Pech

The Pech, formerly called Paya by the Spanish, are a Chibchan-speaking people of north-eastern Honduras. Pech is their own name for themselves, while they call outsiders Pech-Hakua. Migrating north from what is now Colombia, they held coast and interior from the Aguán River toward the Nicaraguan border, organized into chiefdoms whose social complexity reached back to about the year 300.

Spanish expeditions in the early sixteenth century met the land they named Taguzgalpa and failed to subdue it, but from 1622 missionaries gathered the Pech into reductions. A governor of the Paya was appointed in 1713, and further reductions followed in 1739, 1767 and 1797.

Raided by the Miskito and displaced by settlers, the Pech were moved from Cape Camarón to the mouth of the Aguán in 1805, by then confined to a fraction of their old territory.