History of Yucatán

The territory of what is now the Republic of Yucatán has one of the longest recorded histories in the Americas. The earliest reliable archeological evidence of the presence of homo sapiens sapiens suggests that the human presence in the Yucatán stretches back at least as early as 10 000 BCE, in the form of generally nomadic tribes of hunters and gatherers.

Beginning in 5200 BCE, and continuing for almost four millennia, the inhabitants of central Mexico began to develop agriculture, through the domestication of corn, beans, squash, and tomatoes, and the development of turkeys and dogs as food animals. As Mesoamerican agriculture became steadily more productive, the Mesoamerican societies supported by agriculture gradually became more complex. Circa 1500 BCE, this complexity reached a critical level among the Olmec of southeastern Mexico, who developed the first organized civilization in Mesoamerica. Although Olmec history remains largely unknown, it is known that the Olmecs established the basic pattern of Mesoamerican civilization, creating the basis for the Mesoamerican calender, developing distinctive styles of architecture, and inventing many other cultural elements that endured until the Conquest.

Maya civilization began to develop in what is now Chiapas and Guatemala in 500 BCE. In the succeeding centuries, the Maya gradually developed a civilization based largely on the Olmec model, refining the Olmec calender and developing distinctive Mayan architectural styles. Perhaps most importantly, the Maya invented a distinctive hieroglyphic writing system that was the first writing system of any kind in the Americas. As Maya cities continued to develop, the Maya began to emerge as a major cultural influence in their own right upon the rest of Mesoamerica.

From the 4th to the 10th centuries, Maya civilization reached its height in what is known as the Classic Period. A complex network of city-states, united by common networks of trade, religion, and dynastic relations, the Classic Maya quickly evolved into one of the most advanced civilizations existing on Earth by the late First Millennium.  Particularly in the realms of astronomy and architecture, the Maya were without equals. Only towards the end of the Classic Period did Maya civilization begin to fall apart, under the strains of incessant dynastic warfare.

The Post-Classic Period lasted for roughly six centuries, until this Conquest. During this vast span of time, the Maya moved north into the lowlands of the Yucatán peninsula, abandoning the older cities in the interior to the jungle and constructing new coastal communities closer to trade routes. The Maya seem to have been unique in Mesoamerica inasmuch as they retained their independence from the empires -- first Zapotec, then Toltec, and finally Aztec -- that each took power in Mexico. For all of their independence from the empires of Mexico, though, the Maya were essentially marginal in the Mesoamerican context. In the 12th century, a league of city-states in the Yucatán peninsula was overthrown by the city of Mayapán, which came to exercise a protectorate over much of the peninsula. Later, in 1441, Mayapán and its informal empire was destroyed by the other Maya. Inter-state warfare continued across the Maya cultural area long after the destruction of Mayapán.

Individual Spanish explorers visited the Caribbean coast of Yucatán as early as 1511, but only after Hernan Cortés' successful 1521 conquest of the Aztec Empire for Spain did Spanish imperialism begin to pose a threat to the Maya. When the first conquistadors landed in the Yucatán peninsula in 1526, the Maya put up a lively resistance, opposing the superior technology and organization for more than two decades. By the 1550's, though, the decimation of the Maya by Old World epidemic disease and the swelling numbers of Spanish troops forced the surrender of the last major remaining independent Maya state. Although resistance continued in the impenetrable jungle of the interior, the Maya had essentially been secured for Spain.

The Spanish colonial period lasted for the better part of three centuries, and exerted tremendous pressures upon Mayan culture. The introduction of Old World epidemic diseases into what had been a disease-free environment continued to decimate the Maya even into the 17th and 18th centuries, aiding the Spanish as they enforced their imperial rule over the Maya lands through the construction of the imposing cities of Mérida, Campeche, and Valladolid. In 1562, the Mayan culture was struck a severe blow when Friar Diego de Landa ordered the destruction of thousands of Mayan religious sculptures and 27 different hieroglyphic manuscripts, along with the torture and murder of suspected Mayan non-Christians. With that act of cultural vandalism, the possibilities for a restoration of pre-Conquest Mayan culture were closed off.

Despite the sufferings of the Maya under Spanish rule, Mayan culture persisted. For instance, although the Maya were converted en masse to Roman Catholicism by Spanish missionaries priests, despite the protests of those same priests the Maya peasantry managed to reconcile their pre-Conquest religious beliefs and rites with those imported from Europe. Perhaps more importantly, Yucatán's lack of plentiful wealth discouraged Spanish settlement in the area, and unlike Hispanicized Mexico, post-Conquest Yucatán remained overwhelmingly Mayan in culture. The only exception to this pattern in the entire Mayan culture area lay in British Honduras, a colony carved into the uninhabited rain forests on the fringes of Mayan settlement that was quickly settled with Jamaican and Barbadian slaves. All in all, though, there existed a very real possibility that Maya and Mayan culture could again regain their predominance in their homeland.

The Maya led Spanish America in their opposition to Spanish rule. Large parts of the Yucatán peninsula remained outside Spanish control, and Mayan religious and political leaders continually raised revolts against the Spanish Empire. As a result of this insurrectionary history, after the Napoleonic French invasion of Spain in 1807, the Maya quickly took advantage of the collapse of the Spanish empire. The Maya war of independence were fought successfully, and by the mid-1820's the republics of Yucatán, Chiapas, and Guatemala were internationally recognized as independent states. The Maya of the Copán region fell under Honduran rule, and remained an anomalous Native American enslave into a nation almost entirely Hispanophone and mestizo.

The first decades of Maya independence were tumultuous. From the beginning of the independence period, all of the republics were threatened by foreign invasion -- at first by France or Spain, then by Mexico, and later also by the United States. Partly as the result of war scares, but also because of pre-independence patterns under Spain, none of the Mayan republics were democratic -- Chiapas and Guatemala were oligarchies ruled by Hispanophone minorities not amounting to a quarter of the total population of either country, while Yucatecan politics were more broadly based but at the expense of constant political instability, numerous coups d'état, and even the odd civil war. On occasion, Yucatán's instability effected its neighbours, thanks to Yucatán's pretensions to the dominance of the entire Maya culture area and the reluctance of both of its Maya neighbours to accept Yucatecan predominance. A war between Yucatán and Chiapas in 1839 and 1840 did little but push the Chiapans to accept their state's annexation by Mexico, and to make Guatemala permanently hostile to Yucatán

In 1847, Yucatán took advantage of Mexico's preoccupation with the Mexican-American War to seize the Mexican state of Tabasco, an area with a mixed population of Mexicans and Maya. After the Mexican-American War had ended, Yucatán's opportunistic act had earned it Mexican enmity. At the same time that Yucatán was embroiled in a series of dissipating civil wars in the 1850's, Mexico was slowly building a more stable government. By 1860, Mexico had emerged as a relatively prosperous country, under a liberal and modernizing if nationalistic regime prone to irredentist sentiment. Given the overwhelming strength of the United States, this irredentism was naturally directed towards Yucatán, and in 1861 the Mexican-Yucatecan War had begun.

Even if Yucatán had not been already involved in a lengthy civil war, the country would have been hard-pressed to cope with the numerical superiority of the Mexicans. As it was, the Yucatecan army suffered catastrophe after catastrophe. With the aid of dissident ex-Yucatecan Hispanics, Mexico retook Tabasco at the same time that a civil war began again in the Yucatecan heartland. By the end of the year, it had become evident that barring foreign intervention, all Yucatán would fall to Mexico.

The Mexican-Yucatecan War happened to coincide in space and time with the First American Civil War in the United States to Yucatán's north. As a country opposed on principle to the slavery practiced by the slaveholding Confederacy, and as a country that feared the prosperity of Confederate imperialist encroachment on its own sphere of influence, France sought an excuse that would not only allow it to intervene against the Confederacy but allow it to expand its empire. Fortunately for France, an agent of the desperate Yucatecan government approached the French and offered France the perfect excuse. As the French navy broke the Confederate blockade of the Francophone Union state of Louisiana, France demanded port rights from Mexico in Tabasco, ostensibly to service its fleet. When Mexico refused, French marines landed in the Yucatán peninsula. As the Union could only watch, the French and Yucatecans gradually mopped up the Mexicans in Yucatán proper, and then went on to conquer not only Tabasco but Chiapas in the space of a year. Public opinion in France was so excited by these conquests that some French dreamed of creating a French empire in Mexico. Indeed, it wasn't until the United States threatened France with war that the Second Empire reluctantly abandoned the possibility of a wider Mexican empire.

In a series of treaties between the United States, France, Mexico, and the greater Yucatán, the French position in Middle America was defined to the grudging acceptance of all parties. France received from Mexico the entire state of Chiapas on behalf of Yucatán, while renouncing any further aspirations towards Mexico. In exchange, France received from all of the other parties formal recognition of its new protectorate over the Republic of Yucatán, with the proviso of a French military presence limited to the bare minimum required to keep domestic order. Thus began Yucatán's century-long experience as a French protectorate.

Ironically, as soon as it became apparent that Yucatán was a strategic liability for France, that the Yucatecan domestic market was too poor and small to be a substantial market for French exports, and that the only thing that Yucatán could export were beef and corn exports that competed with France's own exports of the same, Yucatán promptly became an unpopular colonial holding of France. Many contemporaries of the early years of the Yucatecan protectorate entirely expected that Yucatán would become in short time an impoverished backwater of the French empire. Indeed, the only thing that saved Yucatán from such a fate was a stream of enlightened French administrators.

Émile Dupreux -- Yucatán's first French administrator -- was, among other things, a devotee of the Saint-Simonian cooperative movement that had allowed rural France to achieve an enjoyable level of prosperity. Drawing upon his experiences in his native Basse-Normandie, Dupreux embarked on am ambitious program of establishing a basic educational system that would reach deep into the peasant communities of the Yucatecan and Chiapan interior, and to encourage the establishment of agricultural cooperatives among the same communities. As most of the greater Chiapan landowners had fled to Mexico following the Yucatecan conquest, and the Maya peasantry had longed to own its own land, he was also able to enact a sweeping program of land reform, eliminating most of the Hispanic absentee landowners from rural life. By the time that Dupreux had died in 1884, 21 years after he had begun, his liberal policies had taken root, and were followed by his successors for more than a generation after his own death. Later, the peasantry and poor urbanites were gradually given the political franchise. By the time that the First World War had begun, Yucatán was still rather poor, but it had a popular and reasonably effective government that ruled over one of the best-educated and healthiest populations in the entire region.

Yucatán's participation in the First World War was limited to its dispatch, under French command, of half of the Yucatecan army in 1917 to fight in Austria after the daring landings on the Dalmatian coast. Despite its noninvolvement in the war, Yucatán took part in the global economic boom of the 1920's. For the first time, Yucatán began to develop some industry, based on the rich oil wells of Tabasco and the processing of beef , henequen fibres, and sugar cane for export. In the middle of this boom, many Maya began to ascend to the ranks of the middle classes in Mérida and Campeche, joining the already-established Francophone bourgeoisie.

This economic modernization was accompanied by a reassertion of the Mayan national and ethnolinguistic identity in Yucatán. This reemergence came about as the product of three different factors. In 1917, Yucatán had become a founding member of the League of Nations on the model of the British overseas dominions. In 1923, Yucatán finally extended the franchise to all males 18 years of age and older, making the country the first mass democracy in Middle America. Throughout the first quarter of the 20th century, too, the long-standing curiosity of the French and other Westerners at the vast complexes of ruins scattered throughout Maya exploded into a French national obsession, as French researchers scoured the ruins and jungles for information about the civilization of the Classic Maya. These factors combined to produce a society where the Maya language and culture of the vast majority of Yucatecans became an essential feature of the country, and naturally led to a cultural renaissance among the modern Maya. Based on the work of linguists at the Université du Mérida, a standard version of the Mayan language, based upon the Yucatec dialect of the Mérida, was created and gained official status as the first national language of Yucatán alongside French. At the same time, many Yucatecan artists were inspired by the works of European modernist writers and Mexican muralists and began to apply those principles to their own environments -- whether the sufferings of the peasantry, the historical experiences of the Maya nation, or the experience of Yucatecan urban life -- and described them, to great effect.

Yucatecan prosperity came to an end in the 1930's, with the Great Depression. Yucatán's close ties with France and the League allowed the country to have the relatively least painful experience in all of North America, but Yucatecan economic recovery came only with the League's period of rearmament in 1939. Yucatán played a more prominent role in the Second World War than in the First World War, and the (French-commanded) Yucatecan Expeditionary Force played a crucial role in the liberation of Strasbourg in October of 1943. Yucatán's military participation on France's side helped Yucatecan politicians to gain the support of France for gradual independence. In 1945, Yucatán became a full member state of the French Community, with the promise of full independence no later than 1965.

Yucatán took full part in the quarante glorieuses; in fact, it was one of the most notable successes of that heady area. Save for the high productive oil wells of Tabasco, Yucatán developed little heavy industry during this period. Rather, Yucatán developed light manufacturing industrial plants devoted to exports to destinations elsewhere in the Americas. At the same time, loans and grants from France allowed Yucatecan agricultural cooperatives to adopt more modern machinery, while substantial investment from France, the United States, and South America transformed the white-sand Caribbean beaches of the Yucatán peninsula into a vast complex of beach resorts.

The quarante glorieuses transformed Yucatecan society. The modernization of Yucatecan agriculture freed up more than half of the total national population from rural areas. The overwhelming majority of these rural migrants moved to the cities of Yucatán, where their numbers ensured the new urban majority in Yucatán of Mayan-speakers. Perhaps a quarter-million Yucatecans, though, chose to emigrate, most going to the prosperous Francophone United States' state of Louisiana. At the same time, a half-million economic migrants came to Yucatán, most of these Guatemalan Maya. A new mass culture quickly spread across Yucatán, propagated by the mass media in Maya as often as in European languages, and heavily influenced by popular cultures all over the world, from the United States to Brazil to France. Women quickly came to play an important role in this mass culture: After Yucatecan women acquired the vote in 1948, feminists quickly took advantage of the Yucatecan cooperatives to create a pro-feminist majority in Yucatán.

Yucatán's full independence in 1964 scarcely disturbed the economic boom and development of mass culture. By the early 1970's, the Republic of Yucatán was clearly a high-achieving Second World country on the verge of First World status. Unfortunate, by the end of the 1970's this Golden Age was brought to an end by the appalling mistreatment of the Guatemalan Maya. While Yucatán, under French rule, had gradually evolved into a liberal and prosperous nation-state, Guatemala actually experienced something of a regression. Although there were twice as many Maya living in Guatemala as in Yucatán -- seven million against three million -- a Hispanic minority that formed only one-quarter of the Guatemalan population ran the country. Spanish-language literacy and income requirements for voting effectively prohibited Maya participation in Guatemalan politics, and a Hispanic stranglehold over the national economy contributed to making Guatemalan Maya formed one of the most impoverished populations in the Western Hemisphere.

Since the mid-1960's, popular opposition in Yucatán to the apartheid regime of Guatemala made for chilly relations between Mérida and Guatemala City at the best of times. In 1977, a rebellion broke out among the Mayan peasants of the rainforests of Petén department, and quickly spread throughout Guatemala. Claiming that the revolution represented a Communist rebellion, the ruling Hispanic caste gained the material and financial support of a reactionary Nixon administration in the United States that had developed an almost-obsessive fear of Communism, both at home and abroad. With unholy glee, the Guatemalan Army set to work.

In 1979, Yucatán saw the first large numbers of Mayan refugees arriving from Guatemala, bringing with them reports of appalling massacres of entire village populations solely on the basis of their Mayan ethnicity and their suspected political affiliations. The Yucatecan government brought these reports before the League of Nations General Assembly, and Guatemala was accordingly rebuked and suffered the application of general League sanctions. The Guatemalan government ignored these sanctions and withdrew from the League, and with the help of the sympathetic Nixon Administration in the United States, continued its series of massacres.

As the slaughter began to take on a genocidal nature, the Mayan populations of both Guatemala and Yucatán were steadily radicalized. Beginning in the middle of 1980, the Yucatecan government arranged for the secret shipment of Mexican-made armaments to Mayan insurgents in Guatemala, and unsubtly began to prepare the Yucatecan population for war. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the strong Mayan national identity of Yucatecans and the strong parallels seen by many between the contemporary slaughter of Guatemalan Maya by Hispanics and their slaughter of their ancestors in the 16th century, Yucatecans were eager for war. Following a particularly bloody massacre of Maya in the Guatemalan Highlands in February of 1981, the Yucatecan government demanded that Guatemala open its border to League peacekeepers. When the Guatemalan government refused, Yucatán declared war upon Guatemala in March.

At first, the war went remarkably well for the Yucatecans and their Guatemalan Maya allies. The scattered Guatemalan army units in the vast Petén rainforest in the north of Guatemala were easily overwhelmed, while the Maya uprising in the Guatemalan Highlands kept the Guatemalan army from defending itself against the Yucatecan invasion via Chiapas. The Central American republics aside, the rest of the League of Nations supported the Yucatecan invasion; Mexico even provided Yucatán with Mexican-made light weapons at cost. As Yucatecan forces and their Guatemalan allies advanced towards the Guatemalan Hispanic heartland, Guatemala showed every sign of quickly crumbling before the Maya advance.

Unfortunately for the Maya, in March of 1982 President Chang decided -- over the vehement opposition of the most of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Congress, and the remaining democratic states of the Union -- to intervene on behalf of the Guatemalans. Devastating air strikes were made against Mérida and other Yucatecan cities, and United States Marines were actually landed in Mérida itself. Although many of the Marines chose to defect, the consequent fighting and devastation of the Yucatecan heartland played into the hands of the Guatemalan army, which fortified the Central and Eastern Highlands of Guatemala as the Yucatecans and their local allies desperately attempted to recover.

Perhaps surprisingly, neither Yucatán nor Guatemala suffered nuclear bombardment in the Third World War, despite that conflict's degeneration into an openly genocidal war. Guatemala suffered terribly from the post-war famines, with almost half of the Maya living in the territories under Guatemalan control starving after the confiscation of their food crops by the army. Yucatán had the advantage of being a functioning state; as soon as the spring harvest of maize came in in June of 1983, Yucatán went on the offensive. The Guatemalan army quickly crumbled, and by September Guatemalan troops only occupied Guatemala City and the adjacent Honduran border. While the elite First Army Corps waited on the border to reinforce Guatemala City's defenses, the Guatemalan government whipped the Hispanic population of Guatemala City into a frenzy, warning that if the Yucatecans broke through into the erstwhile national capital they would loot and murder without restraint, and that Christian civilization in Middle America would come to an end. Outside the barrios surrounding Guatemala City, in the meantime, a large combined force of Yucatecan veterans and angry Guatemalan peasants prepared to assault the capital, determined to destroy the genocidal Guatemalan regime once and for all.

The actual Battle of Guatemala City lasted the better part of the month of October, and approximately 150 thousand people -- only half of them combatants -- died. As the First Army Corps crossed the border into anarchic Honduras to create a Central American redoubt, the Yucatecan/Maya and Guatemalan armies collided head-on. In the midst of intense street fighting and repeated artillery fire and airstrikes, huge numbers of Yucatecan/Maya and Guatemalan soldiers died. Many civilians were caught in the cross-fire between the two armies, while the Guatemalan army executed twelve thousand Maya in the heat of the battle for supposedly betraying the Guatemalan government. As Hispanics fled under escort into Honduras, the Yucatecan army redoubled its assault, finally breaking through the inner defensive lines on the 28th of October and occupying all of the Guatemala City metropolitan area by the beginning of November. Mopping-up actions eliminated the last Guatemalan units between Guatemala City and the Honduran border, and by the 15th of November Guatemala was mostly pacified. At a cost of two million Maya dead and a half-million Guatemalan Hispanic dead, Guatemala had been freed. Many Maya were enraged by the escape of many of the leading génocidaires to Honduras, but their war-weariness made peace an absolute necessity. Following the extradition of many of the leading génocidaires for trial (and eventual conviction) to the World Court, the Yucatecan and Central American governments signed a series of accords in May of 1984 that brought the war to an end.

In September of 1984, a referendum was held in the Guatemalan territory to determine the political future of Guatemala -- whether it would remain independent, federate with Yucatán, or be annexed wholesale into Yucatán. Perhaps not surprisingly, a two-to-one majority of Guatemalan voters voted in favour of their erstwhile country's absorption into Yucatán. On the 1st of October, the League of Nations, its member-states, and the Tripartite Alliance recognized the annexation.

Yucatán faced a task of reconstruction of immense magnitude. In the old provinces of Yucatán, perhaps a tenth of the pre-war population had died, whether in the Guatemala War or in the post-Third World War famines. Much of their industry had been destroyed by the United States air strikes of 1982, while the tourist resorts of Cancún and Cozumel hosted only American and Guatemalan refugees. The global capital shortage made it impossible for Yucatán to attract foreign capital in order to begin rebuilding, giving Yucatecan financial cooperatives a new importance as the only available source of capital. In the 1980's and early 1990's, a quarter-million Yucatecan professionals who despaired of their country's chances emigrated, the overwhelming majority going to France and Mexico. Eventually, the advantages of the old provinces of Yucatán -- a educated and multi-lingual workforce, a central geographical location in North America, and an attractive environment for tourists -- came into play. As the 1990's progressed, Yucatán's recovery quickened, finally regaining its 1980 standard of living in 1997.

The situation in the former Guatemala was naturally much worse. The 1985 census recorded that of the seven million Maya who had lived in Guatemala in 1980, only 4.5 million had survived, and that of the two million Hispanics who once lived in the country, only a quarter-million peasants remained. Guatemala's meagre infrastructure had been almost destroyed in the course of the Guatemala War. Desperately poor and ill-educated, Guatemalans suffered very poor living conditions, whether in isolated rural villages or in the sprawling slums of Guatemala City. Even before the fall of Guatemala City, Yucatán made strenuous efforts to overcome Guatemala's poverty. In January of 1985, the army conscription law that mandated all male Yucatecan citizens to serve two years in the Yucatecan army when they turned 18 was altered. Under the new Loi sur la service nationale, all Yucatecans 18 years of age, regardless of sex, had the choice of serving either in the Yucatecan army or in the Yucatecan Service Corps. The CSY was devoted to work in the Guatemalan provinces, where members rebuilt roads, staffed schools and hospitals, and established community cooperatives, with the ultimate aim of implanting a viable democratic society in the former Guatemala. Many of the Yucatecan veterans of the Guatemala War settled permanently in Guatemala, and came to play a prominent role in the reconstruction -- for instance, the young Mérida-born mayor of Guatemala City, François X. Chan, led the successful reconstruction of Guatemala City in the course of his decade-long mayoralty. In the end, Guatemalan life was improved significantly, but the exceptionally high rate of population growth amongst Guatemalans eroded many of these gains. By 2000, the Guatemalan population had doubled to eight million, with another million migrating to old Yucatán, another half-million settling in the Mexican New Territories or in the bayous of western Louisiana at the invitation of national governments. Yucatecan volunteers became common sights in Congressional and Louisianais armies, particularly after the abortive Presidentialist offensive into New Orleans.

As the 1990's advanced, Yucatán slowly began to establish itself as a new, unified country. For the first time ever, Yucatán had become a major North American power, with the fourth-largest population of any North American state and one of the largest militaries in the world on a per capita basis. Yucatán quickly began to enlarge upon its ties with the outside world, allying with Mexico on the grounds of their compatible democratic governments and Second World economies, associating with Native American states like Paraguay, Peru, Bolivia, and the Southwestern Confederation, and strengthening its ties with the rest of the francophonie. In 1996, Mérida hosted the 31st annual Sommet de la francophonie, the first time that Yucatán had hosted the annual assembly of Francophone countries since the 1968 Cancún Summit. Yucatecan pop-music bands such as Caracol, Tête-plats, and Petén broke into the mainstream of global popular culture with their fusion of Antillais zouk with traditional Maya folk music, while the nouvelle vague of Yucatecan writers -- from old Yucatán and from the former Guatemala -- writing in French or in Yucatec began to achieve international renown. While the Yucatecan population passed 11 million in 1997 and the income per capita enjoyed growth of 7%, Yucatán had managed to position itself as a cultural leader in the Second and Third Worlds.

First contact with the ITA shocked Yucatecans, as it did their co-planetaries. A brief economic recession in 1998 was followed by a rapid expansion of interworld exports and tourism, and by the beginnings of what looked like a global economic boom. Yucatecans found themselves entranced by the world of Mayan Earth, and happily supported Yucatán's application for membership in the Chotl ta'an -- the assembly of Mayan nations across the ITA. As Yucatán has begun to evolve into a gateway for Mayan Earth investment and interest on Tripartite Alliance Earth, Yucatecans have found themselves faced with a profoundly attractive and specifically Mayan version of modernity. Although Yucatecan culture is likely to remain relatively Europeanized for some time to come, the influence of Mayan Earth can certainly be expected to change the Yucatecans.

In the spring of 2000, Yucatán involved itself in the Mosquitia War against the Central American Union. Following the genocidal assault upon the self-governing Nicaraguan province of Mosquitia, Yucatecans eagerly joined the fight against the regime founded by the descendants of the génocidaires of the Guatemala War. By May of 2000, Yucatecan troops had taken San Salvador in cooperation with the Mexican army, and a referendum in the Mayan-populated Honduran department of Copán led to Copán's annexation into Yucatán.

As the St. Louis Conference oversaw the creation of a North American confederation including Yucatán and the other states of North America in June, Yucatecans had good reason to be pleased with their lot. For all of their nation's problems, Yucatecans could rest easy in the knowledge that as the fighters of the independence wars in the 1820's had hoped, their homeland was secure in its independence and in its Maya culture. The future of Yucatán appears assured.