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.

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.

While Yucatecan elites consistently characterized the Caste War as a racial conflict and labelled the rebels as Indians, the insurgents were in fact a fairly mixed population. Ample evidence from contemporary observers shows that many non-Indians were found in the rebel ranks. The rebels employed terms of self-identification that reflect their mixed social and ethnic composition and religious affiliation, generally referring to themselves as cristiano’b (Christians), otsilo’b (poor), masewalo’b (commoner) or kruso’b (the crosses) and not as Indians or Maya. It comes as no surprise that legally most rank and file rebels were Indians, as revealed by their Maya surnames. Legal Indians were overrepresented among the rural lower classes, the insurgents’ main social base. In addition, the preponderance of Indians simply mirrors Yucatán’s demographic structure, since the bulk of the rebels came from areas where this group outnumbered vecinos by three or four to one.