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The Kingdom of Guatemala circa 1800 was no longer the depressed and isolated frontier settlement that Murdo MacLeod describes in his magisterial study Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520– 1720.1 Nor had Central America yet irrevocably slipped into the destructive pattern of internecine con®icts, political fragmentation, and fragile export-oriented monoculture that would dominate the subsequent two centuries and recon¤rm the region’s status as a backwater. Instead, the colony to which José de Bustamante was posted as captain general proved to be one of the great (if short-lived) success stories of the Bourbon reforms of the eighteenth century.2 Starting about 1750 the Kingdom of Guatemala experienced an economic boom resulting from the cultivation of indigo (añil) and the relaxation of restrictive Spanish trade laws, factors that contributed to the incorporation of Central America into the developing Atlantic commercial economy. During this period, Central America became a valuable part of the Spanish empire, at times remitting yearly revenues to Spain in excess of 350,000 pesos.3 Energized by growing contacts with the outside world and in®uenced by Enlightenment thought, a powerful network of Guatemala-based creoles began to consolidate into a social and economic oligarchy with kingdomwide in®uence. Finally, the Bourbon administrative reforms, the most important of which was the establishment of intendancies during the 1780s, spurred provincial political, economic, and institutional development as 2 The Kingdom of Guatemala on the Eve of Independence well. By the ¤rst decade of the nineteenth century the colonial administrative unit known as the Audiencia of Guatemala, with a total population exceeding one million, ranked second to Mexico in terms of demographic size.4 This half century of economic expansion, political consolidation, and social transformations, in many respects a golden age for the Kingdom of Guatemala, started to show signs of breakdown as the nineteenth century began, in large part because of the reemergence of European hostilities following the French Revolution and their impact on international commerce. Contemporaries remained optimistic that further reforms would restore the region to prosperity. By this time, however, imperial of¤cials were more concerned with the preservation of the colony in the face of the threat to Spanish America following the French takeover of Spain than with economic revitalization measures. The crown could not ignore the strategic importance of Central America: it served as the bulwark of Spanish authority in the lower Caribbean; it dominated the weak southern ®ank of Mexico; it offered direct access into South America through the Panamanian isthmus; and it was in direct confrontation with English settlements in Belize and the Mosquito Coast. Therefore, when José de Bustamante, as the new president, governor, and captain general of the kingdom, came to of¤ce he was compelled to emphasize the military aspect of his authority to a much greater degree than had his predecessors. As an institution, the captaincy general was a military designation. While military duties may have been de-emphasized at times in relation to the other powers of the king’s senior representative on the isthmus, the reverse was true by the ¤rst decade of the nineteenth century. Unfortunately for Spain, the new imperial perspective, which subordinated social and economic reform policies and civil justice to defense concerns, appeared misplaced to a relatively loyal population facing an economic depression and served as the root cause of much of the opposition that Bustamante would face over the course of his term in of¤ce. In an era in which governments struggled continuously to surmount the immense challenges of space and time, when round-trip communication with Spain took months and the transit of internal correspondence was measured in weeks, the ability of colonial governors to ensure domestic tranquility depended heavily upon the stability and viability Kingdom of Guatemala 23 of the administrative infrastructure. Prior to the arrival of Bustamante in 1811, Spain had had three hundred years of experience governing Central America, a heritage that left both positive and negative imprints on the colony. On the one hand, the legitimacy of the Spanish crown to govern was deeply rooted among all segments of the population, and its institutions were both recognized and familiar. On the other hand, years of stagnation and isolation helped breed a climate of mistrust and corruption among relatively autonomous imperial of¤cials, a situation that often complicated relations between the bureaucracy and the local population, as well as among the bureaucrats themselves, and that the crown attempted to rectify with...

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