UNITED PROVINCES OF CENTRAL AMERICA 217
British companies that were to colonize the land
with foreign immigrants and provide it with an
infrastructure, and even an agrarian reform that
allowed squatters to buy land for half its value and
permitted natives to settle on vacant land. Gálvez
also sought to reform Guatemala’s judicial system
by providing for trial by jury and habeas corpus and
vesting power to appoint all judges in the governor
of the state. This last feature alienated powerful
landed interests who often served as jefes políticos,
local offi cials who combined judicial and admin-
istrative functions and were permitted to keep a
share of tax collections.
The loss of the support of local landed interests
combined with the ravages of a cholera epidemic
that spread over Central America in 1837 to bring
down the Gálvez regime and its ambitious reform
program. Stirred up by local clergy who proclaimed
the epidemic to be divine retribution for the her-
esies of civil marriage and divorce, the native and
mixed-blood masses rose in revolt against Gálvez’s
radical innovations in law and taxation, attacks
on their landholdings by creole landowners, and
sanitary measures instituted to prevent the spread
of disease. The principal revolt in February 1838
was led by the mestizo Rafael Carrera, whose army
of indígenas and castas cried, “Long live religion,
and death to all foreigners!”
Carrera took Guatemala City, defeated Morazán
in 1842, and ended the federal republic. He then
established a conservative regime in Guatemala,
which he controlled until his death in 1865. In
1854, dispensing with the formality of elections,
he had Congress name him president for life and
implemented a reactionary program that revived
the authority of the church, returned church and
indigenous communal properties to their original
owners, brought back native forced labor, and even
changed the title of local offi cials from jefe político
to the old colonial title of corregidor. But what had
begun as a lower-class protest against radical inno-
vations and the spoliation of communal lands was
soon taken over by the conservative merchant oli-
garchy, who provided the taxes Carrera needed to
pay his army and foreign loans. Conservative min-
isters drawn from the elite surrounded the dictator.
Alongside the traditional labor arrangements, there
existed free labor and a money economy, with land-
less natives and mestizos working, sometimes under
debt peonage, on the plantations.
Similar trends prevailed throughout Cen-
tral America in the age of Carrera, although
labor was freer in most of the area than it was in
Guatemala. By the 1850s, a rising world demand
for coffee stimulated expansion of the crop, which
had been grown on a large scale in Costa Rica
since the 1830s, and spurred attacks on indig-
enous communal lands. Coffee in Costa Rica and
indigo and coffee in El Salvador made for relative
political stability in those countries. In the more
backward republics of Nicaragua and Honduras,
where cattle barons warred with each other, little
centralized authority existed.
The discovery of gold in California gave a new
importance to Central America as a transoceanic
transit route and sharpened the rivalry of the
United States and Great Britain in the area. The
threat to the sovereignty and territorial integrity
of the Central American republics grew acute as
a result of the folly of Nicaraguan liberals, who in
1855 invited William Walker, an adventurer from
the United States, to help them overthrow a con-
servative regime. Having brought the liberals to
power, Walker, supported by a band of some three
hundred countrymen, staged a coup, proclaimed
himself president, legalized slavery, and made Eng-
lish the offi cial language. By mid-1856, in a rare
display of unity, Nicaraguan liberals and conserva-
tives, joined by all the other Central American re-
publics, had combined in the National War against
the Yankee intruders, but the Central American
army that opposed Walker was essentially a con-
servative army. Defeated in 1857, Walker re-
turned to the United States. He nevertheless made
two more attempts to conquer Central America,
the last ending with his death before a Honduran
fi ring squad in 1860.
The National War revived the moribund
movement for Central American unity. The lib-
eral Salvadoran president Gerardo Barrios was a
leading advocate of federation. His efforts to real-
ize Morazán’s dream provoked Carrera, who was
determined to maintain conservative domination
over Central America and to send troops into El