Battle at Trinidad, in which Morazán won his first victory (as depicted on a present-day bank note).
Francisco Morazán, whose birthday is celebrated as a national holiday in Honduras (as depicted on the reverse side of the note).
He reinstalled the Liberal Guatemalan state government. He exiled sixteen of the top Conservative leaders.3 Then on his orders, the archbishop and hundreds of Franciscan, Dominican, and Recollect friars were rounded up, transported to the coast, and also expelled from the country. New legislation was enacted abolishing the monastic orders and confiscating their properties, some of which were converted to schools and government buildings.
Through battlefield machismo and sheer force of personality, Morazán had in two years blazed from relative obscurity to become supreme master of Central America. Quickly elected president of the republic, he and others in the governing Liberal party over the next decade established programs to modernize the united provinces. But they moved too far too fast, particularly in Guatemala. “The Guatemalan liberals were essentially calling for a capitalist revolution in a country that was in large part still feudal,” explained historian Ralph Lee Woodward, who wrote a brilliant study of the period.4 And a new economic boom did not find its way down to the people. Ruling-class whites—Liberals and Conservatives—made up only a fraction of Guatemala’s population. The great majority of the population consisted of an illiterate underclass of Maya Indians and mixed races, few of whom took any part in the political and economic life of the country—except when pressed into service as soldiers or laborers.
These peasants had achieved a measure of stability, however, under the old Spanish colonial system. They lived hard lives in the same poor rural villages their ancestors had farmed for centuries. They had survived the shock of the Spanish Conquest. And after more than three hundred years of colonial rule, they had taken the Catholicism imposed on them and had woven it through the fabric of their own social and spiritual life. They might be willing to embrace any measure that actually improved their lives, but to them, independence from Spain meant little more than a change in masters. Except now they were being forced to stop tilling their land to build jails for a new penal system, and to serve on juries and road gangs. The native weaving industry suffered as imported textiles entered the country under new trade policies. Their sense of injustice grew when the government levied a head tax on them to finance its Liberal programs, and opened unused Indian lands for foreigners to invest in. They were devoutly religious and infuriated by the repression of their church leaders.
The Conservatives, meanwhile, had not disappeared. Many had gone into hiding. Others secretly returned from exile determined to regain control. And a large number of parish priests, who as a group had not been exiled, now became their chief collaborators. As the Liberals systematically removed the church from its traditional roles in politics and education, limiting it solely to the religious realm, the priests moved among the villages stirring up hatred against the government. Every earthquake or poor crop, they told the Indians, was a sign of punishment from God against the devils who had taken power. Foreigners were being invited, they said, to take over communal Indian land.
Finally, in 1837, the Liberals in Guatemala City ruled that divorce could be granted by the state and marriages performed under civil contract, a direct assault on the church’s most holy and sacred authority. The decrees drove the Conservatives and church leaders into a frenzy. For the priests and most of their flock, it was the last straw.5
Then cholera came to Guatemala.
Many of Carrera’s contemporaries believed him to be an Indian, in part for his role as leader of the Indian uprising, but also because of his dark skin and ink-black hair. He was born, however, in an impoverished section of Guatemala City in 1814, the son of mestizo parents. His father was a mule driver and his mother a domestic servant.6 Little is known about his childhood except that he received no schooling and never learned to read or write. He emerged from the barrio at the age of twelve to join the Conservative-led federal army as a drummer boy, reportedly rising to the rank of corporal or sergeant during the 1827–29 civil war.
When the conflict ended, the teenage Carrera drifted restlessly through the Guatemalan countryside, finding work as a servant, taking on menial jobs until he finally settled in Mataquescuintla in 1832 and began buying hogs in the countryside and driving them to market. By 1836 he had accumulated enough substance to marry Petrona Garcia Morales, the daughter of a local rancher. It is not clear how much political influence she exerted over her young husband, but in the months to come the haughty, fiery Garcia would become one of Carrera’s closest confidantes. She was skilled in the use of the lance and pistol and often accompanied him into battle. She later became legendary for her violent fits of jealousy, bragging about how she mutilated and disfigured her husband’s mistresses.
Physically, Carrera was not imposing. Though not tall, he was solidly built, and his frame and square shoulders were packed with energy. A doctor who attended him marveled at his preposterously tough constitution.7 He was famous for his ability to survive one battle wound after another and recover with amazing speed. His followers were certain he could not be killed, and it was said that Carrera came to believe it himself. But there was another quality that set Carrera apart, an overpowering vitality and charisma that enabled him to dominate men and armies. He possessed an explosive mix of violence, cunning, and courage.
After Mataquescuintla, the Guatemalan government responded with swift, brutal military force. Carrera and his small army of insurgents took to the mountains and waged a classic guerrilla war. The troops sacked villages. Carrera and the rebels countered by going town to town assassinating government officials and judges. The struggle took on aspects of a religious crusade and grew inexorably into a class and race war as the Indians, mestizos, and mulattos united against the white ruling class and foreigners. The battle cries soon became “Death to all foreigners!” and “Viva religion!”
President Morazán, who years before had moved the federal government to El Salvador, tried to negotiate a peace from his headquarters in San Salvador. But it was too late. Carrera had molded his ragtag rebels into a sizable army, and in 1838 they marched on Guatemala City and its Liberal defenders. After five days of street fighting, Carrera entered the city’s center victorious. Terror-stricken residents barricaded themselves in their homes and braced for the worst.
De Witt, still the U.S. diplomat in residence, described the assault in a dispatch to U.S. secretary of state Forsyth: “On Monday the 29th [of January] at 1 o’clock in the night, the battle commenced. The firing of musketry was kept up briskly for an hour near the western gate. . . . From this time till Friday morning the warfare continued day and night, chiefly from the street corners and barricades, with various intervals of intermission. On Wednesday, the 31st, Carrera with three thousand Indians entered the city by the eastern gate. They perpetuated many excesses and on Thursday afternoon barbarously murdered the Vice President [José Gregorio Salazar had been sent by Morazán to negotiate a peace] in the presence of his family, as he was walking in the parlor with an infant in his arms.”8
Within a week, Carrera and his peasant army were gone. With the Liberals deposed, Carrera’s main objective had been achieved, and he seemed not to know what else to do in the capital. Terrified Conservatives and municipal officials had quickly transferred new rifles to his men and commissioned Carrera a lieutenant colonel with command of his home district in Mataquescuintla.9 Though Carrera and his mob army withdrew, the demons had already been let out of the bag, according to De Witt, who wrote to Forsyth: “What wise men do now most fear, is that the Indians, having for the first time since the conquest of the country discovered that they can by a use of their power force the whites and [mestizos] into terms, will hereafter return to repeat their atrocities upon the slightest provocation. They outnumber the other classes in the proportion of ten to one.”10
Morazán soon arriv
ed from San Salvador with fifteen hundred federal troops, restored the Liberals, and over the next eighteen months pursued a counterinsurgency campaign to capture or kill Carrera and wipe out his partisans. The federal troops won virtually every battle, but most of the rebels escaped and Morazán could not catch Carrera. “Morazán is master of no more ground than he can cover with his troops,” wrote De Witt.11 The insurgents continued bloody hit-and-run strikes from strongholds in the mountains east of the capital. Acts of butchery escalated on both sides.
In the middle of Morazán’s campaign against Carrera in Guatemala, Conservatives in Nicaragua, Honduras, and Costa Rica seized power, formed an alliance to dissolve the federation, and by early 1839 were marching on El Salvador. De Witt summed up the situation in one of his final dispatches. The republic’s constitution was, he said, “a mere rope of sand, and the people are wholly unfit for a republican government. The machinery will not work.”12 As the federation began to crumble around him, Morazán now alone represented the republic.
War broke out across Central America and Morazán was forced to return to El Salvador with the core of his army to contain it. Carrera had won a war of attrition. On April 13, 1839, he marched into Guatemala City unopposed. By fiat, he reinstated the Conservatives and some political moderates to power. They, in turn, commissioned the former drummer boy a brigadier general and named him commander in chief of the Guatemalan army. This time Carrera, or one of his surrogates, was in the city to stay.
Hundreds of miles to the east, in El Salvador, Morazán succeeded once again in doing what he knew how to do best—win military engagements. In early May, outnumbered two to one, he defeated a combined Honduran-Nicaraguan army, but he suffered a serious bullet wound to his right arm during the battle. The victory was not decisive; his small army of Liberal loyalists was unable to follow up. He was now isolated. Even his native state of Honduras had turned against him. The federal congress disbanded. Morazán’s dream of a united Central America was disintegrating around him.
In rapid succession, Guatemala seceded from the federation, the archbishop was invited back to Guatemala, the Roman Catholic Church was reestablished as the state religion, the civil marriage act was revoked, and the monastic orders were restored. Under Carrera’s watchful eye, the state government was reverting to the old colonial system. In September, around the same time Stephens and Catherwood were preparing to sail from New York, Carrera heard rumors that Morazán was about to attack and he rode to the El Salvador border to survey the situation. While there he was fired on by a small group of Salvadoran troops and hit in the chest with a musket ball.
In San Salvador, Morazán, recovering from his wound, isolated and surrounded, continued to fend off invaders from Honduras. Then a serious earthquake rocked San Salvador, causing heavy damage. The Honduran general, Francisco Ferrera, gave Morazán twenty-four hours to surrender. Instead Morazán rode north with the remainder of the Salvadoran army to face the Hondurans at San Pedro Perulapán. The battle appeared lost until Morazán, greatly outnumbered again, personally led one of the final attacks, appearing up and down the line of his troops urging his men on. It was the decisive moment and swung the tide of the battle. Ferrera and another senior Honduran officer were wounded, and large quantities of munitions were captured, including Ferrera’s sword, the ultimate humiliation. The Honduran general was forced to flee on foot with his soldiers. Morazán stood victorious on the battlefield once again, seemingly never to taste defeat.
Stephens had not wasted his time in Guatemala City. A sharp-eyed observer, he had taken careful measure of the overall political situation and arrived at a very low opinion of the public men he met in social and official gatherings. He had no sympathy for their politics. They were the wealthy and privileged who after years of exile had taken back their properties and political power. He noted how they humored Carrera and the Indian castes for their own ends, manipulating them through the priests, playing on their ignorance and stoking their religious fanaticism. He wrote that in “their hatred of the Liberals they were courting a third power that might destroy them both, consorting with a wild animal which might at any moment turn and rend them to pieces. And in the general heaving of the elements there was not a man of nerve enough among them, with the influence of name and station, to rally around him the strong and honest men of the country, reorganize the shattered republic, and save them from the disgrace and danger of truckling with an ignorant uneducated Indian boy.”
He concluded that the only responsible thing for him to do was to go to El Salvador, where he could decide for himself if any legitimate form of central government had a chance of succeeding. But traveling overland was out of the question. Chatfield had taken a circuitous route by sea on his return to Guatemala City. The master of a French ship anchored off El Salvador, Captain De Nouvelle, had come up to Guatemala City riding hard to reach the capital. He reported a number of atrocities, including the discovery of three men found dead with their faces disfigured beyond recognition. Rather than return overland, the captain sent a courier with orders to bring his ship up to the Guatemalan port of Iztapa. He offered to take Stephens aboard when he returned to El Salvador.
Meanwhile, 1840 and a new decade clanged to life with the bells of the city’s thirty-eight churches, convents, and monasteries. Shops were closed, the sky was clear, flowers bloomed in the courtyards, green mountaintops and volcanoes circled a city bathed in sunny warmth so unlike the snow and cold of New York on the first day of January. Visiting the cathedral as “Mozart’s music swelled through the aisles,” Stephens observed Carrera taking his seat directly in front of the pulpit with the chief of state, Mariano Rivera Paz, at his side. When the service ended, the way was cleared as Carrera, “awkward in his movements, with his eyes fixed on the ground, or with furtive glances, as if ill at ease in being an object of so much attention, walked down the aisle.” When he emerged on the church steps overlooking the main plaza, Stephens saw a thousand “ferocious-looking soldiers were drawn up before the door. A wild burst of music greeted him, and the faces of the men glowed with devotion to their chief.”
9
Malaria
Stephens left for Iztapa on January 5 accompanied by Catherwood, who planned to go only as far as the coast and return to the city. His contract, after all, said nothing about chasing after governments. They left in the afternoon, stopping for the night on the edge of a lake.
Sometime during the night Stephens fell violently ill. Plasmodia parasites were swarming through his body. A week or two before, probably during his visit to the coast, he had been bitten by a female anopheles mosquito. In her saliva were microscopic protozoa that slipped into his bloodstream and lodged in his liver. After days of consuming cells and reproducing up to forty thousand times, they burst out and entered his red blood cells. There they continued replicating in such vast quantities the blood cells had now swelled past the breaking point. Unknowingly, Stephens had contracted malaria.
“I woke the next morning,” he recalled, “with a violent headache and pain in all my bones.” Though very sick, he was still able to travel. He suffered from high fever the next several nights as he struggled to reach the coast. One morning in great pain he could not move for hours. The last night on the trail, his condition took a turn for the worse. “Mr. Catherwood,” he wrote, “who, from not killing anyone in Copán had conceived a great opinion of his medical skills, gave me a powerful dose of medicine and toward morning I fell asleep.”
The next day they reached the port of Iztapa, where Stephens left Catherwood and boarded De Nouvelle’s ship. The cool sea air revived him. That night, as the ship caught an evening breeze for El Salvador, his cabin filled with mosquitoes, but he had no way of knowing that some of them almost certainly carried the same protozoa that caused his sickness. The next day his fever returned and remained all day. When they arrived off the coast of El Salvador, Stephens was too sick to go ashore. De Nouvelle, with pressing business, went on ahead, saying that he
would arrange to have horses waiting for Stephens once he was able to land. To catch the air that afternoon, Stephens went on deck, where he counted six volcanoes along the coast. That night he sat in wonder watching the incandescent top of Volcan Izalco, whose fiery golden lava served as a navigational guide for sailors far out at sea.
In the morning he felt well enough to go ashore. El Salvador’s chief port was a bleak place, no more than a sandy beach, a few soldiers, some dilapidated Spanish warehouses, several huts, including one for the port captain, and a small rancho. Weak and wobbly, Stephens sought shelter from the heat in one of the rancho’s huts. “It was close and hot,” he wrote, “but very soon I required all the covering I could get.” He was shivering violently with chills, suffering the classic paroxysms of malaria. The fever returned. He craved water. “I became lightheaded, wild with pain, and wandered among the miserable huts with only the consciousness that my brain was scorching. I have an indistinct recollection of speaking English to some Indian women, begging them to get me a horse to ride to Sonsonate; of some laughing, others looking at me in pity, and others leading me out of the sun, and making me lie down under the shade of a tree. At three o’clock in the afternoon the ship’s mate came ashore. I had changed my position, and he found me lying on my face asleep, and almost withered by the sun.”
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