After Mexico won independence from Spain in 1820, it reclaimed Chiapas and even annexed Guatemala and the rest of Central America. Three years later eastern Chiapas joined Guatemala in forming the Central American Federation, but it was reincorporated into Mexico when the CAF failed in 1842. (A final portion was wrested from Guatemala by longtime Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz in the 1880s.)

The 19th century saw two products—timber and coffee—spark fundamental changes in Chiapas’s political, economic, and environmental landscape. Large logging companies, mostly European-owned, began harvesting ancient mahogany and cedar trees in Chiapas’s vast eastern rainforest, using the Río Usumacinta to float freshly cut logs to processing plants downstream.

The industry was the first step in what has become a steady march of deforestation in Chiapas—which continues to this day. It also created what has become an all too familiar pattern: foreign or out-of-state entities exploiting Chiapas’s natural resources, while leaving little or no lasting benefit for the state or its residents.

The steep south-facing slopes of the Sierra Madre de Chiapas mountains are ideal for growing coffee, and huge plantations—also owned primarily by foreigners, in this case Germans—emerged in the late 1800s, especially near Chiapas’s border with Guatemala. The plantations were complemented by ranching and agriculture in the coastal lowlands, and the region became Chiapas’s first economic success story.

A rivalry developed between coffee producers and lowland agro-business interests on one hand, and the political elite concentrated in the highlands, especially in San Cristóbal, at that time the state capital. (It was a microcosm of the division emerging throughout Mexico—between upstart market-oriented liberals and traditional church-backed conservatives—and which eventually led to the Mexican Revolution of 1910.) Liberals prevailed, expropriating huge tracts of Church-owned land for development, and even moving the state capital to present-day Tuxtla Gutiérrez in 1892.

Liberal gains in the latter part of the 19th century were not necessarily good for Chiapas’s indigenous population, however. Reforms designed to spur development and encourage foreign investment left “backward” peasant farmers increasingly marginalized, especially through the expropriation of farm lands and the growth of debt labor.