Captaincy General of Guatemala

The Captaincy General of Guatemala was Spain's Central American kingdom from 1540 to 1821, the Reino de Guatemala ruling the isthmus from Chiapas to Costa Rica. Alvarado, Pizarro's captain turned conqueror, burned through the highlands in the 1520s; the Audiencia of Guatemala, founded 1543 at Gracias and settled at Santiago, gave the provinces law under a captain general who doubled as its president. Indigo, cacao and cattle paid for baroque Antigua, the Santiago of the gentlemen, with its hundred churches and its university, until earthquakes flattened it in 1773 and the capital crawled to the new Guatemala City. The Bourbons squeezed with intendancies and tobacco monopoly; the creole Valle wrote constitutions in advance. When Mexico cried independence, Chiapas left first; in September 1821 the provinces signed their own act in Guatemala City without a shot, joined Iturbide's empire for two confused years, then watched Chiapas stay Mexican while the rest became the Federal Republic of Central America, ending three centuries of the kingdom that had ruled the isthmus from Antigua's ruined arches.