Rafael Carrera

Rafael Carrera destroyed the Federal Republic of Central America and ruled Guatemala for most of thirty years, having begun as an illiterate swineherd. He was of mixed Indigenous and African descent, worked as a drummer boy and then a pig farmer, and rose through a peasant revolt in the highlands in 1837 against the liberal government of Francisco Morazan. The revolt's causes were concrete: a cholera epidemic that the government met with quarantine and medicine the villages believed was poison, a new legal code imported from Louisiana, taxes, and the expulsion of the archbishop. Carrera fought under a banner reading long live religion and death to foreigners, took Guatemala City in 1838 and again in 1840, and beat Morazan decisively - which ended the federation, and Central America has been five countries ever since. In power he restored the Church, brought back the colonial-era protections for Indigenous communal land, and stopped the liberal programme of turning communal holdings into private estates, which is why he is regarded very differently by liberal and Indigenous historians. He was declared president for life in 1854. He beat the American filibuster William Walker's allies in 1856. He died in office in 1865. He could barely read when he took power and learned in office. Liberal historiography treated him for a century as a superstitious brigand propped up by priests; more recent work reads the revolt he led as a defence of village autonomy against a state trying to remake property law over the heads of the people living under it. His land policy was reversed after his death, and the coffee estates that followed took the communal lands after all. Guatemala's conservative period ended in 1871.

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