San Antonio Huista

San Antonio Huista (San Antonio: in honor of its patron saint Antonio de Padua; Huista: from Nahuatl, it means «place where thorns abound») is a municipality from the department of Huehuetenango, in the Republic of Guatemala; It is located in the northwest of the country, 361.5 kilometers from Guatemala City. It is located in the Jakalteca linguistic region, and is made up of a population that depends mainly on agriculture. Some research suggests that the area where this town is located is where corn was originally developed from the "teocinte" plant, a wild plant that is still found in the hills near this municipality.

During the colonial era it was first an encomienda and then a doctrine that passed from the Dominican friars to the Mercedarian friars; In 1754 it became part of the parish that the secular clergy established in Jacaltenango, when the Mercedarians and the rest of the regular orders had to hand over their reductions to said secular clergy.

After the Independence of Central America in 1825, the State Assembly of Guatemala divided the country's territories and assigned San Antonio Huista to the department of Totonicapán/Huehuetenango; Now, starting on April 3, 1838, San Antonio was part of the region that the liberal Creoles established as the State of Los Altos, until it was forcibly reinstated by the conservative mestizo general Rafael Carrera in 1840.

Its border with Mexico was established in 1896, after the Herrera-Mariscal Treaty that President Justo Rufino Barrios signed in 1882 with the government of Mexico, and through which the Guatemalan government definitively resigned to its claims on the territory of Soconusco and Guatemala lost nearly 10,300 km, fourteen towns, nineteen villages and fifty-four rancherías, while Mexico lost only one town and twenty-eight rancherías. The agreement was so disastrous for Guatemala that the report by the director of the Boundary Commission, engineer Claudio Urrutia, was confiscated by the government of President Manuel Estrada Cabrera when it was made public in 1900, and then by the government of Julio César Méndez Montenegro when it was reprinted in 1968.

Since 1970 it has been part of the region known as the Northern Transversal Strip.

Toponymy

Name in Spanish

Many of the names of the municipalities and towns in Guatemala consist of two parts: the name of the Catholic saint who is venerated on the day they were founded and a description with Nahuatl roots; This is because the troops that invaded the region in the 1520s under the command of Pedro de Alvarado were composed of Spanish soldiers and Tlaxcalan and Cholultec indigenous people. The place name "San Antonio Huista" then comes from "San Antonio de Padua » and from the Nahuatl voice «Huitztlán», which in turn originates from the terms «Huíztli» (Spanish: «thorn») and «tlan» (Spanish: «abundance»), so it means «Place of where thorns abound" or "Thorny place."

Name in Jakalteco or Popti'

The origin in the Jacalteco or Popti language From the toponym "Huista", it would come from "wixtaj" which means "brother", so it would mean "sister town of Jacaltenango".^{[citation required]}

Political division

The Municipality is comprised of a town - divided into six cantons -, five villages, and fourteen hamlets; The five villages are: San José El Tablón, Nojoyá, El Pajal, El Coyegual and Rancho Viejo.

Physical geography

According to the Brand Bank of the General Directorate of Roads, San Antonio Huista is geographically located at 15°, 39' and 0" of northern latitude; and at 91°46'15" of west longitude. Its average height is 1,260 meters above sea level and it has a population of 19,311 inhabitants in 2022.

Municipal government

Municipalities are regulated by various laws of the Republic, which establish their form of organization, matters relating to the formation of their administrative bodies and the taxes allocated to them. Although they are autonomous entities, they are subject to national legislation and the main laws that have governed them since 1985 are:

The government of the municipalities is in charge of a Municipal Council while the municipal code - ordinary law that contains provisions that apply to all municipalities - establishes that "the municipal council is the highest collegiate body of deliberation and decision." decision of municipal affairs [...] and has its headquarters in the constituency of the municipal seat"; Article 33 of the aforementioned code establishes that "[it] corresponds exclusively to the municipal council to exercise the government of the municipality."

The municipal council is made up of the mayor, trustees and councilors, elected directly by universal and secret suffrage for a period of four years, and may be re-elected.

There are also Auxiliary Mayor's Offices, Community Development Committees (COCODE), the Municipal Development Committee (COMUDE), cultural associations and work commissions. The auxiliary mayors are elected by the communities according to their principles and traditions, and meet with the municipal mayor on the first Sunday of each month, while the Community Development Committees and the Municipal Development Committee organize and facilitate the participation of the communities. communities prioritizing needs and problems. The mayors that have existed in the municipality are:

• 2012-2016: Manglio Camposeco Castillo

History

There is no official date that establishes the moment of the founding of the town that gave rise to this municipality, although there are vestiges of indigenous populations in the surroundings which allows us to assume that a pre-Hispanic town existed. From the first years of colonization it was already known as a population center with the name of Iwil'Áh; According to the Huehuetenango monograph by Adrián Recinos, the population originally appeared registered as "San Pedro Nolasco."

Colonial era

The first historical references relating to San Antonio Huista date back to 1528. San Antonio and Santa Ana Vystlán, in 1528 and 1529, were granted as an encomienda to a man named Francisco López; They consisted of forty-five tributaries and the obligation was constituted by "the annual tribute of four bushels of beans, one hundred small mats, two arrobas of honey, four loads of chili, four dozen chickens and four Indians for service or in their place eighty blankets." ».

In the chronicle of Father Antonio de Remesal, Santa Ana and San Antonio Huista are mentioned, among the towns that were formed around that time. A few years later, between 1555 and 1567, the missionaries of the order of Our Lady of Mercy replaced the Dominicans in caring for the people of the region. Around the year 1600, the Huista—Santa Ana and San Antonio—were visiting towns that depended on the convent of Jacaltenango.

Between the years 1768 and 1770, Archbishop Pedro Cortés y Larraz visited the region and in the chronicle of his visit he noted that Santa Ana Huista was a town attached to the parish of Our Lady of Purification of Jacaltenango and that it had 342 inhabitants.

After the Independence of Central America

In the year 1825, the government of the State of Guatemala divided the territory into seven departments, one of them being Totonicapán-Huehuetenango, which had seven municipalities, including Jacaltenango; The constitution of 1825 also divided the territory into ten districts with several circuits each for the administration of justice and Jacaltenango was the headquarters of the circuit of the same name in district No. 9 (Totonicapán) to which Santa Ana Huista, San Antonio also belonged. Huista, San Andrés, San Marcos, Concepción, Nentón, Petatán, Acatán, San Juan Ixcoy, San Sebastián Coatán, Santa Eulalia, Istatán, Ishcán, Ixcacao, Sajnabac, Paduano, Cajtavi, Lo de Alvarado, Tierra Negra and Montenegro, the latter now part of Mexico.

The ephemeral State of Los Altos

As of April 3, 1838, San Antonio was part of the region that formed the ephemeral State of Los Altos and that forced the State of Guatemala to be reorganized into seven departments and two independent districts on September 12, 1839.:

• Departments: Chimaltenango, Chiquimula, Escuintla, Guatemala, Mita, Sacatepéquez, and Verapaz
• Districts: Izabal and Petén

The western region of present-day Guatemala had shown intentions to obtain greater autonomy with respect to the authorities of Guatemala City since colonial times, since the local Creoles considered that the capital Creoles who had a commercial monopoly with Spain They were not treated fairly. But this attempt at secession was crushed by General Rafael Carrera, who reintegrated the State of Los Altos into the State of Guatemala in 1840.

During those times, and since colonial times, San Antonio was an obligatory passage for trips to Mexican territory through the Sierra de los Cuchumatanes, as mentioned by the English archaeologist and diplomat John Lloyd Stephens in his book Travel incidents in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatán; Stephens was traveling with the architect and draftsman Frederick Catherwood when he passed through the town in 1839, when the situation between Los Altos and Guatemala was at its height. Here is how they described what they saw in San Antonio: «Clouds of enormous flies, perhaps scared by the bonfire and flying in groups around the area of heat, they fell on the mules. With each bite they sucked blood and remained attached to the necks of the tormented animals until we beat them with clubs. We fought for an hour, but we couldn't get their necks or heads free. The poor beasts were terrified, despite our efforts, their necks, the inside of their legs, mouths, noses and ears, and even noble parts, were oozing blood. Quickening our pace, between hours we saw the church of San Antonio Huista, and in a few minutes we entered the town, beautifully located on a plateau that jutted out from the side of a mountain, overlooking an enormous opening, with a magnificent view for where you would like to see it. At this point we were free from the fears of war. [...] We took possession of San Antonio, and we divided ourselves between the chapter and the convent and we sent for the mayor (because even in this remote location the name of Carrera was omnipotent). The mayor and his sheriff searched the entire town, and in a while, instead of the classic "there is no one", they gave us so many gifts that it seemed like a Turkish paradise. Twenty or thirty women were at the convent at the same time with baskets of corn, tortillas, sweets, bananas, jocotes, sapotes and many other fruits [...]."

Boundary Commission with Mexico

The boundaries between Guatemala and Mexico were placed after arduous work that took several decades; It all began when, by virtue of the agreement celebrated in the capital of Mexico on December 7, 1877 by the representatives of both countries, two commissions of engineers were appointed, one for each nation to recognize the border and draw up a plan that would serve to the negotiations between the two countries; Although only a map was made of the border between the slopes of the Tacaná volcano and the Pacific Ocean, the meeting of President Justo Rufino Barrios and Matías Romero, Mexican representative, was held in New York on August 12, 1882, in which The bases were laid for an agreement on limits, in which it was stated that Guatemala dispensed with the rights that it had over Chiapas and Soconusco and the definitive limits were set. In November 1883, the drawing of the border began and to the survey of the topographical plan of its surroundings, with the head of the Guatemalan commission being the astronomer Miles Rock, and his collaborators Edwin Rockstroh, Felipe Rodríguez, Manuel Barrera and Claudio Urrutia. In the first year of work, only the Ixbul hill was reached, and in the following year they sought to reach the Usumacinta River or the Chixoy River, but it was extremely difficult because there were no roads in the area.

In his report to the Government of the Republic of Guatemala in 1900, engineer Claudio Urrutia indicated that: «[...] the treaty was fatal for Guatemala. In everything that the question of limits was related to during that time, there is something hidden that no one has been able to discover, and that forced the people who took part in it for Guatemala to proceed festively or as if forced by a powerful pressure, they tried issues with other people's ideas or in an unconscious manner. And then he continues: «Guatemala lost on the one hand nearly 15,000 km and gained on the other, something like 5,140 km. Result: A loss of 10,300 km. Guatemala lost fourteen towns, nineteen villages and fifty-four rancherías, with more than 15,000 Guatemalans, while Mexico lost one town and twenty-eight rancherías with 2,500 inhabitants: judge the equity in the compensations.

All copies of the Memory on the Question of Limits were collected by orders of President Manuel Estrada Cabrera shortly after being distributed; and according to the historian Solís Castañeda, the same thing happened with the second edition -1964- and with the book Greatnesses and Miseries of Diplomatic Life, which were confiscated in 1968 on instructions from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Foreign Affairs of the government of Mr. Julio César Méndez Montenegro.

20th century

During the first half of the XX century in the slabs and crevices of the stones of Fierruchén different vestiges were found with some hieroglyphs, starting in 1954 they were lost without knowing what happened to them, they may have been illegally trafficked to other countries or they are still in the possession of those who found them. In 1925 the anthropologist Oliver La Farge visited the town to observe the Ruins of Pueblo Viejo , during his stay he prepared a detailed sketch that represented the plan of the supposed buildings that existed.

In the 1960s, while Óscar Gonzalo Martínez was mayor, the Maryknoll Fathers handed over the Catholic School to the municipality, which was eventually called the “Miguel Angel Gordillo Guillén” National Urban School of Primary Education, the first school < i>formal of the municipality of San Antonio Huista.

Northern Transversal Strip

After the counterrevolution of 1954, the Guatemalan government created the Economic Planning Council (CNPE) and began to use free market strategies, advised by the World Bank and the International Cooperation Administration (ICA) of the United States government.. The CNPE and the ICA created the General Directorate of Agrarian Affairs (DGAA) which was in charge of dismantling and annulling the effects of Decree 900 of Agrarian Reform of the government of Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán. The DGAA was in charge of the geographical area that It bordered the departmental limit of Petén and the borders of Belize, Honduras and Mexico, and which over time would be called the Northern Transversal Strip (FTN).

The first colonizing project in the FTN was that of Sebol-Chinajá, in Alta Verapaz. Sebol, at that time, was considered a strategic point and a waterway through the Cancuén River, which connected with Petén to the Usumacinta River on the border with Mexico and the only road that existed was the dirt road built by President Lázaro Chacón. in 1928. In 1958, during the government of General Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) financed infrastructure projects in Sebol. In 1960, the then captain of the Guatemalan Army Fernando Romeo Lucas García inherited the Saquixquib farms. and Punta de Boloncó northeast of Sebol, Alta Verapaz, with an area of 15 caballerías each. In 1963 he bought the "San Fernando" El Palmar de Sejux farm with an area of 8 caballerías, and finally bought the "Sepur" farm, near "San Fernando", with an area of 18 caballerías. During these years he was a deputy in the Guatemalan Congress and lobbied to promote investment in that area of the country.

In those years, the importance of the region was in livestock farming, the exploitation of precious wood for export and archaeological wealth. Timber contracts were given to transnational companies, such as the Murphy Pacific Corporation of California, which invested 30 million dollars for the colonization of southern Petén and Alta Verapaz, and formed Compañía Impulsadora del Norte, S.A. The colonization of the area was done through a process by which land in inhospitable areas of the FTN was granted to farmers.

In 1962, the DGAA became the National Institute of Agrarian Transformation (INTA), by decree 1551 that created the Agrarian Transformation law. In 1964, INTA defined the geography of the FTN as the northern part of the departments of Huehuetenango, Quiché, Alta Verapaz and Izabal and that same year priests of the Maryknoll order and the Order of the Sacred Heart began the first colonization process, together with INTA, taking residents of Huehuetenango to the Ixcán sector in Quiché.

The Northern Transversal Strip was officially created during the government of General Carlos Arana Osorio in 1970, through Decree 60-70 in the Congress of the Republic, for the establishment of agrarian development.

In the 1970s the “José Dionisio Herrera” market was built.

Customs and traditions

The main festival of San Antonio Huista is that of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which is celebrated between December 9 and 12. The patron saint's day is that of San Antonio de Padua, which is celebrated from June 11 to 13.

Tourism

The tourist places in San Antonio are:

• The Cimientos, an archeological site located in the southwest of the municipal capital, near the village of Nojoyá; these smaller pre-Hispanic buildings are called "Old People" and "Plan of the foundations" old buildings of unknown origin and of very difficult access, which probably made them strategic points for their former builders.^{[chuckles]required]}
• Yalankú Cascade.
• The hermitage of the Virgin of Guadalupe, north of the village, on the hill of Ipanna. It is a mountain where on September 19, 1948 an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared. Very visited by Mexicans, in the first days of December of each year.