The history of Belize

Belize, on the Caribbean coast of Central America, was a heartland of Maya civilisation for some three thousand years, with great cities such as Caracol, Lamanai and Altun Ha and a population at its height far larger than today's. Spain claimed the region but never controlled it, and from the seventeenth century British logwood cutters, the Baymen, settled the coast and worked the forests with enslaved Africans. The settlement became the colony of British Honduras in 1862, home to a mix of Kriol, Maya, Mestizo and Garifuna peoples. Belize won independence in 1981, but neighbouring Guatemala's long-standing claim to all or part of its territory delayed independence and remains before the International Court of Justice.

People were farming in the lowlands of what is now Belize by the second millennium BCE. At Cuello, near Orange Walk, archaeologists have found some of the oldest pottery in the Maya region, from a village of maize farmers that grew over many centuries. Belize lay within the core of the Maya civilisation, which took shape across southeastern Mexico, Guatemala, western Honduras and Belize. Between about 2500 BCE and 250 CE the basic institutions of Maya life emerged: maize, bean and squash farming, ceremonial centres, trade in jade, obsidian and shell, and a ruling class that claimed sacred authority. Cerros, on Chetumal Bay, flourished as a coastal trading and ceremonial town between about 300 BCE and 100 CE, and Lamanai, on the New River lagoon, was already building large temples in this period.

The Classic period, from about 250 to 900 CE, was the height of Maya civilisation. In the Maya Mountains foothills of western Belize rose Caracol, which at its peak may have held well over 100,000 people spread across terraced fields, reservoirs and causeways. Its inscriptions record that in 562 its ruler defeated Tikal, the great city of the Petén, beginning a long period of Caracol's dominance in the region. Other centres included Xunantunich and Cahal Pech in the Belize River valley, Lubaantun and Nimli Punit in the south, and Altun Ha near the coast, where archaeologists found a carved jade head of the sun god Kinich Ahau, one of the largest Maya jade objects known.

Maya farmers supported this world with ridged and drained fields, terracing and shifting cultivation, feeding craft workers, merchants, warriors and the scribes and astronomers who kept the elaborate Maya calendar and carved dated monuments. Estimates for the population of Belize in the late Classic period range from 400,000 to a million, far more than live there today. From the ninth century the southern lowland cities declined, as they did across the region: monument building stopped, royal courts collapsed and populations fell, probably through a combination of warfare, environmental stress and drought. The last dated monument at Caracol was carved in 859. In the north, Lamanai and other towns carried on, and Maya communities remained across Belize through the Postclassic period, linked by canoe trade along the coast with the cities of Yucatán.

When Europeans arrived, the territory was divided among several Maya polities whose borders ignored those of today. Chetumal province covered the north around Corozal Bay; Dzuluinicob, with its centre at Tipu near the present Guatemalan border, held the centre; and Chol-speaking Manche groups and Mopan Maya lived in the south. Christopher Columbus sailed into the Gulf of Honduras in 1502, and Hernán Cortés crossed the southwestern corner of Belize on his march to Honduras in 1525. Spanish conquest of Yucatán began in 1527, and the Maya provinces of Chetumal and Dzuluinicob resisted fiercely. Smallpox, yellow fever and other diseases brought by the invaders devastated their population even where Spanish soldiers did not reach.

Tipu was nominally conquered in 1544, but it lay far from Spanish towns. Franciscan friars built a church there in 1618, and in 1638 the people of Dzuluinicob rebelled, abandoned their mission towns and gathered at Tipu, which kept its independence for nearly six decades. Pirates sacked the Spanish town of Bacalar in 1642 and 1648, ending Spanish control in the south of Yucatán. In 1696 Spanish forces used Tipu as a base for the conquest of the Itzá kingdom of the Petén, which fell in 1697, and in 1707 they forcibly resettled Tipu's people near Lake Petén Itzá. Southern groups were likewise deported to the Guatemalan highlands. Colonial histories long claimed that the Maya had abandoned Belize before the British came; in fact Spanish campaigns had only just emptied large parts of it.

From the mid-seventeenth century English buccaneers raided Spanish shipping along the coast of the Yucatán and then began cutting logwood, a tree whose heartwood gave a valuable dye for European textiles. After their camps on the Bay of Campeche were destroyed by Spain, the woodcutters, known as Baymen, established a lasting settlement near the mouth of the Belize River by the late 1710s. Spain, as part of the Spanish Empire's claim to the whole region, attacked them whenever the two crowns were at war, but never settled the area. The Treaty of Paris in 1763 and the Convention of London in 1786 let the British cut timber within set limits while recognising Spanish sovereignty and forbidding forts, plantations and formal government.

The settlers governed themselves anyway, electing magistrates from 1738 and holding a Public Meeting that a few wealthy families dominated. The last Spanish attempt to expel them came in September 1798, when a Spanish fleet was driven off at St George's Caye by settlers, enslaved men and a British naval sloop. The anniversary, 10 September, is a national holiday. When Spain lost its American empire in the Spanish American wars of independence, the new republics of Mexico and Central America claimed to inherit Spain's rights over Belize. By then the settlers had pushed their limits south to the Sarstoon River and west towards the Petén.

Enslaved Africans were in the settlement by the 1720s, many brought via Jamaica, Bermuda and the Atlantic slave trade. Because plantations were forbidden, slavery in Belize centred on the forests. As the trade shifted from logwood to mahogany in the late eighteenth century, gangs of enslaved men spent months in remote camps felling and hauling the great trees to rivers, while enslaved women worked mainly as domestic servants in Belize Town. By the 1820s there were roughly 2,300 enslaved people, most of them born in Africa, and after 1770 about four in five enslaved men cut timber. The isolation of the camps did not make the system mild: a report of 1820 described "extreme inhumanity", punishments were savage, and there were numerous revolts, the last in 1820 led by two men named Will and Sharper. Many people escaped to Yucatán, Guatemala and Honduras, where Spanish authorities offered freedom.

A small, separate class of free people of colour grew up, whose privileges were limited and who often stressed their loyalty to Britain. Out of the mixing of African and British ancestry and cultures emerged the Kriol people and language. Slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1834, with full freedom in 1838. Slaveowners in Belize received some of the highest compensation per person in the empire, while freed people got nothing. A small elite kept control of the land, and through debt advances and labour laws freed people were tied to the mahogany camps for generations.

In the early nineteenth century a new people arrived. The Garifuna, descended from Kalinago of the Lesser Antilles and Africans who had escaped slavery, had resisted British rule on St Vincent until they were defeated in 1796. Britain deported thousands of them to the island of Roatán off Honduras, and from there they spread along the Central American coast. Garifuna were living at Stann Creek, now Dangriga, by 1802, and more arrived after a civil war in Honduras in 1832. Their arrival is commemorated on Garifuna Settlement Day, 19 November. The colonial authorities treated them as squatters, denied them ownership of land and confined them to reserves.

The Caste War of Yucatán, a vast Maya rising against the Mexican state that began in 1847, sent thousands of Maya and Mestizo refugees into northern Belize, where they founded towns such as Corozal and Orange Walk and grew much of the colony's food. Some Maya groups fought the British: Marcos Canul's Icaiche Maya attacked mahogany camps in 1866, defeated a British detachment at San Pedro, occupied Corozal in 1870 and attacked Orange Walk in 1872, the last serious assault on the colony. In the 1880s and 1890s Mopan and Q'eqchi' Maya fleeing forced labour in Guatemala settled in the south, where their villages kept elected alcaldes and much of their way of life.

Pressure from the United States, which objected to British expansion in Central America, pushed Britain to define the settlement. The Wyke–Aycinena Treaty of 1859 with Guatemala described the boundary from the Sarstoon River to Garbutt's Falls and north to the Mexican border. In Britain's view the treaty recognised the existing territory; Article VII also committed the two parties to cooperate in building a road from Guatemala City to the Caribbean coast, which was never built. The settlement became the Colony of British Honduras in 1862, subordinate to Jamaica, and in 1871 its assembly gave up its powers in exchange for Crown colony rule. A treaty with Mexico in 1893 fixed the northern border on the Rio Hondo.

Guatemala came to argue that the 1859 treaty was in substance a cession of territory paid for by the road, and that because Britain never built it the treaty had lapsed, so Guatemala's inherited claim revived. In 1939 Guatemala's foreign ministry formally argued that the treaty had lapsed, and its constitution of 1945 declared British Honduras part of Guatemala. Britain and later Belize maintained that the treaty set a valid boundary that both sides had respected and partly marked, and that the people of the territory had a right to self-determination. From the late 1940s Britain stationed troops in the colony against the threat of invasion.

For most of the colonial era, power lay with timber companies in London and merchants in Belize Town. The Belize Estate and Produce Company came to own about half of all private land. Chicle, the gum used to make chewing gum, was tapped from sapodilla trees by Maya and Mestizo workers from the 1880s, but the economy stagnated. The Great Depression collapsed timber exports, and on 10 September 1931 a hurricane flattened much of Belize Town, killing more than a thousand people. In 1934 unemployed workers led by Antonio Soberanis Gómez began protests, strikes and petitions that marked the start of modern politics. Trade unions were legalised in 1941, and in 1943 breach of a labour contract ceased to be a crime.

In December 1949 the governor devalued the British Honduras dollar against the wishes of elected members, and the anger it caused gave birth to the People's Committee, which in 1950 became the People's United Party (PUP). Under George Price, the party won the first election under universal adult suffrage in 1954 and dominated politics for three decades. Mennonite settlers from Mexico and Canada arrived from 1958 and became major farmers. Internal self-government came in 1964 with Price as premier. Hurricane Hattie devastated Belize City in 1961, and a new inland capital, Belmopan, was built and opened in 1970. The colony was renamed Belize in 1973.

Independence was delayed by the dispute. Guatemala, under military governments for much of this period, massed troops on the border several times, and Britain reinforced its garrison in 1972 and 1975. Belize took its case to international forums from 1975, winning support first from the Non-Aligned Movement and Caribbean states, then from Cuba, Mexico, Panama and Nicaragua. In November 1980 the United Nations General Assembly called for Belize's independence with its territory intact. A last-minute Heads of Agreement in March 1981 collapsed amid protests in Belize and opposition in Guatemala, and Belize became independent on 21 September 1981, with Elizabeth II as queen and Price as prime minister. British forces remained to defend it.

The United Democratic Party under Manuel Esquivel defeated the PUP in 1984, and since then the two parties have alternated in power: Price again from 1989, Esquivel from 1993, Said Musa of the PUP from 1998, Dean Barrow of the UDP from 2008 and Johnny Briceño of the PUP from 2020. Guatemala recognised Belize's independence in 1991 and the two countries established diplomatic relations, and most British troops left in 1994. Tourism, built around the Maya sites and the Belize Barrier Reef, grew alongside sugar, citrus and bananas. Immigration from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras in the 1980s, during the region's civil wars, helped make Mestizos and other Hispanic Belizeans the largest group in the country, overtaking the Kriol population.

In 1999 Guatemala restated its claim, now to land south of the Sibun River, about half of Belize, together with islands and maritime areas. Incidents along the border led the two states to agree under the Organization of American States on an adjacency zone either side of the line. In 2008 they agreed to put the question to the International Court of Justice if voters in both countries approved. Guatemalans voted in favour in 2018, and Belizeans, by 55 percent, in May 2019. The written pleadings closed in 2023, and the case was still pending in 2026. A related case brought by Belize against Honduras over the Sapodilla Cayes is also before the court, and in March 2026 the court allowed Guatemala to intervene in it on the question of those islands. In the general election of 12 March 2025 the PUP won 26 of 31 seats, and Briceño began a second term as prime minister.