18 - Civil War, Ideology and Motivation

Summary

Although Caste War rebels were frequently despised as “barbarians” or “savages”, their culture, their society and their military organization were strongly reminiscent of rural Yucatán. Kruso’b and soldiers were both victims and perpetrators of internal and external violence. They employed force to attack the enemy, defend themselves, appropriate valuable commodities (food, booty) and take prisoners. Soldiers and rebels used similar tactics on their thrusts into enemy territory, mostly assaulting settlements with surprise attacks. Looting was a key incentive for both soldiers and kruso’b when it came to combat. Both rebels and government forces rarely distinguished clearly between combatants and non-combatants and both employed strategies of terror to induce inhabitants of frontier settlements to abandon their homes, thereby expanding the no man’s land between rebel territory and areas under government control. Internal violence occurred in both groups, although the underlying causes differed. Force served to maintain obedience of subalterns to superiors in army and militia units; violence was vital among the rebels to establishing and upholding the political hierarchy.