced labor , expansion of white large estates by confiscating the land of the indigenous inhabitants and all undeveloped areas), which led to an aggravation the economic situation and thus to increased unrest among the indigenous people. Just as little as with independent Mexico , the Mayas could not identify with the White Yucatans, the Yucatecos , and the Republic of Yucatán , which they proclaimed .

procedure

The trigger for the first revolt on July 30, 1847 in Tepich in what is now Quintana Roo , about 50 km west of Valladolid , was the execution of the Maya leader Manuel Antonio Hay (or Ay) and two other Maya personalities. The uprising spread first to Tihosuco and then to the whole of eastern Yucatan, and later to the entire peninsula. In 1848 the Mayans had practically the entire peninsula under their control, except for the cities of Mérida , Campeche and some cities in between. Against this background, when the war between the USA and Mexico was raging at the same time , the government of Yucatán offered the USA, Great Britain and Spain the surrender of their sovereignty, provided that the corresponding colonial power would destroy the Maya fighters. After the peace agreement between the United States and Mexico, the Yucatán finally agreed to the re-annexation to Mexico, which took place on August 17, 1848.

It remains unclear why the Maya did not take advantage of the favorable situation and stormed the last bases of the whites. It is known that a large part of the Mayan fighters, who were also farmers, left the fighting lines for the sowing. It is believed that the Mayan leaders Jacinto Pat and Cecilio Chí had no interest in the cities of the white people and viewed the fight as an exclusively defensive war. The ability of the poorly armed and trained Mayan fighters to conquer cities at all is also questioned.

Maya sphere of influence around 1870

After the reunification with Mexico in 1848, this group sent troops to Yucatán, which quickly subdued a large part of the peninsula.

The governor of Yucatán, Miguel Barbachano , on his own initiative sold 140 and then a second time 195 captured Maya as slaves to Cuba, which at that time was still a Spanish colony. In doing so, he violated the law of the Republic of Mexico, which, in contrast to the Spanish colonial empire, had abolished all forms of slavery. The government in Mexico City only found out about this through a report from the Mexican consul in Havana .

However, parts of eastern Yucatán remained under the control of the Maya, who waged a guerrilla war until 1901 . In 1858 Mayan rebels destroyed the city of Bacalar , which had been under Mayan rule from 1847–1849. The political and religious center of the Maya became Chan Santa Cruz , where the Maya fighters, the Cruzoob , practiced the religious rite of the Speaking Cross . Two attacks by Mexican troops on Chan Santa Cruz in 1851 and 1860 were repulsed. A second cult center with a speaking cross was Tulúm , which had to repel a Mexican attack in 1871 with heavy losses.

On January 11, 1884, a general from Chan Santa Cruz and the lieutenant governor of Yucatán signed a treaty in Belize City in which the Maya recognized the sovereignty of Mexico and in exchange Mexico accepted the Maya leader Crescencio Poot as governor of the Mexican state of Chan Santa Cruz . In 1885, however, Crescencio Poot was murdered by opponents from Chan Santa Cruz, and these, inspired by the Speaking Cross, continued the war.

In addition to the state of Chan Santa Cruz with over 30,000 inhabitants, which stretched from Tulum to the border with British Honduras , there were two other more important independent Maya states: The approximately 1,000 Ixcanha -Maya, which continued to adhere to traditional Catholicism, and the Icaiche -Maya, who also undertook raids into British Honduras. Both groups were enemies with the Cruzoob and made peace with the Mexicans towards the end of the 19th century.

Conquest of the Maya territory around 1901

A border agreement between Mexico and Great Britain, the then colonial rulers of Belize, in 1893 laid the basis for the final submission of the still independent Maya. The British undertook to stop all trade (weapons for wood) with the rebellious Maya. In 1898 the Mexican port city Payo Obispo (today Chetumal ) was founded. In 1901 Mexican units under General Ignacio Bravo took the Maya city of Chan Santa Cruz , which had already been vacated by the Cruzoob , completely destroyed it and founded the city of Santa Cruz de Bravo (named after the victorious General Bravo, since 1930 Felipe Carrillo Puerto) in its place ) and opened them up via the Decauville railway Vigía Chico - Santa Cruz, which went into operation in 1905 . The forests have been cleared for deforestation by some logging companies. The former Maya area in East Yucatán was politically separated from the state of Yucatán as the territory of Quintana Roo (since 1974 state) in 1902 and administered by the governor General Bravo appointed by Porfirio Díaz .

After the fall of Porfirio Díaz in the course of the Mexican Revolution , General Bravo was replaced as governor of the Quintana Roo territory by General Salvador Alvarado , who was tasked with eliminating the socio-economic causes of the war and who declared the caste war to be over in September 1915 . In the 1920s, the lands looted in 1901 in the area of ​​what was once Chan Santa Cruz were returned to the Mayan village communities.

Nevertheless, there were frequent skirmishes between Cruzoob and government forces. The last battle of the 85-year war took place in April 1933, when five Maya and two Mexican soldiers died when the Mexican army stormed the village of Dzula. The last Cruzoob signed a peace treaty with the Mexican government in 1935, in which they recognized the state authority of Mexico, but could still - to this day - administer their villages themselves and cultivate the cult of the Speaking Cross on a peaceful basis.

Estimates of the total number of fatalities as a result of the direct effects of the caste war, which was very bloody for a long time, amount to 40,000 to 50,000 people on both sides.

literature

  • Alfonso Villa Rojas: Los elegidos de Dios - etnografía de los mayas de Quintana Roo. Capítulo III: La guerra de castas y el aislamiento de Quintana Roo. Capítulo IV: La pacificaicón de Quintana Roo. México, Instituto Nacional Indigenista, 1987, ISBN 9688220779 .
  • Silvia Terán Contreras, Christian Heilskov Rasmussen: Xocén - el pueblo en el centro del mundo, p. 49-62: Guerra de Castas. Ediciones de la Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, Mérida 2005. ISBN 9706981055 .
  • Nelson A. Reed: The Caste War of Yucatán. Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif., 2001, ISBN 0-8047-4000-3 .
  • Wolfgang Gabbert: Violence and Ethnicity in the Caste War of Yucatán . 2000 (English, PDF, 106 kB ).

Web links