The Prospect

The nineteenth century was a particularly violent period in Latin American history. The wars of independence against Spain between 1810 and the mid-1820s brought devastation to many regions. In contrast to the relative stability of three hundred years of colonial rule, the newly independent countries were shaken by countless military coups, civil wars and popular rebellions. Society was militarized to a substantial degree since large sections of the male population participated in warfare. The collapse of colonial institutions and the long absence of a strong central government took its toll. Although the wars of independence brought freedom from colonial rule, they did little to improve the living conditions of the masses. Working conditions for laborers remained oppressive, while commercial agriculture, often devoted to export crops, expanded at the expense of peasant farming. Beyond this, the new elite of Spanish-speaking Creoles, as those of alleged Hispanic descent born in the Americas were called, dismantled the colonial laws that had partially protected the communal property of the rural, mostly indigenous, population, a move that led to widespread social unrest.Footnote ¹

Mexico was no exception to this state of affairs. A succession of more than fifty governments “ranging from monarchy or dictatorship to constitutional republicanism” headed the state between 1821 and 1857.Footnote ² Dozens of rural uprisings unsettled the country, particularly since the 1840s.Footnote ³ These were frequently depicted by contemporary elites as racial or caste wars, that is, indigenous revolts against the rest of the population.Footnote ⁴ The so-called Guerra de Castas or Caste War of Yucatán in the tropical southeast of the country, the focus of this book, was among the most important of these rural insurgencies in nineteenth-century Mexico for at least three reasons:

1. 1. Its duration and magnitude. In its most intense phase from 1847 to the mid-1850s, it assumed the character of a full-blown civil war that affected large sections of the regional population. The conflict continued up to the beginning of the twentieth century in the form of guerilla warfare and raiding.

2. 2. The tremendous loss of human life and material resources. The population of Yucatán dropped by more than 40 percent between 1846 and 1862 alone.Footnote ⁵ Thus, even in its civil war phase, the Caste War lasted longer and claimed more victims than most other wars and rebellions in nineteenth-century Mexico.Footnote ⁶

3. 3. Its consequences. After initial success in 1847–8, the rebels, who mostly stemmed from the Maya-speaking lower classes, were forced to retreat to the isolated southern and eastern areas of the Yucatán peninsula (today Quintana Roo) where they established independent polities. The rebels and their descendants became known as kruso’b, which in Yucatec Maya simply means “the crosses,” a term derived from the religious cult that emerged among them in 1850. The cult centered on idols in the form of a cross that were imputed with the ability to speak.Footnote ⁷ Supported by this ideology, the rebels succeeded in maintaining their independence from the governments of Yucatán and Mexico for half a century.

“There is only one remedy for this war: war to the death, war without quarter.”Footnote ⁸ This statement by an army officer in the early 1850s describes the nature of the Caste War in a nutshell. The general level of violence was indeed high during the war. Even Mexican General Severo del Castillo, director of the campaign against the Caste War rebels in the mid-1860s, had to admit that “barbarous and cruel actions were as common among whites as they were among Indians.” Prisoners were occasionally mistreated or killed on the spot, and houses, property and fields destroyed.Footnote ⁹ Some examples indicate the spectrum of atrocities committed: Caste War rebels captured by government forces during an expedition to Bacalar in 1850 were brought to the village of Kankabchén and hanged from a scaffold, their bodies dragged by cavalrymen (cosacos) and flung onto a small square on the road to rancho Dzelcacab.Footnote ¹⁰ When the army attacked the rebel hideout Bolonná in late March 1855, it caught seven or eight of the defenders, who were then “put to the sword.” Later, the soldiers summarily executed two captives from an ambush.Footnote ¹¹ The rebels, for their part, frequently killed prisoners captured in combat.Footnote ¹² Non-combatants likewise suffered from their outrages during assaults. When Becanchén was raided in late December 1855, for example, the rebels set fire to the village, and killed sixteen men and women, while others were burned to death in their houses.Footnote ¹³

Although violence tends to appear chaotic, random and irrational, this book takes as its starting point that certain patterns, motives and underlying causes of rebellions and civil wars such as the Yucatán Caste War go beyond individual meanness and brutality. As Stathis Kalyvas, adopting ideas from Goethe and Shakespeare, puts it: “There is logic in madness and hell has its laws.”Footnote ¹⁴ My hope is to bring at least some order into the apparent chaos of the fighting, looting and killing that characterized the Caste War. This order cannot be deduced from such general factors as poverty, oppression or racial hatred but can only evolve from careful consideration of the specific social contexts and dynamics of the violent acts concerned. I am somewhat skeptical, however, of trends in the sociology of violence that plead for a shift from “why” questions that look for reasons to “how” questions that concentrate on performance, since these minimize the importance of searching for causes. The late Trutz von Trotha denied, for example, that an understanding of violence could be found “in any ‘causes’ beyond the violence.” In his view, the key to violence lay “in the forms of violence itself.”Footnote ¹⁵ By stressing performance, nevertheless, von Trotha and others hint at a significant point, namely, that violence should be examined as a process and often a highly dynamic one at that.Footnote ¹⁶

The following chapters are an attempt to gain a deeper understanding of the drama of the Caste War that haunted Yucatán for more than fifty years by elucidating both the structural features of politics, society and the economy (such as colonial heritage, political instability and the grabbing of peasant or national lands by the elites) and, as far as the sources permit, the situational factors that facilitated or fostered the use of violence within and between the contending parties. Although gaps remain, the available information allows for the partial reconstruction of key events and processes, of patterns of violent behavior and of the social, political and ideological context of acts of violence. Among other things, different types of violence will be discerned (internal versus external). Beyond this, tentative hypotheses on the meaning of violent action can be formulated.

Of course, no single book can do justice to the bewildering complexity of participants’ motives, actions or reactions and the intended or unintended consequences of their deeds in a conflict such as the Caste War. Furthermore, several imbalances in the existing sources are reflected in this volume. Firstly, the book concentrates on the perpetrators rather than the victims of violence.Footnote ¹⁷ Secondly, it is predominantly a book about violence and men. There are several partly interrelated reasons for this. While women actively participated in rebellions in colonial Mexico, as William Taylor has shown, and took part in armed conflict in the formal role of soldiers in some societies – think of the female warriors in the West African Kingdom of Dahomey – they are heavily underrepresented as victimizers in most historical cases of collective violence.Footnote ¹⁸ As for the Caste War, little is yet known about the part women played in the conflict, not least due to the male bias of the sources, where women mostly appear as victims of male violence associated with rebel or army assaults. As Georgina Rosado Rosado and Landy Santana Rivas argue, however, it is conceivable that at least some women played a leading military, political and religious role among the Caste War rebels.Footnote ¹⁹

Such lacunae notwithstanding, this book endeavors to provide critical data and make the Caste War accessible to the comparative study of civil wars, rebellions and collective violence.

Existing Scholarship on the Caste War

A book about violence during the Caste War in Yucatán may appear trite at first glance. What could be more obvious, more “natural,” than violence in a bloody confrontation that lasted more than fifty years and took the lives of thousands? This apparent banality might explain why so little work has hitherto been done on the topic. While the general course of the war is well documented,Footnote ²⁰ I know of no major in-depth study that concentrates on the violence of the Caste War, with the exception of pioneering work by Paul Sullivan (Reference Sullivan1997a; Reference Sullivan2004), the books of Martha Villalobos González (Reference Villalobos González2006) and Terry Rugeley (Reference Rugeley2009), and several studies of my own.Footnote ²¹

Nelson Reed’s The Caste War of Yucatán (Reference Reed1964) is without doubt the most widely read modern study of the conflict. With its many reprints, translation into Spanish and publication of a revised edition (Reference Reed2001), it drew the attention of a broader international public to the war in a hitherto remote and little-known region of Mexico. This highly readable book offers a lively account of the course of the war and of crucial aspects of rebel, social and religious organization, which will be discussed in detail in Chapter 15. War-related violence as such, however, is not analyzed in detail. The first part of Reed’s book is entitled “The Two Worlds of Yucatán” (The Ladino World and the Mazehual World), highlighting the separation of non-Indians and Indians in the region. In line with this conception, Reed basically considered the Caste War a result of Maya resistance to Ladino oppression, an interpretation that continues to prevail in part of the academy and the wider public.Footnote ²²

Terry Rugeley (Reference Rugeley1996) and Don Dumond (Reference Dumond1997), in contrast, argue that the municipal level saw intensive interaction between Indians and non-Indians (vecinos), including intermarriage, and that members of both categories participated jointly in numerous political and sometimes military affairs. While Rugeley concentrates on the decades preceding the outbreak of the conflict, Dumond offers a detailed encyclopedic account of the war, including material on hitherto rarely studied rebel groups in the south of Yucatán (pacíficos del sur). Careaga Viliesid (Reference 326Careaga Viliesid1998) discusses military confrontations up to the late 1860s and provides an extended account and interpretation of the kruso’b cult up to the 1990s. Hence, all three books present vital information on the causes, origins and development of the war, as well as on several aspects of rebel religious organization, but do not focus on Caste War violence as such.

The works of Paul Sullivan, Martha Villalobos González and Terry Rugeley are of particular importance here in addressing crucial aspects of Caste War violence. In his groundbreaking article, Sullivan (Reference Sullivan1997a) offers the first systematic study of major aspects of kruso’b warfare, such as the number, timing and duration of raids on the Yucatecan frontier, the rebel economy and the motivations of leaders and the rank-and-file to participate. His marvelous book Xuxub Must Die (Reference Sullivan2004) provides additional data on kruso’b raiding and the nature of rebel leadership in his meticulous analysis of one rebel assault in the 1870s. Villalobos González (Reference Villalobos González2006) further deepens our understanding of the rebel economy and rebel politics in her study of the exploitation of forest resources as a major source of revenue. The exploitation of forest resources permitted the preservation of rebel autonomy for five decades, on the one hand, but became a bone of contention among the leadership, on the other, resulting in divisions and, at times, violent conflict among and between the different groups.

Rugeley’s voluminous study from 2009 is a shrewd and detailed treatment of Yucatán’s history from the independence era in the 1820s to the establishment of authoritarian rule in Mexico by Porfirio Díaz and the beginnings of a henequen (sisal) boom in Yucatán in the 1880s. His ambition is to fill a persistent research lacuna and to rectify what he considers the “ethnohistorical apartheid” that plagues existing scholarship, the fact that we know “more about the rebels’ maroon world than about the larger Yucatecan society and how it pulled out of the wreckage and went on.”Footnote ²³ As Rugeley shows, not all of the region was affected by the Caste War in like manner, and conflict with rebels and their descendants became less and less important as time went on. Although violence plays a major role in his account, it is not the main analytical thrust. In contrast to the present study, which also analyzes developments in the rebel territory, he focuses on social and political institutions in areas controlled by the government.

Unlike existing scholarship, forms and patterns of violence take center stage in the present book. Violence is a reality that is molded by economic, political and social features and, in turn, molds numerous aspects of people’s lives. While there is an obvious overlap in terms of sources used and topics discussed in relation to existing studies, the particular focus of this book leads to different emphases, the scrutiny of matters not exhaustively analyzed so far and, consequently, to partly divergent conclusions on key issues such as the constitutive role of internal and external violence in the political organization of the rebels, the logic involved in killing or sparing individual categories of captives (men, women, children, upper class, lower class), and the function of internal and external violence in the government forces, on the one hand, and among the rebels, on the other.

While the Caste War is often seen by the wider public and part of scholarship as a conflict between two unitary actors, that is, the whites and the Maya or the army and the rebels,Footnote ²⁴ it will be shown here that Indians and non-Indians fought and died on both sides. The book discusses the violence between the contending parties but also the use of force in their own camps.Footnote ²⁵ As will be argued, violence was instrumental in shaping the social organization of the conflict groups. In addition, the nature of the war changed through time and, for some participants, violence became a means of “production” as much as of destruction. While large sections of the population suffered greatly during the war, violent acts provided others with a source of income, prestige and power.

This book is the result of an interdisciplinary endeavor that combined the painstaking investigation of primary historical sources with an explicit discussion of findings from the anthropology and sociology of violence. While the latter provided the conceptual tools to order and analyze the myriad of empirical data and allowed for the formulation of hypotheses for their interpretation, the former helped to maintain a sense of the complexities, contradictions and contingencies of social reality. Beyond this, the book is a conscious attempt to link Caste War studies to the anthropology and sociology of violence and war, and to make this case more accessible to comparative social science research. The relationship between violence and political organization and their commonalities and particularities in both conflict groups (Caste War rebels and government forces) is discussed and correlated with the results of comparative studies of armed groups.

The Sources

This book is based on the study of extensive unpublished documents from various archives in Mexico City (Archivo General de la Nación, AGN; and Archivo Histórico Militar, Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional, AHM), Mérida (Archivo General del Estado de Yucatán, AGEY; and Centro de Apoyo a la Investigación Histórica de Yucatán, CAIHDY, now Biblioteca Yucatanense), Conkal (Archivo Histórico del Arzobispado de Yucatán, AHAY; and Archivo Carrillo y Ancona del Seminario de Yucatán, ACASY) and Campeche (Archivo General del Estado de Campeche, AGEC), and published primary sources such as the official newspapers of the states of Yucatán and Campeche from the 1840s to the end of the nineteenth century. Many of the sources provide data on the damage caused by rebel assaults, the course of military expeditions, and occasionally a body count of putative rebels who were captured, wounded or killed. They offer comparatively little detailed information on specific contexts, however, or on the performance of individual acts of violence. Nevertheless, numerous military reports contain descriptions of armed engagements. Statements by captured rebels and former prisoners of the insurgents give major insights into everyday life, including the role of violence.

With respect to the Caste War, the researcher faces a problem familiar from the study of insurgencies of subaltern groups in general, namely, that the overwhelming majority of the sources stems from the pen of rebel adversaries. There are, however, some written statements by insurgents, including internal military and mundane communications, proclamations of the Speaking Cross habitually signed with “Juan de la Cruz” (John of the Cross), letters to the government and correspondence with priests, officials and others. These provide at least a glimpse of their worldviews.

Of course, none of these sources can be taken at face value but should be critically interrogated for their ideological background and political or personal aims, such as inflating enemy losses to promote one’s military success. The problem of biased or entirely false accounts is particularly acute in conflict and war, since accusations of undue violence are made regularly to discredit the adversary. Only rarely are we lucky enough to come across documents that reveal such attempts, as occurred with reference to the nature of the Caste War. While the Yucatán government depicted the conflict in its public discourse as a race war, in which the Indian population set out to exterminate the peninsula’s non-Indian inhabitants, the governor explicitly denied this claim in a classified document from 1847 I found in the state archive in Mérida.Footnote ²⁶ We are frequently less fortunate, however, and do not have the necessary sources at our disposal to verify accounts of violence. While statements by adversaries should thus be treated with caution, other people may also have an interest in inventing or distorting evidence. Such is the case, for example, with the story of a farm hand who presented himself in Mérida in 1862 as Isidoro Chan from the town of Pisté. He informed the authorities that he had been kidnapped by the kruso’b in a raid on the said town and described in gruesome detail some of the atrocities they had committed. Having entangled himself in contradictions, however, it transpired that he had never been to Pisté and that in reality his name was Isidoro Tun. He had invented the story to disguise the fact that he was a fugitive peon from a hacienda near Tixpéual.Footnote ²⁷ The main tools at our disposal for veracity control of our sources are the examination of logical consistency, the search for internal contradictions and, where available, cross checks with other accounts of the same event.

The Structure of the Book

Part I briefly discusses the results from the anthropology and sociology of violence that seem most significant for the topic of this book. These help to understand the dynamics of the Caste War and to recognize the key structural and social contexts in which violent acts evolved. Rather than interpreting it as an irrational outburst of atavistic instincts, violence should be understood in most cases as a multi-faceted means to achieve certain ends. It can be used to obtain material gain, establish dominance or express ideas. Violence and war have strong transformative qualities, so that the political, social or ethnic composition of the contending parties and their motives for fighting can undergo change over time. In addition, the reasons why leaders take part in the struggle may differ radically from those of the rank and file.

Part II gives a short description of Yucatán’s key social characteristics in the nineteenth century, allowing the reader to place subsequent chapters in their historical context. The persistence of colonial structures and the enduring importance of racist arguments in the elite discourse following Yucatán’s independence from Spain in 1821 are fundamental to understanding the conflicts that led to the outbreak of the Caste War and its interpretation by numerous contemporary observers as a racial fray. It is shown, furthermore, that for many Yucatecans violence was part of everyday life beyond the rebellion, particularly in the countryside. Widespread destruction and cruelty to combatants and non-combatants alike had been common in previous insurgencies and wars, and re-emerged in the frequent uprisings and coups that haunted Yucatán during the Caste War.

Part III provides a chronological outline of the principal events and phases of the uprising and serves as a guideline and contextualization for the more topical discussions in subsequent chapters. The chapters in this part discuss the origins of the Caste War in the strife between two Yucatecan political factions in 1847 and describe the advance of the rebels up to mid-1848, their retreat to the southeast of the peninsula due to internal discord and the arrival of government troop reinforcements. Particular attention is given to the most intense combat period that saw a ruthless counter-insurgency campaign lasting until the mid-1850s. The rebels were indomitable, however, and created independent polities whose autonomy endured until 1901, when Mexican forces finally crushed rebel resistance in a massive military offensive.

Parts IV and V discuss the structural and situational features that fostered violence both within and between the contending parties. Internal violence played a crucial role when it came to enforcing order and military discipline, as a deterrent against desertion or to gaining and preserving status and power among the rebels. In addition to military considerations in the narrow sense, the need to procure food by harvesting enemy cornfields, for example, or the quest for enrichment by looting or putting prisoners to work often triggered external violence. Both rebel and government forces were guilty of strategic massacres and other atrocities in a show of force or an attempt to demoralize the enemy and, at times, of situational carnages as acts of hatred and revenge.

While material incentives partly provoked violent behavior in soldiers, Part V argues that the use of force by and among the kruso’b cannot be understood in isolation from their political organization or their economy, which was based on looting Yucatecan settlements and lumbering in the area under their control. When the original military and social organization became untenable as a result of death, destruction, flight and dispersal during the war, the religious cult of the Speaking Cross provided solace and hope, and an alternative organizational focus. Allegiance to the town of origin and a number of chiefs endowed with traditional legitimacy as community leaders was replaced by identification with the cult and fealty to potent warriors. Rebel leaders began to legitimize their violent deeds as “orders from the cross.” Beyond this, the use of force was an essential component of the emerging political structure, which could be described as strongmen rule (caudillaje or caudillo politics).

Part VI summarizes the main results of the empirical chapters and asks what they reveal about earlier characterizations of the Caste War as a racial or class conflict. In addition, it provides an overview of the magnitude of the casualties suffered in the conflict, combatant and non-combatant alike. The chapters in this part also consider general conclusions to be drawn from the empirical material on violence in the Caste War in particular and in insurgencies and civil wars in general. Army and rebel violence show both striking similarities and a number of differences. Force was used, for example, to maintain internal discipline and order. Over and above, violence served both military and economic ends. The acquisition of booty was a key motive for violent action in both groups. In kruso’b society, however, violence was far more relevant as a constitutive feature of its political structure than in the case of the army, which was embedded in a more sophisticated bureaucratic structure.

The Appendices provide vital information on the dynamics of the Caste War. The voluminous tables summarize the quantitative information I found on rebel assaults and army attacks. Concise and in chronological order, they represent most of the data on which this book is based. Although some minor events may be missing due to a lack of relevant data, to my knowledge this is the most detailed and most extensive compilation on these issues up to now.Footnote ²⁸ It presents information on targets, military strength, the number, gender and status of victims (Indian or non-Indian), the amount of booty taken, and the losses and casualties suffered by the respective attackers. These facts allow us to grasp the changing nature of the war and gain key insights into the structure of individual rebel assaults on Yucatecan and pacífico settlements, on the one hand, and army thrusts into rebel territory, on the other.

Note to the Reader

All translations of foreign language quotations are mine; emphasis is in the original unless otherwise indicated. The spelling of Yucatec Maya follows the CORDEMEX dictionary (1980) or what is used in the sources. Variations in the orthography of the primary sources cited have been respected. The use of accents and the spelling of personal and place names may therefore vary. Authors did not distinguish consistently, for example, between “b” and “v” in Spanish.