Caste War of Yucatán

The Caste War of Yucatán was a long armed struggle on the Yucatán Peninsula that began in 1847, when Indigenous Maya communities rose against the Hispanic Yucatecos who controlled the region's land, politics and commerce. Maya peasants had been pushed into debt labor on haciendas as henequen and sugar cane estates spread onto customary lands in the decades after Mexican independence, and that pressure set off the revolt. For many years the rebels held the south and east of the peninsula, where the Maya state of Chan Santa Cruz grew up, while Yucatecos held the northwest; the United Kingdom recognized the Maya state for a time because of trade with British Honduras. Mexican forces occupied Chan Santa Cruz in 1901, the formal end came in 1915 under Governor Salvador Alvarado, and skirmishes with holdout settlements continued until 1933. The source reports a total of about 364,000 dead, and notes that the peninsula's population was roughly halved by war, disease and migration.