Manche Ch'ol

The Manche Ch'ol were a Ch'olan-speaking Maya people of the rainforests between southern Peten and the southern Belize coast, taking their name from Manche, their largest village. Regarded as descendants of the Classic Maya of the southeastern lowlands, they reorganized after the ninth-century collapse into small chiefdoms without a single king.

Their towns grew cacao rather than much maize, and their canoes traded from the Itza capital of Nojpeten to Spanish mission towns. The warlike Itza controlled the salt supply and kept them as clients.

Hernan Cortes crossed their territory in 1525, and coastal villages were soon granted in encomienda, but inland settlements long stayed independent. From the early seventeenth century friars gathered them into missions, until Itza raids and epidemics broke them up; in the late seventeenth century they were forcibly relocated to the Guatemalan highlands, and by 1770 they had effectively disappeared, the survivors merging into the Qeqchi.