Los Altos

The state matters out of proportion to its brevity, for three reasons. It was the only serious attempt to make the Guatemalan highlands a political unit of their own, and the arguments used for it in 1838 — the port, the road, the tariff, the refusal to be governed from the capital — are the arguments of every provincial movement in Central American history. It was also a liberal project that rested on a population which did not want it, and the manner of its failure shaped the next thirty years of Guatemalan politics. And it left a paper trail unusually rich for a state so short-lived: decrees, a government gazette, a constitutional draft, petitions from Maya municipalities, and the memoirs of participants on both sides.

The map draws Los Altos only for 1840–41, the two years in which it was being overrun and then governed as a Guatemalan province. That window is the dataset's, not the state's: it shows the polygon at the moment of its destruction and misses both the constitutional decade that produced it and the 1848 revival. The dates below therefore run wider than the drawn range, and the mismatch is worth keeping in mind when using the map.

At a glance

Why did the highlands want a state of their own?

Because the highlands had become rich, and the government that taxed them sat two hundred kilometres away on the other side of a mountain range. The western altiplano is a series of basins between 2,000 and 2,600 metres, ringed by volcanoes and cut by ravines, cold at night and dry from November to April. It held four Maya peoples — Mam, K'iche', Kaqchikel and Tz'utujil — with dense settlement, communal land and a textile tradition older than the Spanish presence. Under the Habsburgs and Bourbons the region was administered as the alcaldía mayor of Zapotitlán, subordinate to the Audiencia of Guatemala; it had no mines, few Spanish residents, and for two centuries the crown's interest in it was tribute and labour rather than settlement.

That changed in the later eighteenth century. The indigo boom tied the region to the Atlantic economy, and the growth of Guatemala City created a market for food. Estates producing wheat, maize and vegetables spread across the basin floors, and sheep and cattle on the higher ground. Quetzaltenango and Totonicapán became manufacturing towns: coarse wool cloth, sold throughout the isthmus and smuggled south, was the region's great export, and the workshops of Totonicapán were famous enough to worry the peninsular merchants. A class of criollo and ladino landowners, merchants and muleteers grew up around this trade, intermarried, lent to each other, and by the 1820s had a clear sense of itself as the natural elite of the west.

Independence did not give them what they wanted. Guatemala declared independence from Spain in 1821 and was annexed to the Mexican empire of Agustín de Iturbide the following year, with Mexican troops entering Quetzaltenango in 1822 over local resistance; when the empire collapsed in 1823 the region passed into the United Provinces of Central America, a federation of five states in which Guatemala City kept the customs house, the mint, the university and the credit. The altenses had been asking for a government of their own since the last decades of Spanish rule; they now asked the federation for a state of their own, and the federal constitution gave them a procedure for it.

The demographic fact underneath all this is the one that decided the outcome. Los Altos was not a Creole province with an Indian labour force; it was an Indian province with a Creole and ladino elite, in places a very thin one. Taracena Arriola's history of the region takes its title from that asymmetry — criollo invention, ladino dream, indigenous nightmare — and the phrase is a fair summary of the state's twenty-six months. The men who declared the sixth state in 1838 governed a population that spoke languages they mostly did not speak, worked land the state was beginning to sell, and paid the taxes that kept the state alive.

What did the quarrel with Guatemala City turn on?

Money, mainly, and the politics that followed from it. The capital's merchant houses, grouped around the Aycinena family and the Consulado de Comercio, financed the import trade and the government, advanced loans against future customs revenue, and controlled the routes by which the highlands' wheat, cloth and cattle reached the sea. For the altenses the arrangement had three defects: they sold into a protected market at prices the capital's merchants set, they paid the alcabala on goods moving between their own towns and the capital, and they had no port. Every scheme for a Pacific outlet ran into the same objection from Guatemala City, which was that a port in Suchitepéquez would let the west trade directly with Peru, Chile and Europe and would end the capital's monopoly.

The political argument sharpened after 1829, when the federal president Francisco Morazán invaded Guatemala, broke the conservative regime of Mariano de Aycinena, and expelled the Aycinena family and the regular religious orders. For eight years the federation was run by liberals, and Mariano Gálvez governed Guatemala with a programme of secular reform: civil marriage, lay education, the abolition of the tithe, trial by jury and the imported Livingston codes from Louisiana. The altenses were liberals, but not that kind. They disliked Gálvez's anticlerical legislation, which had cost them the goodwill of their parish priests, and they disliked the jury system, which they thought unworkable among a population that did not read Spanish. When Marcelo Molina later addressed the state's constituent assembly, he explained that he had restored the old judicial order because trying to sustain "a system so discredited and so far above the ideas and civilisation of these peoples, composed mostly of the indigenous class" would have been the most imprudent act available to a provisional government.

So the west's grievance was not a simple liberal-versus-conservative one. The altenses wanted free trade, light taxes, local courts and a port; they wanted, in other words, the economic programme of liberalism without its social programme, and they wanted it inside the federation rather than inside Guatemala. In May 1836 a Quetzaltenango newspaper made the proposal that had been circulating for a decade: a state comprising Quetzaltenango, Totonicapán, Sololá and Suchitepéquez, with about 200,000 inhabitants, which would give the west its own representation in the federal congress and its own revenue. Nothing came of it while Gálvez held Guatemala City.

In January 1838 Gálvez fell to a rural revolt in the east led by Rafael Carrera, an illiterate peasant commander from the eastern highlands who had become the spokesman of peasant grievances against liberal taxation. Carrera's forces entered Guatemala City on 31 January, and the conservative Mariano Rivera Paz took over the state government. Three days later Quetzaltenango declared itself separate. The timing matters: the altenses were not seceding from a liberal federation but from a conservative Guatemala, and they did it in the name of the federation they had just been complaining about. Their hope was to leave the Guatemalan state without leaving the union — to become the sixth member of a congress in which the liberals still had a majority, and in which the west would count for something.

How was the sixth state declared?

By a municipal meeting, then by a federal decree, and the gap between the two is where most of the legal argument has been spent. On 2 February 1838 the municipality of Quetzaltenango issued a declaration of separation and set up a provisional government subject to the federal authorities; Totonicapán and Sololá adhered on 5 February. The fuller acta of Quetzaltenango, as Lorenzo Montúfar printed it in 1879, is dated 8 February and sets out the case in numbered articles. Articles 7 to 9 complain that Sololá, Totonicapán and above all Quetzaltenango had been "constantly oppressed and harassed with violent and unjust measures and with exorbitant charges and contributions, to maintain numerous forces sustaining the hostile views of the government"; that Quetzaltenango, though the most obedient of towns, had "always been the most unjust target of the governors"; and that repeated requests about taxes, road repairs, a bridge over the Samalá and the opening of the port of Ocós had been ignored.

The federal congress took its time. The chamber of deputies approved the admission of the new state on 5 June 1838; the senate followed on 14 August; the decree was promulgated on 16 August. It authorised the departments of Quetzaltenango, Totonicapán and Sololá to form a member state, named a provisional junta of Marcelo Molina Mata, José María Gálvez and José Antonio Aguilar, and left Agustín Guzmán — a Mexican officer who had served under Vicente Filísola and settled in Quetzaltenango — in command of the state's forces. Suchitepéquez, which the altenses regarded as their outlet to the sea and where the ladino municipalities of Retalhuleu, Mazatenango and Cuyotenango had declared for them, was not named in the decree, and the omission was never resolved. Huehuetenango was added by the state's own declaration of 31 May 1839, and Soconusco was claimed on paper without ever being held.

The legality was doubtful, and the altenses knew it. Article 197 of the federal constitution of 1824 provided that no new state could be formed in the interior of another; article 198 allowed a new state only where the majority of the representatives of the towns concerned proposed it, the population exceeded 100,000, and the state from which it separated retained an equal population and the capacity to subsist. Los Altos passed the demographic test easily, with some 200,000 people against a threshold fixed at 100,000. It failed the first test outright: the Guatemalan assembly never consented, and the federal congress admitted the state anyway. The precedent was not lost on anyone. If a liberal congress could carve a state out of a conservative Guatemala, a conservative congress could put it back.

There was a further irony. Los Altos entered the federation in the year the federation dissolved. Nicaragua had seceded in April 1838, Honduras and Costa Rica followed before the end of the year, and by 1839 the union existed mainly in the person of Morazán and the revenues of El Salvador. On 31 May 1839 the altenses took the logical next step and declared their state "free, sovereign and independent", as the other states had done, adding Huehuetenango and Soconusco to its territory. From that moment the sixth state was a small independent republic with a federalist vocabulary, allied to El Salvador by treaty — signed on 10 August 1839 and ratified by Morazán on 8 September — against the government of Guatemala.

Who governed Los Altos, and by what right?

A junta of notables, an assembly that sat for a few months, and a commander with a militia. The provisional government of June 1838 gave way in December to an elected governor: Marcelo Molina Matta, a lawyer from one of the town's leading families, who had been the junta's head and would remain the state's principal civilian figure until 1840. The constituent assembly was installed at Totonicapán on 25 December 1838, with a sermon by the parish priest José Matías Quiñones that later historians have quoted more than any other text of the episode. Quiñones told the congregation that the separation was a historical redress: the land of the K'iche' had been humiliated by the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century, and in the nineteenth it was "already a sovereign state of the Central American Union… a people appearing in all the majesty of its political being".

The rhetoric was Americanist and republican, and it was also, in a precise sense, decorative. The assembly sat in a town whose population was almost entirely K'iche'-speaking, in a state whose indigenous majority had already begun petitioning against it, and its constitutional project of April–May 1839 reproduced the standard liberal formula: equality of all inhabitants before the law, the obligation to defend the state and to contribute in proportion to one's duties, representative institutions and a division of powers. What it did not do was abolish the personal legal status of the indigenous communities, the tutelary regime of colonial origin that kept them as a separate corporation under special courts and officials. The liberal state of Los Altos inherited the colonial constitution of Indian affairs and left it standing, because its revenue depended on it.

Institutions were thin even by the standards of the period. There was no professional army — the state relied on municipal militias, called out when needed and unpaid — no bank, no mint of its own, although a die was cut showing a quetzal and a volcano for stamping pesos, and no cathedral or bishop. In August 1839 the ecclesiastical judge Antonio de Larrazábal, acting for the exiled archbishop, erected a vicaría foránea for Los Altos and put José Matías Quiñones in charge of the parish of San Miguel Totonicapán, giving the state an ecclesiastical administration of its own; it was a bold move, negotiated in exchange for liberal support over the archbishop's return, and it lasted less than a year. The state's public face was its press. Quetzaltenango had a printing house, the liberals published El Popular against the Guatemala City government, and the state's own Gazeta del Gobierno de Los Altos printed decrees, circulars and rebuttals. Its first official paper had been called Quetzal, which tells you what the regime thought it was doing.

What held the state together was not an administration but a network. The same surnames recur in every list of officeholders — Molina, Aguilar, Gálvez, Dávila, de la Torre, Velasco, Martínez, Rivera Mérida — and they were connected by marriage, commerce and godparenthood to the merchant houses of San Marcos and the piedmont. The state was, in effect, the municipal patriciate of Quetzaltenango writ large, and its authority in Totonicapán, Sololá or Huehuetenango depended on the willingness of those towns' ladino councils to accept Quetzaltenango's precedence. Where they did not, there was nothing behind the decree.

Where did the money come from?

From the people the state had been created to protect from Guatemala City's taxes. Los Altos had no customs house on the coast, since the port it wanted at Ocós was never opened and the Suchitepéquez outlets remained contested, and it had no share of the capital's import revenue. Its expenditure, on the other hand, was immediate: a bureaucracy, a militia, and the certainty of a Guatemalan invasion. The government therefore did what the colonial regime had done and what Gálvez had done before it, and taxed the indigenous communities directly.

The measures came in a cluster in 1839. The tithe on agricultural produce was restored in place of the old territorial contribution, "more in keeping with the habits and customs of the peoples of the State" — by which the decree meant the Indian towns. The treasury took the whole of the territorial contribution owed, seized the funds collected locally for the Academy of Guatemala and treated them as a loan, and authorised the executive, in the event of war, to levy a direct contribution of 2 per cent on the value of all property above 100 pesos. A decree of 25 May 1839 required every land title issued by the Guatemalan state to be revalidated before the altenses' executive within two months, on pain of the land being auctioned or declared state property, and claimed for Los Altos the compensation paid on any land sold after 13 February 1838. The capitation — the contribución directa — continued to be collected throughout, by force where argument failed: it was the old Indian head tax under a republican name.

The land measures had a purpose beyond revenue. The merchants of Quetzaltenango and San Marcos had formed a private company to improve the road from the altiplano down to Suchitepéquez, which was the state's only route to the sea. In return they received the right to appropriate vacant land along the route, the right to conscript "as many labourers as might be necessary" from the neighbouring towns, the right to levy a toll, and an obligation to build two bridges over the Samalá with forced labour, one by the company and one by the villagers of San Sebastián Retalhuleu. The road, the bridges, the tolls and the land grants were a single package: public works financed by dispossession, a familiar arrangement in nineteenth-century Latin America, but executed here at speed and in a small territory where everyone could see who was gaining.

The result was a state that taxed wheat, cloth, cattle and heads, and spent the proceeds on soldiers and salaries in Quetzaltenango. Its own constitutional language of equality before the law sat awkwardly beside a fiscal system that counted people by ethnicity and a land regime that turned communal ejidos into lots for auction. Taracena's judgement is that the liberal state in Los Altos reproduced the colonial "personal statute" of the Indians while proclaiming their citizenship, and that the contradiction was not an oversight but the condition of the state's survival.

Why did the highland villages refuse the new state?

Because the new border ran through their markets. The first refusals came within weeks of the declaration, and they were practical rather than ideological. In February and March 1838 the Tz'utujil municipalities of San Pedro, San Juan and San Marcos La Laguna and Santiago Atitlán sent a representation to the Guatemala City government arguing that separation would obstruct their trade with the capital and expose them to paying the contribution twice, once to Quetzaltenango and once to Guatemala. The K'iche' of Joyabaj made the same point in different words: it was "burdensome to go as far as Quetzaltenango for our affairs" when their commercial and administrative relations had always been with the capital, which was nearer.

The altenses understood the problem. Diego Botín, governor of Sololá, was sent to explain to a public meeting at Atitlán that Los Altos was "a separate government, free and independent of that of Guatemala", but that this did not prevent the towns from selling in the capital as before, that those who joined Quetzaltenango would not pay contribution to Guatemala, and that no war was being made on towns that adhered. The argument that carried weight, according to the report Botín sent back, was that they would be joining "a state that was almost one of Indians alone". It was a good line and a misleading one: the state was Indian in population and Creole in government, and the taxes fell on the former.

Then the taxes were collected. Santa Catarina Ixtahuacán in Sololá and San Sebastián in Retalhuleu refused the first instalment of the direct contribution, citing also the smallpox epidemic that had swept the towns. On 18 August 1839 the villagers of Santa Catarina publicly beat their alcalde when he insisted a second time. On 30 September Quetzaltenango decreed that 100 militia from Totonicapán and Sololá under the governor Felipe García should march and collect by force. The town was empty when they arrived; the following day a delegation of principals from Ixtahuacán and Nahualá came to negotiate, and shooting began inside the convent they had been using as a barracks. The altenses lost one man and counted 39 Indian dead, among them two principals of Nahualá, and the expedition fell back on Totonicapán. On 7 October it had collected 750 pesos, of which 400 were the first third of the capitation and 200 were charged to the towns for the cost of putting down their own revolt.

The revolt spread along the lake and into the mountains. On 8 October the Guatemalan government's secretary, Joaquín Durán, told Quetzaltenango plainly what the structural problem was: the daily complaints of its Indian subjects to a foreign government compromised the state that claimed them. Quetzaltenango replied that Carrera was inciting the towns of Sololá to resist the payment, with the assurance of protection from Guatemalan troops stationed at Patzún. On 11 October a rising at Chiantla in Huehuetenango was aborted, with proclamations in favour of Carrera, and a father carried the severed head of his son to Guatemala City to show the authorities what the altenses' tax collection looked like.

The alliance that destroyed Los Altos was therefore made in the highlands, not in Guatemala City. Carrera offered the villages what the liberal state would not: abolition of the head tax, the restitution of communal land, and a government that would leave their internal affairs to their own officials. In September 1839 the Guatemalan assembly reimposed the Laws of the Indies, created a permanent commission for the protection of Indians, restored the office of interpreter and abolished the capitation throughout Guatemala — measures designed simultaneously to win the highland towns and to differentiate Guatemala from Los Altos. Whatever else Carrera was, he was the only political leader in Central America in 1839 who had grasped that the Indian majority could be a political base rather than a tax object.

How did Carrera destroy Los Altos in 1840?

In four months, with a small army and a great deal of local help. The commercial quarrel turned into a military one in the last weeks of 1839. In October the Guatemalan government heard that Guzmán was raising troops at Sololá; in late November it impounded a consignment of arms destined for Los Altos, with the encouragement of the British consul Frederick Chatfield, who had moved to Guatemala City after quarrelling with Morazán. On 18 December Guatemala pressed the altenses' representative to sign a peace convention whose price was the return of the weapons Guzmán had taken from Carrera when he arrested him in January 1839. While Quetzaltenango debated the ultimatum, Carrera issued a proclamation calling on the Indians of Los Altos to rise against the Quetzaltenango government.

On 22 January 1840 Guzmán declared war. The campaign was short. There were skirmishes on the road from the capital, and then the fighting around Sololá: San Andrés Semetabaj on 26 January, where Alejandro Marure recorded 116 dead, and El Bejucal on 28 January, with 65. These were among the bloodiest fights in Central America between 1821 and 1842, and they were fought at least partly as reprisals. Guzmán was captured. Carrera entered Quetzaltenango at the head of 2,000 men and was received, in the phrase of the sources, as a liberator by a large crowd; the indigenous towns had gone over to him as soon as his columns appeared. He abolished the personal tax, restored the privileges of the Catholic religion, and told the members of the Creole council, assembled before him, that he had been lenient because it was the first time they had defied him and would not be lenient a second.

The leniency had limits. Guzmán and Molina were sent to Guatemala City and paraded there on 17 February, Guzmán in irons on a mule with his wounds still bleeding. On 26 February the Guatemalan government issued Decree 21, reincorporating the departments of Los Altos, abolishing the capitation in their territory, guaranteeing that no contributions would be levied there beyond those established in 1838, earmarking local revenues for local administration, and promising a commission to hear complaints. Carrera had won the west with a programme of lower taxes and local autonomy — the programme, in most respects, that the altenses had claimed for themselves.

The second act was triggered by Morazán. On 18 March 1840 the federal president invaded Guatemala from El Salvador with about 1,500 men to avenge Los Altos and to make a last attempt at reviving the union. He reached the capital almost unopposed, took it, and released Guzmán from prison. Carrera, who had withdrawn with a few hundred men to the heights of Aceituno, counter-attacked into the plaza and broke the Salvadoran army in the streets; Morazán escaped down the ravine of El Incienso and eventually took ship for Peru. Guzmán rode back to Quetzaltenango with the news that Carrera was beaten. The Creole council re-declared the state in force, and the city celebrated.

Carrera came back in early April. The council members who could leave did so; those who stayed were arrested and shot in the public square. The alcalde, Roberto Molina Motta, brother of the state's former governor, was among them, with the syndics and councillors — fifteen named men in the records, and sixteen more killed in the days that followed. Carrera took the press of the Diario de Quetzaltenango and the instruments of the municipal band back to Guatemala City as trophies. In April the government's secretary-general Luis Batres Juarros obtained from the ecclesiastical judge Larrazábal the dismantling of the regional church: the parish priest of Quetzaltenango, Urbano Ugarte, and his coadjutor José María Aguilar were removed, and Fernando Antonio Dávila — the same man who would reappear in 1848 — was installed in their place. The destruction of Los Altos was therefore not a battle but an operation of political surgery: the removal of a rival administration, the execution of its municipal leadership, the confiscation of its means of publicity, and the transfer of its ecclesiastical jurisdiction. It took ten weeks. That it took so little time is the measure of how shallow the state's roots were: no army of its own, no rural clientele, no church, and a majority population that had sided with the other side.

What did Guatemala do with the region afterwards?

It kept the tax cuts and took the power. Decree 21 of 26 February 1840 was careful: the capitation was abolished in Los Altos, no new contributions were to be imposed beyond those of 1838, local revenues were to be spent locally, and a commission was to tour the departments and hear grievances. A decree of 14 March on the protection of the departments of Los Altos followed, and one of 23 March regulated passports, requiring travellers to present themselves in the capital for visas — a small measure that says a good deal about how the government expected to control a recently rebellious province.

The institutional reconstruction was gradual. Quetzaltenango was made a department by decree of the Constituent Assembly on 16 September 1845, five years after the state's destruction, which fixed the administrative shape the region still has. The indigenous policy of the conservative regime took its final form in the decree of 8 November 1851, "on various provisions concerning the Indians", which instructed corregidores to keep a copy of the Recopilación de las Indias, to govern "paternally" this "recommendable class", to protect them from abuse of their ignorance and to leave their customs intact unless clearly unjust. It was a statute for a protected community, not for citizens: the "republic of Indians" restored, in Taracena's phrase, as a policy of calculated isolation.

The land question was settled in the other direction. Carrera himself received 1,007 caballerías of land at Las Animas in Suchitepéquez in 1842, and a further 116 at Raxtut in 1846; his officers and allies did the same. The altenses' road company had been the precedent, and the conservative victory did not reverse it but transferred its benefits. Through the 1840s the highland towns continued to litigate against estates encroaching on communal land, with occasional success and growing difficulty, and the corregidores who were supposed to protect them were the same officials granting the titles.

The state's claim to Soconusco outlived the state. Guatemala had signalled in 1839 that it meant to include the district in one of its states; in 1840 the alcalde of Tapachula asked Mexico for protection, and in 1842 a Mexican force occupied the province, which Mexico had claimed since 1824. Guatemala protested, asked for British mediation and got none, and renounced the claim only in the treaty of 1882, with the boundary surveyed by 1902. The coast the altenses had wanted as their outlet to the world became a district of Chiapas.

Economically the region did not decline. Wheat, wool cloth and cattle continued to move south and east, the piedmont plantations expanded, and Quetzaltenango remained the second city of Guatemala, with about 20,000 people by 1850 and a merchant class that had learned to work with whichever government held the capital. What the region lost was political weight: a governor appointed from Guatemala City, a corregidor, and no representative institution of its own. The altenses became provincial notables, which is what most of them had been before 1838, with the difference that the experiment had taught them what they could not do alone. The last echo came in 1851, when Doroteo Vasconcelos of El Salvador, who had sheltered the altenses and sponsored their second republic, assembled an army from El Salvador and Honduras and invaded Guatemala. Carrera destroyed it at La Arada on 2 February, and the liberal coalition that had made Los Altos possible in 1838 and in 1848 was broken for twenty years.

Why did Los Altos return in 1848, and why did it fail again?

Because the same men were still there, and because Carrera was, briefly, gone. Guatemala declared itself an independent republic on 21 March 1847, with Carrera as its president; through 1848 a coalition of liberals and disgruntled conservatives forced him out, and on 17 August he resigned and left the country. On 26 August the municipal councillors of Quetzaltenango declared the state of Los Altos in existence again, with Agustín Guzmán as provisional president, and called on the other towns to adhere. On 5 September delegates from six municipalities met and appointed a provisional government of three men — Fernando Antonio Dávila, José Velasco and Rafael de la Torre — with Fernando Antonio Martínez subsequently heading the administration. From 25 December Guzmán was styled second chief of the state, an arrangement that gave the soldier the army and the civilians the paperwork.

The revival had real support outside the highlands. Vasconcelos in El Salvador recognised it and sent money; the Cruz brothers, Vicente and Serapio, who were running a guerrilla war against the Guatemalan government in the east, were its allies; and the liberal exiles who had fled in 1840 came back to Quetzaltenango. It had no support inside the highland villages, where the conservative land and tax settlement of 1840 stood, and it had no answer to Carrera, who returned from exile in 1849 with troops.

The end came by negotiation and ambush. On 8 May 1849 Guzmán travelled to Antigua Guatemala to meet representatives of President Mariano Paredes, and while he was there Carrera took Quetzaltenango and occupied the plaza. The corregidor of Suchitepéquez, José Víctor Zavala, had been sent by Paredes to arrest Carrera and instead put himself under Carrera's orders. Paredes, faced with Carrera's control of the west and with the indigenous population's evident support for him, revoked the death sentence against Carrera, appointed him commander-general of arms, and left him to pacify the country. A convention between Guatemala and Los Altos for the incorporation of its communities was ratified on 15 May. Guzmán left Guatemala on 1 June and reached El Salvador on 10 June, where Vasconcelos gave him asylum.

Carrera had entered the capital in triumph on 8 August 1849, and went on to govern Guatemala, with one interval, until his death in 1865. Guzmán did not stay away long. In October 1849 he re-entered Guatemala with a small force and a new ally, Agustín Reyes, evaded Carrera's columns in the east, and got into Guatemala City, which had a garrison of about a hundred men. They fought their way in, set fire to Carrera's house with his family inside, and were broken by artillery in the Plaza de Armas; Guzmán was badly wounded and died that night outside the city.

The second Los Altos failed for the reasons the first had failed, only faster. It was a municipal coup supported by a foreign president and a guerrilla faction, without an army, without revenue, and without the consent of the population it claimed. The difference between 1838 and 1848 was that in 1838 the altenses had been able to argue that they were building a state inside a federation; in 1848 there was no federation, no federal congress to admit them, and no legal fiction left. What remained was the name, and the memory of a flag.

What became of Los Altos?

It became a region again, and then a memory. In 1871 the liberals returned to power in Guatemala under Justo Rufino Barrios, who had been born at San Lorenzo in San Marcos in 1835 — inside the territory the sixth state had claimed — and who had fought in the campaigns of the 1860s as an officer from the west. The liberal revolution dismantled the conservative settlement: communal land was opened to privatisation, the tithe and the Indian courts were abolished, and the state promoted a new export crop. Coffee transformed the piedmont below Quetzaltenango and the slopes of the western volcanoes, and by the 1880s it had replaced cochineal and wheat as the country's leading export. The beneficiaries were a new class of planter-entrepreneurs, many of them altenses, and the losers were the highland communities whose land and labour the coffee economy required.

Coffee made the west rich again and kept it powerless. Quetzaltenango acquired a theatre, a railway station, electric light and a German merchant colony; in 1902 the earthquake of 18 April destroyed most of the city, and the eruption of Santa María on 24 October buried the surrounding country in ash. The electric railway to San Felipe on the coast, opened in 1930 and built by AEG and Krupp, was the altenses' last great civic project, and it was destroyed by landslides within three years and formally dismantled in 1933. Its station is now a museum, which is the usual fate of infrastructure that a region builds for itself and cannot maintain.

The twentieth century did not restore the region's political weight. The revolution of 1944 and the agrarian reform of 1952 touched the highlands, the coup of 1954 reversed them, and the civil war of 1960–96 was fought hardest in the indigenous departments to the north of Quetzaltenango, in Quiché and Huehuetenango, where the army's counter-insurgency campaign destroyed hundreds of villages. Quetzaltenango was spared the worst of the violence but not the militarisation, and it grew into a commercial and university city of a few hundred thousand people, the second city of a country whose capital had long since outgrown it.

The memory of the sixth state survives in two forms. One is commemorative: a carved coat of arms on the grave of the "heroes" in Quetzaltenango's cemetery, a departmental museum, and a municipal tradition that the dissolution of 1840 was illegal because only the federal congress could have revoked a state's existence. The other is historiographical. Nineteenth-century writers such as Montúfar and the participant-memoirist Sinforoso Rivera Mérida treated Los Altos as a liberal martyrdom; Rivera Mérida, who had served the state, wrote that "the victory was won by the Indians, whom they had filled with enthusiasm by false promises", which is as close to an admission of the state's failure as the literature contains. Twentieth-century nationalist historiography made it a precursor of departmental autonomy. Taracena's work in the 1990s changed the question, from why the state failed to whom it was for, and the answer — a Creole and ladino elite that could imagine a nation of citizens as long as it did not have to include the majority as citizens — has held up better than the heroic version.

That is why a state that lasted twenty-six months is worth a map polygon. Los Altos was not an accident of caudillo politics, nor a proto-nation betrayed by Carrera. It was a serious attempt to solve a real problem — how a rich periphery governs itself against a poor centre — by a group that could not bring itself to pay the political price, which was to treat the people who did the work as the point of the state rather than as its revenue. The villages chose the caudillo who abolished the head tax over the liberals who levied it. Everything that followed in the Guatemalan highlands, down to the land conflicts and the war of the late twentieth century, runs through that choice.

Common myths about Los Altos

Timeline of Los Altos

What the map shows next

The polygon at 1840 on the map is the state at the moment it was being overrun: Quetzaltenango, Totonicapán and Sololá, with the piedmont contested and the Guatemalan army coming up from the capital. Compare it with the departments drawn around it and the shape of the modern republic becomes visible — the west as a block that Guatemala could absorb administratively but never quite govern from the centre.

At 1841 on the map the same territory is drawn as a Guatemalan province, one year after Decree 21, with the frontier against Mexico still unsettled and Soconusco still claimed. It is worth looking at what is not on the map: the second state of 1848–49, the Salvadoran government that sponsored it, and the indigenous municipalities whose refusal to pay the capitation decided the outcome in 1839.