# African presence in the formation of the new nations  
At the beginning of the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century, Central America had an indigenous population of approximately five million people. In the following years, the population dropped to extreme levels; in some regions, the death toll was greater than fifty per cent of the total population. This was due to the impact of military conquest, disease, enslavement, famine and the dismantlement of the indigenous states and societies' political and economic systems. By the middle of the eighteenth century, communal strategies, political restructuring and the force of their civilization led indigenous communities to recover demographic stability (Lutz, 1982).  
It is precisely as this indigenous demographic decline was under way that we see a sustained demand for workers and a continued increase in the Afrodescendent populations across the region. School textbooks teach (Euraque and Martínez, 2016) that Central American populations are chiefly of mestizo, ladino, indigenous and European descent. However, the reality is that Africans and their descendants were and are an integral part of the contemporary society's foundation.  
During the colonial period, most of the Central American territory was under Spanish hegemony and under the authority of the General Captaincy of  
Guatemala, which managed the region from Chiapas to Costa Rica. Nonetheless, Central America's Caribbean coast was under British influence. Hence the coastal areas became integrated into a colonial network that connected them commercially and demographically to the Antilles (West Indies) and particularly to Jamaica, starting in the seventeenth century. Accordingly, the Caribbean coast was historically an area of dispute between Spain and Great Britain, with distinct patterns of occupation that determined the diversity of their identities.