United Provinces of Central America

It lasted sixteen years, and for at least ten of them it was at war with itself. The union's own congress voted in May 1838 to let the states constitute themselves as they pleased, and the last federal legislature closed in July of that year. By 1841 the five states were separate republics, and the five flags that still carry the same blue-and-white bands are the remnant of the experiment.

The federation matters beyond its own failure, because Central Americans have spent the two centuries since trying to rebuild it. Every generation produced a unionist: a Salvadorean president in 1851, a Honduran in the 1850s, a Guatemalan in 1885, three states in 1896, four in 1921, and finally the institutions that survive today, from the Organisation of Central American States to the Sistema de la Integración Centroamericana. The entry below is also an argument about why the first attempt failed. It failed less because Central Americans did not want a nation than because the federal government was given responsibilities it had no revenue to meet, in a region where the states, not the centre, commanded the taxes, the soldiers and the loyalty of the villages.

At a glance

Why did Guatemala declare independence in 1821?

The kingdom of Guatemala was among the poorest of Spain's American possessions and the least supervised. It had no viceroy and no silver mines worth the name; the audiencia at Guatemala City governed five intendancies and a scatter of corregimientos through a merchant oligarchy — the Aycinena family chief among it — that financed the indigo crop and took its profit at the fairs of San Miguel and San Vicente. The Spanish Empire defended the coast with a handful of garrisons and left the interior to the friars and the town councils.

The crisis arrived sideways, from Mexico and Cádiz. The constitution of 1812 gave the towns elected councils and a free press; the restoration of absolutism in 1814 took them away again; and the liberal revolution in Spain in 1820 forced the colonial authorities to publish the constitution once more, which meant elections, which meant newspapers, which meant arguments. There had already been an abortive rising in San Salvador in 1811 and the Belén conspiracy in Guatemala City in 1813, in which creole plotters — some of them aiming at the Aycinena clan as much as at Spain — were betrayed and imprisoned until 1819.

What broke the deadlock was the Plan of Iguala. When Iturbide's army turned the Mexican war into a conservative independence settlement in February 1821, the Guatemalan authorities could see that no royalist army would come to save them. On 15 September 1821 the provincial deputation met in the palace with the archbishop, the audiencia, the cathedral chapter, the town council, the university, the merchant consulate and the heads of the religious orders. The act they signed is a cautious document. Independence was declared because it was "the general will of the people of Guatemala", and to "prevent the consequences that would be fearful if the people proclaimed it in fact"; the question of "general and absolute independence" was reserved to a congress of deputies, one per 15,000 inhabitants, which was to assemble in Guatemala City on 1 March 1822.

Two clauses deserve attention because they are usually skipped. The fourth admitted "the natives of Africa" to citizenship, in a kingdom where the caste system had been legal until recently. The tenth guaranteed the Catholic religion "pure and unalterable" and the property of the clergy. The union that followed would be torn by both questions.

The provinces then decided separately, which is why "Central American independence" is a misleading phrase. San Salvador swore the act on 22 September and proclaimed it a week later. Nicaragua's intendant, Miguel González Saravia, declared his province separated from the capital on 27 September and suspended the proclamation "until the clouds of the day clear" — then proclaimed it on 11 October under the Plan of Iguala. Comayagua accepted independence but made it conditional on being subject only to whatever government emerged in North America, while Tegucigalpa and the mining districts accepted the Guatemalan act without conditions. Quetzaltenango pronounced for Iguala on 13 November. Chiapas had already gone its own way.

Why did the provinces join Mexico, and why did that union break?

Iturbide's empire offered the Guatemalan elite a way to keep the social order and lose the constitutional experiments. On 5 January 1822 the governing junta in Guatemala City declared that the will of the majority of the kingdom's peoples was union with Mexico. San Salvador and Granada refused to accept the declaration and prepared to fight; the Salvadorean provincial congress went so far as to erect its own diocese in March 1822 and install José Matías Delgado as bishop, a decision that poisoned church-state relations for a decade.

The Mexican Empire sent troops. In June 1822 a Guatemalan column attacked San Salvador and was thrown back; in December the Salvadorean congress, besieged and short of options, declared the province united to the United States of America and adopted its constitution — a gesture of despair rather than a plan, which left no trace. In February 1823 General Vicente Filísola entered San Salvador with about 2,000 imperial troops, and the province capitulated at Gualcince on 21 February.

The empire then dissolved under Filísola's feet. Iturbide had no money and no army loyal enough to survive the Mexican republicans; by the spring he was gone, and the Central American provinces were free of Mexico without having won anything. One act of Filísola's is worth remembering to his credit: on 29 March 1823, as the last superior political authority on the spot, he issued the convocation for the congress that the act of 1821 had promised, and the provinces elected to it. The congress met in Guatemala City on 24 June under Delgado's presidency.

Its declaration of 1 July 1823 is the founding document, and it is blunt about the previous two years. The incorporation into Mexico, it says, "verified only in fact at the end of 1821 and the beginning of 1822, was a violent expression, torn out by vicious and illegal means", never accepted by the Mexican national representation, and Iturbide's decrees on the matter were void. The provinces were therefore "free and independent of old Spain, of Mexico and of any other power", and formed a sovereign nation under the name — "for now, and without prejudice to what is resolved in the constitution that is to be formed" — of the United Provinces of Central America.

Chiapas did not join. The constitution of 1824 excluded it by name while leaving the door open should it "freely unite", and it never did; Soconusco on the Pacific slope was occupied by Mexican forces in 1842 and its status stayed unsettled for decades. The new state also inherited a border problem on the Caribbean side, where the British settlement at Belize and the Miskito shore lay outside anyone's effective control and inside everybody's maps.

What did the declaration of 1823 actually create?

It created a nation whose parts had already decided that they were nations. That is the contradiction at the heart of the federation, and it was visible from the first session. The provinces were represented as provinces; the declaration called them "the United Provinces"; but the Salvadoreans had governed themselves since 1821, Costa Rica had been running its own affairs from San José and Cartago, and Nicaragua's cities were fighting each other over which of them would run the province. Each of those bodies wanted a centre weak enough to leave it alone and strong enough to protect it from its neighbours.

The constituent assembly worked for nineteen months, from June 1823 to January 1825, and during that time the states wrote constitutions of their own. El Salvador's was decreed on 12 June 1824 and sworn on 4 July, months before the federal text existed. When the federal constitution finally appeared, on 22 November 1824, it had to describe a federation that was already functioning as five small republics with a coordinating committee.

Two decisions of 1823–24 shaped everything after. The first was to name the state a federation rather than a unitary republic — the assembly briefly used "Estados Federados del Centro de América" before settling on "Federación de Centro-América" — which fixed the locus of sovereignty in the states. The second was to leave the capital question open. Article 64 of the constitution said merely that "the Congress shall resolve in each legislature the place of its residence", and that the federal authorities would exercise no powers over the town where they sat beyond keeping public order. Guatemala City was the seat because it was the seat; it was not the capital by constitutional right, and everyone knew it.

That single article explains a decade of politics. Guatemala City held the customs house, the mint, the merchants and the only printing press of consequence; the other states regarded every federal official in it as a Guatemalan agent. From 1826 the Salvadorean government asked that the federal authorities be moved at least forty leagues away. The petition was refused while the federalists had a majority, and granted in 1833 — by which time, as Alejandro Marure wrote afterwards, the move itself helped to destroy the system it was meant to save.

How did the 1824 constitution divide power?

The text is a serious piece of constitutional engineering, 211 articles long, and it borrowed deliberately from the United States and from Cádiz. Article 5 defined the territory as the old kingdom of Guatemala except Chiapas; article 8 declared that "the government of the Republic is popular, representative, federal"; article 10 gave each state "liberty and independence in its government and internal administration". The federal congress had two chambers — a chamber of deputies and a senate — and the senate was not a ceremonial body. It could refuse sanction to legislation, and a revenue bill rejected there needed three quarters of the deputies to pass anyway, a barrier designed to make taxation hard. The presidency ran four years, with one immediate re-election allowed.

The constitution also told the truth about the country it governed. Article 11 established "the Catholic, apostolic, Roman religion, to the exclusion of the public exercise of any other". Article 13 declared that "every man is free in the Republic", that no one who reached its territory could be a slave, and that no slave trader could be a citizen — an emancipation that the assembly had already enacted by decree on 17 April 1824, freeing slaves of either sex and any age. Article 14 made citizens of all free inhabitants who were married or over 18 and had "some useful profession or known means of subsistence", while article 21 suspended citizenship for, among others, "domestic servants" — the line between the republic of the literate and the republic of the villages ran straight through the text.

On religion and law the constitution was aggressively secular for its date. Article 153 subjected "all citizens and inhabitants, without distinction of any kind" to the ordinary courts, abolishing the ecclesiastical and military fueros; article 154 ordered the states to introduce jury trials as soon as possible. Tithes were halved in Guatemala in 1826 and abolished in 1832. Religious toleration was decreed in May 1832 and published as fundamental law in March 1833, though it was later revoked in every state. Civil marriage was declared the law in Guatemala in April 1837 and repealed in October 1840.

The distribution of seats showed what kind of union this was. Marure records the federal apportionment as 17 deputies for Guatemala, 9 for El Salvador, 6 each for Honduras and Nicaragua, and 2 for Costa Rica. Guatemala had the population and the capital; the others had the numbers to combine against it, and did.

A revised constitution was decreed on 13 February 1835, and it is one of the forgotten facts of the period: a second federal constitution, intended to answer the states' complaints, was rejected by every legislature except Costa Rica's. The federation never had a constitutional settlement that all five states accepted at the same time.

Who paid for the federation?

Almost nobody. The federal government was assigned the customs duties, the tobacco and gunpowder monopolies, the post office and public lands; everything else went to the states, on the understanding that the states would cover any federal deficit by quotas apportioned to population and wealth. That understanding was the constitution's weakest beam. Article 69 gave congress the power to "decree and designate general revenues" and, if they fell short, to "assign the corresponding quota to each state according to its population and wealth". No mechanism existed to collect an unpaid quota, and no state paid one willingly.

The tobacco revenue, roughly half of the total, was administered by the states, which preferred to keep it. El Salvador refused to let federal appointees run the tobacco office at all, on the ground that it was a question of sovereignty. Only Guatemala, which wanted influence over the federal government, contributed with any regularity. Meanwhile the assembly's liberal tariff policy — gold, silver, tobacco and iron duties abolished, sales tax cut from 6 to 4 per cent, a 20–30 per cent duty on imports competing with local production from 1825 — reduced the customs revenue that was supposed to fund the state, and smuggling did the rest.

The results were arithmetic. When Manuel José Arce became president in April 1825 he found six hundred pesos in the federal treasury. In 1827, with the civil war under way, the budget set revenue at 690,000 pesos and expenditure at 690,791 — a deficit equal to the entire income. The government tried London: at the end of 1825 it contracted a loan with Barclay, Herring and Richardson for £1,428,511 in bonds; by August 1826 the house had sold £111,300 and then failed, and the proceeds went on soldiers. Central America spent half a century paying off the wreckage. For comparison, the captaincy general's ordinary revenue in 1816–20 had averaged 251,855 pesos a year against an average deficit of 92,743; independence had not made the state richer, only more expensive.

The consequences were not abstract. In 1826 congress had to pass a law ordering that, since there was not enough to pay the salaries of all employees, the revenue on hand should be distributed proportionally. When the last federal congress closed its session in July 1838, its president summarised the record: no more than six educational establishments in the whole republic, no navy, no army, no administration of justice, no external or internal credit, and agriculture and trade held back because there were "no roads, no bridges, no highways, no security". A government that could not build a road or pay a schoolmaster could not ask villagers to die for it.

Why did liberals and conservatives go to war in 1826?

Because the federal presidency became a factional prize. The labels liberal and conservative described networks rather than parties: merchants, clergy, and the families who had run the captaincy general on one side; provincial planters, lawyers, journalists and town councillors on the other. The fault lines ran through the church — Delgado's schism in San Salvador, the tithe, the fueros — and through the tariff, which the indigo exporters of the east wanted low and the artisans of Guatemala City wanted high.

Arce, a Salvadorean and an indigo grower, was elected by congress in April 1825 as the candidate of the liberals and then governed against them. He quarrelled with the federal congress, with the senate, and with Juan Barrundia, the liberal head of the state of Guatemala. On 2 September 1826 the senate effectively dissolved as its members withdrew; four days later Arce had Barrundia arrested in his house and the state militia disarmed. In October he convoked an extraordinary congress at Cojutepeque on his own authority, and El Salvador's government answered by summoning the federal deputies to Ahuachapán instead. On 13 October the vice-head of Guatemala, Cirilo Flores, was murdered by a crowd at Quetzaltenango, and every organ of the state government ceased to exist in a single day.

The war that followed was fought by provincial armies with borrowed commanders. Mariano Aycinena, the merchant oligarch, took over Guatemala in March 1827. A federal division under Justo Milla took Comayagua in May after a 36-day siege and imprisoned Dionisio Herrera, the Honduran head of state. Arce beat a Salvadorean army at Arrazola. Then, on 10 November 1827, at the hill of La Trinidad in Honduras, a force of Leoneses and Salvadoreans destroyed the federal troops, and Francisco Morazán — who had taken over the government of Honduras as senior councillor — began the career that would make him arbiter of the republic for a decade.

Morazán's campaign of 1828 was the military turning point. The Salvadorean army was beaten at Chalchuapa in March, in the bloodiest action of the war, and the Guatemalan army assaulted San Salvador on Good Friday; but Morazán won at Gualcho on the Lempa in July, forced the surrender of the federal army besieging San Salvador at Mejicanos in September, and cut off the San Miguel division in October. Arce had already stepped down in February, handing power to his vice-president Mariano Beltranena, who refused to give it back. On 12 April 1829 the Guatemala City garrison capitulated after two months of siege; Morazán annulled the terms eight days later, arrested the federal and state officials who had governed against him, held them until July and then deported them. On the night of 9 July the archbishop, Ramón Casaus y Torres, and the friars of the three great convents were put on the road to exile.

That sequence is the fairest measure of the federation's politics. The liberals won in 1829 and governed for a decade; they began by tearing up a capitulation, jailing their opponents and expelling the archbishop. Their enemies did the same whenever they got the chance.

What did Morazán's decade achieve?

More in law than in fact. Morazán was elected president in 1830 and served until February 1839, with an interval in 1834–35 when José Cecilio del Valle was elected and died before taking office. His programme was the liberal programme: tithes abolished, religious toleration, jury trial and the Livingston codes imported from Louisiana and promulgated in Guatemala on 1 January 1837, Lancasterian schools, new ports opened on the Pacific, and an attempt to encourage foreign immigration and colonisation — a scheme that brought 63 British settlers to the Verapaz lowlands at Boca Nueva in 1836, which failed as most such schemes did.

The legal changes were real and durable in intention. The Livingston codes were suspended in March 1838 because nobody could work them; the jury system provoked riots in the villages; the tithe was restored in Guatemala in December 1839. What survived was the principle: a state that claimed jurisdiction over everyone, lay courts, secular schooling, free trade, and the abolition of slavery. Central American liberalism after 1840 was built on that inheritance even where it undid the legislation.

Morazán's rule was also, plainly, a military ascendancy. He intervened in El Salvador in 1832, taking San Salvador by assault, arresting the state authorities, trying them before a tribunal created after the fact, and governing the state by decree; the assembly had already declared the federal pact suspended in January 1832 and turned him back from Santa Ana. He intervened again in 1834, with a fight in the streets of San Salvador and another change of government. He moved the federal authorities out of Guatemala City in February 1834, first to Sonsonate and then, in June, to San Salvador, which was made a federal district by the cession of January 1835 and remained the seat of government until May 1839. In 1835 he presided over the second constitution that the states refused to ratify.

He was, in other words, a liberal reformer who governed by force in a state that had no force of its own beyond the armies his allies lent him. That is the central irony of the federation: its only effective government rested on the personal authority of a Honduran general commanding Salvadorean and Honduran troops, in a country whose constitution had given the federal government no proper army and no proper revenue.

What was happening in the countryside?

The war of the capitals was fought over an economy that had changed little since the eighteenth century, and the people who paid for it lived outside the political nation. Indigo was the export: San Salvador alone produced 486,990 pounds in 1807, worth 669,661 pesos, nearly 78 per cent of the captaincy general's total. Independence opened the trade to British merchants, who replaced the Guatemalan consulado and the indigo growers' guild as the source of credit; exports recovered to about 1.2 million pounds by 1826, then fell to 873,750 pounds in 1834 and did not regain a million pounds until the late 1840s. Coffee, which would transform the isthmus after 1860, was a garden crop.

That economy depended on coerced and semi-coerced labour — vagrancy laws, debt peonage, and the communal lands of the indigenous pueblos, which supplied seasonal workers and paid tribute in labour and cash. The liberal programme attacked the communal holdings in principle; the conservative reaction defended them in practice, because the villages were the church's flock and the army's recruiting ground. Neither side offered the villages a state that served them.

What the villages experienced of the federation was taxation, conscription, courts and epidemics. When the Los Altos government tried to collect a direct contribution at Santa Catarina Ixtahuacán in October 1839, the town rose; within three months almost every indigenous pueblo in the new state was in revolt, and the state collapsed. Eighteen months earlier, in the Mita district of Guatemala, the rising that destroyed the federation began in the same way: a crowd objecting to the new jury courts and to the government agents distributing medicine during the cholera epidemic, whom they believed to be poisoning the water.

No census was ever taken, and the figures in circulation are estimates. A British consular estimate put the population at about two million. Travel was the binding constraint: forty days by mule from San Salvador to the Golfo Dulce, two months more to Europe, and a week from Guatemala City to Comayagua in the dry season. A congress that met in one town and a government that collected its revenue in another were, in practical terms, in different countries.

How did the federation fall apart in 1838?

In stages, and with the federal government's consent. The first shock was the cholera epidemic, which reached Guatemala in April 1837 and killed 819 people in the capital alone. The second was the liberal reform programme of Mariano Gálvez, head of the state of Guatemala, whose jury courts and Livingston codes coincided with the epidemic. On 9 June 1837 a meeting at Santa Rosa in the Mita district denounced the juries and the "poisoners"; when the district magistrate rode out with 40 dragoons to disperse it, the crowd killed several of his men. Six days later a government division broke up the dissidents near Mataquescuintla and looted the countryside afterwards. Marure, writing in 1844 from the records and the testimony of survivors, says the depredations made reconciliation impossible and opened eighteen months of fighting in which Guatemalans destroyed each other.

The leader who emerged from that district was Rafael Carrera, a young man from the Mita villages who knew the terrain and the people better than any officer sent against him. Through 1837 and 1838 he beat government columns, took Jalapa and Petapa, and threatened the capital. Morazán campaigned against him in March 1838 and withdrew after three months having achieved nothing; a second campaign ended in December 1838 with the treaties of El Rinconcito, by which Carrera laid down his arms, recognised the government and was confirmed as commander of arms of the Mita district. It was a settlement between two armies that each needed the other, and it lasted four months.

In the capital the liberal state of Guatemala collapsed first. Gálvez was driven out on 2 February 1838 after the Antigua rose and its forces entered Guatemala City; on the same day the western departments of Quetzaltenango, Totonicapán and Sololá declared themselves a sixth state, Los Altos, which the federal congress recognised by decree on 5 June. On 30 May 1838 the federal congress took the decisive step itself: it declared the states free to constitute themselves as they thought fit, provided they kept a popular representative government. The eleventh and last federal congress closed its sessions on 20 July 1838.

The states then ratified what the centre had already conceded. Nicaragua had declared itself sovereign on 30 April 1838; Honduras followed on 5 November, Costa Rica on 14 November, and Guatemala on 17 April 1839, when its head of state decreed the federal pact dissolved and the state in full sovereignty. Morazán's second term expired on 1 February 1839, and with it the legal existence of the federal executive.

He did not give up. With Salvadorean troops he beat a Honduran-Nicaraguan army at the Espíritu Santo on the Lempa in April 1839 and another at San Pedro Perulapán in September, and he held San Salvador while Los Altos and the Guatemalan conservatives fought in the west. In January 1840 Carrera took Quetzaltenango and ended Los Altos; on 18 March Morazán entered Guatemala City with 1,000 Salvadoreans, and on 19 March, after 22 hours of fighting, Carrera forced him out. He embarked at La Libertad on 5 April with his vice-president and 35 followers and sailed for South America. El Salvador wrote its own constitution in February 1841; the federation was over.

Why did Carrera win?

Because he was the only political leader in Central America who could mobilise the majority of the population, and because the liberals had spent a decade teaching that majority to fear the state. Carrera's base was the Mita district, a poor peasant country of indigenous villages and ladino smallholders east and south of Guatemala City. Its people had reasons to hate the jury courts, the vaccination and medicine agents, the direct taxes and the press gangs. Carrera gave them a leader, a religious vocabulary and, for the first time, a political identity as the defenders of the true faith against the "heretics" of Guatemala City.

His programme was negative and therefore broad: restore the church, restore the old courts, restore the villages' lands and customs, and keep Guatemala City's merchants and officials in their place. The Aycinena family and the conservative lawyers who had lost in 1829 rode back to power on his coat-tails, but they never controlled him. Marure, a liberal writing in 1844, describes the treaties of El Rinconcito with grudging respect: the government had to accept Carrera as commander of arms in his own district, with his people guaranteed their lives and property.

He also won because the terrain and the demography favoured him. The federation's armies were small — a few thousand at most — and had to be supplied by mule over volcanic roads; a rising that controlled the villages around the capital could starve it. And he won because his enemies were divided: Morazán's liberals, Gálvez's reformers, the Salvadorean planters and the Guatemalan merchants each wanted a different federation, and none of them could offer the villages anything better than a court summons.

Carrera went on to dominate Guatemala for a quarter of a century, beating a Salvadorean invasion at Arada in 1851 and making himself indispensable to every government that followed. The state he built was conservative, clerical and authoritarian, and it preserved the indigenous communities' lands for another generation while denying them any share in political power. Whether that was better or worse for the villages than the liberal alternative is still argued in Central America, which is one reason the federation's history is still contested.

Who tried to rebuild the union, and why did they fail?

The union died twice: once as a government in 1840, and once as an idea that no one could safely revive. In March 1842 delegates from El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua met at Chinandega and agreed to establish a provisional national government under Antonio José Cañas, which never took office; in July the same delegates adopted a Pact of Confederation with a supreme delegate, a consultative council and a supreme court, which most of the legislatures then rejected. Morazán, who had landed in Costa Rica in April and taken over its government, declared Costa Rica part of the republic again in July, and was shot in San José on 15 September 1842 with his brigadier, Vicente Villaseñor, after the towns rose against him. On 7 October 1842 Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua signed an alliance whose terms included treating as treason any attempt to restore the constitution of 1824.

That clause set the pattern. Every later attempt was a bid for regional hegemony by one state, and every other state opposed it for that reason as much as for any principle. In 1851 Doroteo Vasconcelos of El Salvador invaded Guatemala with Honduran support and was beaten by Carrera at Arada on 2 February. In the 1850s Trinidad Cabañas of Honduras convened a congress at Tegucigalpa that decreed union with himself at its head; the other governments disowned it. In 1863 Gerardo Barrios of El Salvador won at Coatepeque and sent a Nicaraguan general, Máximo Jerez, to take Nicaragua, which the Nicaraguans shot to pieces. Justo Rufino Barrios of Guatemala tried in 1875, 1883 and 1885 and failed each time.

The most serious attempt came at the end of the century. By the Treaty of Amapala of 20 June 1895, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua agreed a union that took effect on 15 September 1896 as the República Mayor de Centro América, with its capital at Amapala on the Gulf of Fonseca; in 1898 it took a constitution as the United States of Central America, in force from 1 November, and within weeks El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua had each resumed full sovereignty. A four-state federation of 1921 — Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador signed the Pact of Union on 19 January, though Costa Rica never ratified — adopted a constitution in September and fell apart that December when a coup in Guatemala brought down the government that had sponsored it.

What survived were functional substitutes: the Organisation of Central American States, whose charter of 12 December 1962 was signed in Panama and later transformed by the Protocol of Tegucigalpa of 13 December 1991 into the Sistema de la Integración Centroamericana, with its economic subsystem and its Central American Court of Justice. These bodies work because they ask little. They coordinate tariffs and ministers; they do not demand a federal treasury, a federal army or a federal loyalty, which is precisely what the union of 1823 demanded and never received.

How do historians explain the failure?

Nineteenth-century liberals had a clear answer: the federation was betrayed by friars, oligarchs and a peasant caudillo. Marure's chronicle, written in 1844 by a participant, treats the fall as the work of the "party of the opposition" and the clergy, and his verdict on the capital's transfer is that the federalists' refusal to move "influenced the fall of the system, giving rise to the dissolution of the federal authorities". The liberal version hardened into national mythology: Morazán the martyr of union, Carrera the obscurantist. It is a story told by the losers, which is why it is so clean.

The twentieth century added economics. Héctor Lindo-Fuentes's study of El Salvador makes the case that the federal government "could never justify its existence since it could not supply any of the public goods that are expected from a state" — no roads, no courts that people trusted, no schools, no security. On that reading the collapse was structural: a liberal tariff policy cut the customs revenue, the states kept the tobacco monopoly, the quotas went unpaid, and the centre was left with a constitution it could not fund. Ralph Lee Woodward's account of the liberal-conservative struggle puts the church at the centre of it, as the institution that both sides needed to control because it reached the villages that the state could not.

A third explanation looks lower down, at the towns. In this region sovereignty had lived in the municipalities long before it lived in a nation: the act of 1821 was drawn up by a provincial deputation meeting with the town council, the provinces pronounced through their ayuntamientos, and the federal district of San Salvador existed only because the state legislature ceded the city. On that reading the states did not invent themselves in 1838; they resumed something older, which is why they could secede with so little administrative effort.

The evidence supports a plain summary. The federation failed because it had no revenue of its own, no army of its own, and no accepted answer to the question of where sovereignty lay; because its liberal programme attacked the church and the communal lands faster than it could build institutions to replace them; and because the first sustained attempt to govern it coincided with an epidemic, a recession and a peasant war. Whether a different constitution, a different capital or a slower reform programme could have saved it is not answerable from the record. What is answerable is that Central Americans did not reject union in 1838 — their governments did, and their governments spent the next century proving that they could not do without it.

Common myths about the United Provinces of Central America

Timeline of the United Provinces of Central America

What the map shows next

At 1824 on the map the federation appears at its constitutional birth, with the five states drawn as one colour and Chiapas already outside. Drag forward and the shape holds until the end of the decade, though the map cannot show what was happening inside it: the customs houses at Izabal and Acajutla, the mule roads, the parishes.

At 1838 on the map the outline is still there while the states are declaring themselves sovereign, and at 1839 on the map the polygon is in its last year — after that the territory breaks into the five republics, with Centralist Mexico to the north-west and the Mosquito Kingdom's protectorate coast on the Caribbean side.