The Rites of Statehood Violence and Sovereignty in Spanish America, 1789-1821 Jeremy Adelman

Hispanic American Historical Review
The Rites of Statehood:

Violence and Sovereignty in Spanish
America, 17891821
Jeremy Adelman
hat was the relationship between savagery and state formation in Spanish Americas passage from colonial to postcolonial times? Some clues to this
question have come from a distinguished past tradition of military history of
the region. But the emphasis on martial narratives passed out of fashion with
the demise of patriotic histories of the liberators and their foes.1 Indeed, the
eclipse of military history coincided in the 1960s with a general turn away from
politics, which attributed to violence underlying structural forces and sought
to examine them. Under the combined influence of dependency approaches,
Marxism, and the Annales-informed histories, historians focused on what they
thought were primal sources of social strife and deemphasized vnementielle
features of political life, including therefore political ruptures that shook up
social relations. What ruptures could be found were treated as the effects of
global commercial changes and the proletarianization of labor. When political
history came back into vogue it was often stripped of violent features. Indeed,
as the allure of revolution faded in the 1980s and despots returned to the
barracks, historians became more interested in exclusion than exploitation, and
so the emergence of a public sphere and new practices of representation took
center stage.2
I am grateful to the editors and reviewers of the HAHR for valuable comments, and to
colleagues and students at the University of Chicago and Columbia University, where earlier
versions of this essay were presented.
1. Some important and valuable exceptions are Christon I. Archer, ed., The Wars of
Independence in Spanish America (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2000); Clment
Thibaud, Repblicas en armas: Los ejrcitos bolivarianos en la Guerra de Independencia en
Colombia y Venezuela (Bogot: Planeta, 2003).
2. For recent surveys of the independence period, see Antonio Annino and Rafael
Rojas, La Independencia: Los libros de la patria (Mexico City: Centro de Investigacion y
Docencia Economicas / Fondo de Cultura Economica, 2008); John Charles Chasteen,
Americanos: Latin Americas Struggle for Independence (New York: Oxford Univ. Press,
Hispanic American Historical Review 90:3
doi 10.1215/00182168-2010-001
Copyright 2010 by Duke University Press
Published by Duke University Press
392
HAHR / August / Adelman
Yet violence hangs over Spanish American historiography like a cloud.

Perhaps this has escaped analysis because violence was such an obvious feature of political life; for so many, cruelty was sown into a tradition of conquest
and dictatorship. Without wishing to debunk the fire and brimstone style of
chronicling the regions past, this essay puts wrath into a context, with attention
to its specific causes and mutations. It seeks to explore ways to combine some
of the insights of military historians who have thought about the organization
and conduct of group violence with the political historians concern with civic
practices, rhetoric, and institutions, looking at how violence shaped the public
sphere by making it highly charged or constrained, and how the public sphere
became the setting in which the apostles of political violence vindicated their
methods.
One way to think of political violence more actively is to consider it within
a broadened spectrum ranging from the activities of standing armies to informal means of settling scores, a space where crowds, bandidos, militiamen, and
semi-organized mobs struggled for control of state power, and against it. It may
help to borrow and adapt insights from studies of how angry hordes, rioters,
and rebels attacked authorities who failed to provide customary forms of justice. Inspired by the work of George Rud, E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm,
and others, historians of early modern Europe and colonial Latin America (and
more recently nineteenth-century Latin America) have catalogued the ways in
which groups of men and women took to the streets with pitchforks and guns
to assail officials and their associates. But seldom did rebellious crowds call for
new regimes. They more often sought a restoration of order than a revolutionary successor. For the most part, public violence in eighteenth-century Spanish
America conforms to this model of a defense of a moral economy against the
perceived failures of its political guardians. Studies of the nineteenth century
increasingly suggest the same, albeit in more republican terms.3
2008). The literature on the public sphere is also expansive. Isabel Lustosa, Insultos
impressos: A guerra dos jornalistas na independncia, 18211822 (So Paulo: Companhia
das Letras, 2000); Rafael Rojas, La escritura de la independencia: El surgimiento de la
opinion pblica en Mxico (Mexico City: Taurus, 2003); Vronique Hbrard, Le Venezuela
indpendant: Une nation par le discours, 18081830 (Paris: LHarmattan, 1996); Victor
M. Uribe-Uran, The Birth of a Public Sphere in Latin America during the Age of
Revolution, Comparative Studies in Society and History 42, no. 2 (Apr. 2000): 42557.
3. Classic studies include George Rud, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular
Disturbances in France and England, 17301848 (New York: Wiley, 1964); Eric Hobsbawm,
Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movements in the 19th and 20th Centuries
(Manchester: Univ. of Manchester Press, 1959); E. P. Thompson, The Moral Economy
The Rites of Statehood
393
Yet, widening the spectrum of organized violence may not be adequate to

deal with the upheavals from 1808 to 1821. In this conjuncture, large groups
and their leaders fought for more than better governors; they struggled for new
governments. This was more than a really big rebellion; it was a revolution to
cleanse the world of the sources of bad rulers, for this was a specific type of crisis
of a moral economy. Occasioned less by the insinuations of a market economy
(though that was going on) than by the collapse of a model sovereignty that
enforced exploitation and legitimated social inequality, it sired a revolution.
And the concept of revolution comes burdened with historiographic baggage
that specifically addresses the legacies of its primum mobile, violence. Edmund
Burkes prophecythat men who make their careers by seizing power violently
to rid the world of evil cannot help but be consumed by their own deviceshas
rung through the centuries. Hannah Arendts On Revolution captured the growing alarm about rising worldwide belligerence and argued that violence did
much more to destroy than to create. Echoes of her jeremiad could be found
among historians of the French Revolution, especially leading up to and during
the debate about the bicentenary of 1789. For Franois Furet, the revolution
was the work of ideological agents who created primal oppositions in order to
justify bloodshed; once in place, the inner logic of revolution could only end
in terror and gulags.4
of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century, Past and Present 50, no. 1 (Feb. 1971):
76136. For the New World, see William B. Taylor, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion
in Colonial Mexican Villages (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1979), and more
recently Sergio Serulnikov, Subverting Colonial Authority: Challenges to Spanish Rule in
Eighteenth-Century Southern Andes (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2003). For some
recent examples of nineteenth-century studies of political violence, see Hilda Sabato, La
poltica en las calles: Entre el voto y la movilizacin: Buenos Aires, 18621880 (Buenos Aires:
Sudamericana, 1998), and especially Buenos Aires en armas: La revolucin de 1880 (Buenos
Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2008), and for an example of a slave rebellion with its
own particular restorationist aspirations, see the pathbreaking study by Joo Jos Reis,
Rebeliao escrava no Brasil: a historia do levante dos males em 1835 (So Paulo: Companhia
das Letras, 2003). Useful anthologies on rebellion in Mexico and the Andes, where
the research has been most advanced, include Friedrich Katz, ed., Riot, Rebellion, and
Revolution: Rural Social Conflict in Mexico (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1988); and
Steve J. Stern, ed., Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World,
18th to 20th Centuries (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1987).
4. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (New York: Penguin, 1986);
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1963); Jim Wolfreys, Twilight
Revolution: Franois Furet and the Manufacturing of Consensus, in History and Revolution:
Refuting Revisionism, ed. Mike Haynes and Jim Wolfreys (London: Verso, 2007), 5069.
394
This approach to revolution shaped Spanish American scholarship. Revolutions took ordered, stratified societies and flattened them while creating a
new type of social order that favored violence and uncivil modes of politics.
The caudillo exemplified the antithesis of the idealized public sphere and his
triumph marked its failure, ushering in Spanish Americas long detour from
liberalism. For John J. Johnson, this was the birth of a military tradition. For
others, violence upset what might have been a peaceable transformation managed within the coordinates of a transatlantic Spanish constitutionalism under
the charter of 1812. Once armed spoilers dominated the stage, gentlemanly civic
change guided by legislators gave way to brutality and extremism. Perhaps the
most influential scholar operating in this scheme was, not surprisingly, working
in France: the late Franois-Xavier Guerra argued that the French Revolution
disrupted the conceptual order across the Spanish Empire, so that precocious
experiences with modern representation were overwhelmed by colonial analogues of Pariss Jacobins.5
The problem with this formulation was that violence did not require much
explanation since it was endowed with a macabre ability to reproduce itself.
Once unleashed, it simply escalated. The role of primal bloodshed was central to the master narrative of Spanish Americas long history and yet was not
a subject of study. It is time to study it, to pose questions like how and why
did violence escalate? The end of the Cold War and the visibility of crimes
against humanity have renewed attention to political violence because it is not
treated as a simple by-product of ideology or the human psychology of cruelty.
More recently, the study of civil wars, blood feuds, and reciprocal bloodletting
by members of the same political communities has illuminated how violence
unfolds within societies, without assuming that the making of modern states
was about curbing primordial passions through what Norbert Elias called the
civilizing process.6
5. John J. Johnson, The Military and Society in Latin America (Stanford, CA: Stanford
Univ. Press, 1964); John Lynch, Caudillos in Spanish America, 18001850 (Oxford: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1992); Franois-Xavier Guerra, Modernidad e independencias: Ensayos sobre las
revoluciones hispnicas (Madrid: MAPFRE, 1992). There is a way in which Jaime Rodrguez
O.s important Independence in Spanish America echoes an aspect of this lament for a
constitutional order that might have emerged from 1808 and the crippling of successor
states and making them prey for new kinds of imperial predation. Independence in Spanish
America (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998).
6. Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from
Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2007); Arno J. Mayer, The Furies: Violence
and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000);
David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleons Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007).
395
By exploring how politics became a matter of life and death, this essay seeks
to put viciousness and slaughter into context and to make some sense of the
rhetoric of public cruelty. In what follows, political violence does not conform
to some fundamental logic of revolutions or some deep-seated animosity (based
on ethnicity, nation, class, or some other social divide), as if group identities and
animosities predicted an inexorable sequence of escalating hatred that inevitably
led from peace to war. It will be important to recapture the truces, backsliding,
side switching, flight, pauses, and outbursts as reflections of the ways in which
revolutionary upheaval entwined peace and violenceand the choices between
themprecisely because the bloodshed was so fratricidal and not rooted in
ancient discord. While the steps and countersteps varied, violence was central
to the course of revolutions not because large numbers of people became more
fanatical but because it was a means to rid the world of threats and enemies.
Violence is not a timeless expression of frustration endowed with the same
meanings and significance across time and space, as if what we might understand by terror meant the same thing two centuries ago as it does now. Violence has specific causes and connotations that compel us to ask where these
threats and enemies came from and what caused the crisis in the moral economy.
The implosion of the Spanish Empire shook the principles of sovereignty that
enforced exploitation, legitimated social inequality, and held the fabric of moral
economy together. The carnage with which this essay is concerned came from
a context in which the labor of dividing and separating large groups of people
into rival camps was part of a civil war, understood as armed combat within the
boundaries of a recognized sovereign entity between parties subject to a common authority at the outset of hostilities, occasioned by a break in legal authority, the fragmentation of juridical spaces, and intensified by efforts to restore
an old order.7 Violence depended on and shaped political choices over who was
the enemy and how to rid it in an effort to restore, or create anew, a model of
sovereignty. Understanding these choices requires attention to particular circumstances whose effects cannot be reduced to some basic, underlying logic.
An important precaution is in order: the molecular decomposition of state
authority meant that the space of Spanish America became more differentiated as the crisis spread. Some of the important subregional differences may be
lost in this essays effort to tease out general patterns about microsocial processes. More finely grained studies of violence will help evaluate some of the
general claims proposed below. Furthermore, this essay does not systematically
compare older viceroyalties, for example, where loyalism had more ballast, and
7. Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (New York: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 2006), 5.
396
newer ones, where town councils and the press more easily raised the banner of
change, or societies where belligerents began to arm slaves earlier versus those
that deferred it. This would be an illuminating exercise, but it is not my purpose
here. For all the variety, a common fate awaited the Spanish American colonies,
with the exception of Cuba and Puerto Rico. The ensuing civil conflict ended
not on the battlefield but with one sides collapse. It left to the victors the challenge of reassembling the parts of fratricidally divided societies whose memories
of bloodshed did not easily lend themselves to uplifting narratives of national
redemption.8
Crowds, conspiracies, and collective banditry had long been the source of public
violence in colonial Spanish America. They did not arise from a fundamental
crisis of sovereignty, though they reflected colonial subjects unease with their
governments. Early mass rebellions reached their crescendo in the 1780s and
spread panic among colonial administrators, but the combination of commercial expansion and the relaxation of some fiscal demands on colonial subjects
relieved the tension. Still, grievances and unrest did not evaporate.
Authorities in Quito worried about the news of subterranean plots. They
woke up in the mornings to find public walls painted with ominous warnings.
lybery, sto, felycy7a7em, e7, gloryam, consecuento, announced one.
Important intersections had banners and flags with a white cross and red lettering across the axis that read salva cruce. Flyers and broadsheets also carried
the viceroys message that sedition (could be) found all over Quito . . . directed
to hallucinate and provoke the Plebe. What exactly all this meant was unclear
then and remains so now. But it did not prevent frightened authorities from
arresting and interrogating a local school teacher. This was in 1794, shortly
after the creole publisher and tertula impresario Antonio Nario translated
Thomas Paines Rights of Man into Spanish. Copies of it were now thought to be
circulating in Cartagena, Santa F, and beyond. Viceroy Jos de Ezpeleta put his
officers on high alert for seditious acts.9
Fear of insurrection was already spreading. The French Revolution sent
panic across the Atlantic world, unleashing witch hunts for Jacobins and their
allies. But in Spanish America, especially in the slave belts, the specter of Saint
Domingue was more frightening. The 1790s saw a spike in thefts and destruc8. The literature on civil war and memory is expansive. A fine example is David W.
Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Univ. Press, 2001).
9. Jos de Ezpleta to Duque de la Alcudia, 19 Nov. 1794, Archivo General de Indias
(hereafter AGI), Estado, Santa F, 53/55.
397
tion of property, which many saw as a sign of spreading unrest, especially among
rural and urban slaves. Some of this appears to have aggregated into low-intensity
social banditry. The late Alberto Flores Galindo left us with an impression of
late colonial Lima as rife with ambiguous tensions, stable in contrast to the
upheaval of the 1780s and yet simmering with popular disrespect for patrician
property. There were plenty of places where the stability was only superficial.
If authorities in Santa F were worried, imagine the concern in Caracas, where
slave revolts and rumors of them abounded. It was not only seditious slaves that
brought concern; there were the occasional creole secessionists to worry about
as well, like the botched conspiracy known as the Gual and Espaa plot (named
after the two schemers). In the cache of discovered documents were Spanish
translations of the Rights of Man and copies of songs, some of which were meant
to be chanted to the tune of the Marseillaise. One was called La Cancin
Americana, whose verses included some troublesome words:
Viva tan solo el Pueblo
el Pueblo Soberano.
Mueran los opresores,
Mueran sus partidarios.
The idea of slaying the enemy was already on some peoples lips. But what
worried governors most was a convergence of local Jacobins with slaves and
Indians. General Mateo Prez warned his superiors that we must not under
estimate nor irritate mulattos, zambos, and blacks with disdain and mistreatment! Indeed, of the 65 men arrested in the conspiracy, only 34 were white; the
rest were either pardo or free black.10
Warnings became prophecies. In 1799, the slave coast from Venezuela to
Cartagena was seized by a wave of conspiracies and local uprisings. One group
tried to seize the Castillo de San Felipe de Barajas overlooking the harbor of
Cartagena. Others took over estates and burned mills. In Maracaibo, there were
rumors that runaway slaves and Guajiro Indians were preparing an army to
assault the town. Authorities reported that squadrons of slaves (quadrillas) were
patrolling the country roads, seizing carts and pillaging white farms. One captured slave confessed that he was on a mission with others to kill all Whites,
10. Alberto Flores Galindo, Bandidos de la Costa, in Bandoleros, abigeos y montoneros:
Criminalidad y violencia en el Peru, siglos XVIIIXX, ed. Carlos Aguirre and Charles Walker
(Lima: Instituto de Apoyo Agrario / Pasado y Presente, 1990), 5768; and Alberto Flores
Galindo, Los rostros de la plebe (Barcelona: Crtica, 2001), 61102; AGI, Estado, Lima, 75/48,
1796, Carta Anonima; General Mateo Prez to Principe de la Paz, 30 Aug. 1797, AGI,
Estado, Caracas, 71/2.
398
to plunder the Kings treasures as well as those of his subjects. The fugitives,
once the lockdown had apparently defused the crisis, scattered into the social
wilderness, leaving behind them the smoke of fear and panic. As the revolution
on Saint Domingue finally drove Napoleons forces from the island, boats of
insurgents landed around the area of Ro Hacha to join squads of runaways,
freed plebeian forces, and Indians. The bottom-up unrest was not restricted to
slave provinces. Some of Jaliscos gangs (gavillas) formed in bars, jails, and gambling dens graduated from highway robbery to social banditry. In Riobamba,
Andean Indians bearing sabers and machetes confronted the corregidor Xavier
Mantfar in 1803 to protest his way of ruling. The turn of the century in general saw fewer coordinated defenses of community (as one might understand
the acts of Comunero predecessors or the more potent spasm of violence of the
1780s in the central Andes) but rising resistance to the more basic components
of the colonial moral economy and displays in favor of expanded freedoms (of
labor, expression, and trade, and from taxes). Very seldom did this unrest call
for an overturn of colonial rule or monarchy. It exemplified the exhaustion of
a model of exploitation and system of public finance in the age of heightened
interimperial warfare.11
But to the authorities, unrest, sedition, and insubordination were pre
ambles to revolution, especially after 1789. They responded in predictable ways.
One was to bolster local militias to patrol neighborhoods and countryside. In
the frontiers of the Banda Oriental, lancers toured the byways between estates
to keep the peace. Squadrons of riflemen, often funded by merchant guilds to
make up for the governments penury, were dispatched to prevent slaves from
fleeing plantations. In 1794 this was a regular practice in Caracas, where the
Consulado in effect bankrolled the colonial state in its effort to preserve social
order and enforced a local passport system for slaves off the plantations.12
11. AGI, Estado, Santa F: Pedro Mendinueta to Francisco Saavedra, 52/76; Report
by Governor of Cartagena, 53/77; Mendieta to Ceballos, 25 Mar. 1803, 52/84. William B.
Taylor, Banditry and Insurrection: Rural Unrest in Central Jalisco, 17901816, in Katz,
Riot, Rebellion and Revolution, 20810. On exhaustion, see Enrique Tandeter, Coaccin y
Mercado: La minera de la plata en el Potos colonial, 16921826 (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana,
1992), 25363; John Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian
Violence, 17501940 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1986), chap. 2; Richard L. Garner,
Economic Growth and Change in Bourbon Mexico (Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 1993),
3771. More generally on bankruptcy, see Carlos Marichal, Bankruptcy of Empire: Mexican
Silver and the Wars Between Spain, Britain, and France, 17601810 (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 2007)
12. Archivo General de la Nacin, Caracas (hereafter AGNC), Real Consulado, Actas,
2526, ff. 3738.
399
Seditious literature, which included all books or newspapers printed

in French, was simply banned, leaving to the censors the task of separating
legal from illegal tracts. Narios translation of the Rights of Man landed him
in prison. The oidor of the Santa F Audiencia described lurid nightmares to
Charles IVs minister, the Prince of Peace, to justify the censorship and incarceration, which only confirmed the general view in Madrid that Jacobin agents
could be found under beds all over the empire. When posters and other broadsheets began to appear on the streets, roundups began. In spite of protests by,
among others, the magnates of the cabildo, there was no leniency. Eleven conspirators, including Nario, were dispatched to Spain to face trial (where it was
felt that the courts would be free from the pressures of local subjects). Nario
understandably felt scapegoated, and when his appeal was rejected he fled to
Paris to become an avowed lifelong opponent of Spanish rule.13
These were preemptive measures and expressions of the manifold ways in
which fear mutated into loathing. They represent only one end of a spectrum
of deterrence. Ironically, Nario printed only a hundred copies of the tract,
and when he heard that he might be arrested he had them all burned, save two
copies. But there was harsh justice for those who crossed the line. Those caught
conspiring faced stricter penalties and even death sentences. After Mirandas
failed attempt to lead a revolution from Coro in 1806, his followers who had
not managed to escape with him or to slip away in canoes to Margarita Island
were rounded up. All were denounced as traitors dedicated to whipping up the
gente reboltosa and who threatened to bring to Venezuela something akin to
the black tyrant Dessalines. Ten of Mirandas followers were summarily hung,
their bodies left dangling from the gallows. The rest were sent to Spain to languish in prison. This kind of violence exemplified what Lynn Hunt has called a
pageantry of pain, public spectacles of corporal punishment from whippings
to executions, a gamut of bodily desecration meant to dishonor the criminal and
demonstrate the baseness and powerlessness of the condemned as well as the
might and glory of rulers.14
13. Conde de Torre Velarde to Principe de la Paz, 19 July 1797, AGI, Estado, Santa F,
53/59; Anthony McFarlane, Colombia before Independence: Economy, Society and Politics under
Bourbon Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 28489.
14. Andrs Bello, Observaciones sobre la situacin de Coro, 2 Sept. 1806, AGI,
Gobierno, Caracas, 458. Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W. W.
Norton, 2007), 93. The most evocative narrative of this model of justice is Peter Linebaugh,
The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Penguin, 1991).
See also Gene E. Ogle, Slaves of Justice: Saint Domingues Executioners and the Production
of Shame, Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques 29, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 27594.
400
Armed social conflict is one thing; war is quite another. Society at this
point was far from a cycle of civil strife and terror, and certainly no breakdown
of the basic colonial system had occurred. The violence lacked the organizational personality it would have in a few years time. Desecration and rumors of
killing came nowhere close to the language or threat of extermination. Indeed,
colonial subjects for the most part combined their unease with officials heavyhandedness with a vision of the monarch as a source of justice and appealed to
this sense of justice in self-defense in the unfortunate event of arrest. It would
take a specific kind of break in the legal order for enforcements that were once
seen as the rites of natural justice to appear as the exercise of tyranny, or for
plebeian violence to be seen as more than vindictiveness.
There was no shortage of motives for fear and unrest in late colonial Spanish America. Events in 1808 aggravated them all. Napoleonic armies streamed
into Spain and Ferdinand fell into the French rulers hands. Gone was the monarchy, the central legitimating symbol for the empire and source of Christian
justice. With the king unable to rule his subjects, who or what would fill the gap,
and how? It was this break in sovereignty that altered the practice of political
violence. The late Charles Tilly, following an insight by Trotsky, argued that
revolutionary situations were those in which more than one power bloc exercised control over part of the state apparatus. Dual or manifold sovereignties
provoke different classes, sectors, and alliances to lay claim to state power. This
is what started to happen in 1808 across the Iberian Atlantic. The fissuring of
the ancien rgime did not widen under pressure from Jacobin plots or the revolutionary wars of the 1790s but only when the interimperial rivalries blew open
with the coronation of Napoleon as the emperor of France and his campaign for
European supremacy.15
If a break in sovereignty occasioned a revolutionary situation it did not
determine its course. For this, we need to come to terms with the contingencies
of the conflicts that ensued and the violence they magnified. As Spaniards and
colonists grappled with how to improvise a system of rule, they set off a debate
about local autonomy and representation that cascaded into confrontations over
who had voice and how and where they were allowed to express it. The cycle
upset the delicate equipoise of urban patrician models of political domination,
which only intensified authorities suspicions and, in some cases, such as Mexico
City, their reactionary reflexes. It took little time for the war of words to lead to
violence. In July 1809, a group of well-to-do creoles in Quito grew increasingly
15. Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley,
1978), 19091.
401
frustrated with the Audiencias foot-dragging and denounced the viceroys local
officials, calling for an autonomous junta to govern the province in the name of
the king. This was not a declaration of independence, but it was an affront to
some royal officials. There had been arrests and verbal assaults, but now a harsh
reaction was coming. The viceroy ordered troops to smother the quiteo traitors, and their leaders were rounded up. Lima sent 800 soldiers to patrol the
city. More suspects were detained. While the government in Spain was debating new principles of representation and elections, prosecutor Toms Archaga
ordered that the property of all the rebels be seized and requested to the viceroy that they all be executed. Quiteos heard rumors that the repression would
spread and lead to bloodshed, until a group of armed men stormed the prison
and released the detained. One guard died in the mele. Then all hell broke
loose. Soldiers opened fire on a crowd in the plaza mayor. Civilians attacked the
presidio to get guns but were trapped inside. Troops finally captured them and
shot them on the spot. One escaped. By then, fears of the Bastille-style crowd
filled the minds of frightened Peruvian troops, who panicked and went on a
spree of assaults and killings in search of the ringleaders and their supporters.
Using swords, knives, bayonets, and axes, they found and slaughtered 28 of the
men who were awaiting sentences, including some scions of the creole aristocracy. Spanish officials, who had lost control, retreated to the presidential palace
to pray for a miracle. The absence of authority led to days of revenge killings
and retributions. Civilians began to target soldiers from rooftops and windows;
soldiers responded in kind and proceeded to pillage the shops around the now
seething plaza mayor. President Ruiz de Castilla thought that a sign of force
would do the trick to restore order; he commanded that a hanging gallows be
erected in the plaza and that disloyal subjects should be left to dangle without
trial. In the end, it was the bishop who defused the crisis for the moment. The
toll was about 800 civilians dead in the streets, including 13 children. One hundred soldiers also died.16
These at least were the figures and the images that circulated at the time.
Silence and fear descended on Quito. But the news spread, especially now that
censorship was lifted, provoking outrage. In Santa F, Camilo Torres seized
upon the news of the killings in Quito to cajole the Cabildo of Santa F to
issue a Memorial de agravios, which catalogued the atrocities and urged subjects
to reconsider their loyalties, less to Spain itself than to its governors. Sangui16. Jos Manuel Restrepo, Historia de la Revolucin, vol. 1 (Bogot: Bedout, 1969),
11823; Jaime Rodrguez O., La revolucin poltica durante la poca de la independencia: El reino
de Quito, 18081822 (Quito: Universidad Andina Simn Bolvar, 2006), 7173.
402
nary news gave definition to a line that was once imperceptible. It also revealed
how much the pattern of violence had changed from that which poised colonial
militias and enforcers against plebeian sectors. The pattern of violence was less
clearly molded to the landscapes of class and broke the association of enforcement with elites and resistance with subaltern populations.
Violence also summoned new coalitions, some even calling for secession to
restore peace. Consider Cartagena, where proSpanish Regency factions had
threatened since 1810 to roll back local autonomy and tried to seize the governors palace and mobilize the garrison to occupy the city. After several lowerranking officers leaked the plan, crowds took to the streets to preempt the coup
and called out the mixed-race militias and lancers. When Cartagena seceded
from Spanish rule in November 1811, it was an interim measure until the crisis
in the metropole could be resolved. But secessionists also felt that the break was
needed to reestablish legitimacy and bring an end to the carnage and its threat.
The citys assembly issued an urgent call to disarm all colonial militias to prevent opponents from militarizing the conflict. The authors of the declaration
framed their vindications in a memory of bloodshed: We note with horror for
our consideration the three hundred years of vexations, miseries, and sufferings
of all types, which accumulated over our country with the ferocity of the Conquistadors and Spanish rulers.17
The polarization gave rise to an ever more intransigent rhetoric. Some of it
baptized the new autonomist movements with sacrificial imagery and warnings
of a more redemptive, totalizing war. Antonio Nario, who had plenty of time
in Spanish prison to nurse his enmity, returned to the printing presses. His
newspaper La Bagatela was dedicated to denouncing the venality and viciousness of Spanish authorities and publicizing every rumored repression; it invoked
the epic choice in September 1811: salvar la patria o morir.18 Bernardo Monteagudo grew tired of the polite Gaceta de Buenos Aires and founded his own
more vitriolic Mrtir o Libre. In Venezuela, Juan Germn Roscio, otherwise a
less intemperate figure than Nario or Monteagudo, also justified self-rule to
save the peace, because the Spanish could only compensate for their illegitimacy
with bloodletting. The selfsame blood, however, could be the bonding agent for
a new fraternal association: We must recognize a legitimate Government and
decide to seal with the blood of its very last inhabitants the oaths which have
17. El Argos Americano, 11 Nov. 1811; Aline Helg, The Limits of Equality: Free People
of Colour and Slaves during the First Independence of Cartagena, Colombia, 18101815,
Journal of Latin American Studies 20, no. 2 (Aug. 1999): 78.
18. Restrepo, Historia de la Revolucin, 183.
403
been pronounced at the altar of loyalty and patriotism. Mariano Moreno was
practical about the need to shed blood for the revolution. Though he was asked
to draft an outline for the makeup of a provisional government of Buenos Aires
in July 1810, Moreno also suggested means to this end and to resort to gruesome
measures if necessary: We should not be scandalized by my words, to sever
heads, spill blood, and sacrifice at all costs, even when they have all the appearances
of the customs of Cannibals and Caribs (emphasis in original).19
Demonizing the government meant that the violence could cut both ways.
Indeed, no longer were crowds and civilian coalitions taking the place of governments to perform what they considered to be governments dutiful obligations to
subjects, especially the supply of fooda common target of early modern rioting. They were increasingly claiming to be the government, with rights to wield
its weapons against enfeebled incumbents. In May and June 1810, the highlands
around Potos were swept by similar unrest over loyalties to splintering sovereignties. But when the news arrived in November that Porteo armies under
General Antonio Gonzlez Balcarce had defeated Spanish troops at Suipacha,
crowds took to the streets. One set off for the house of the Governor Francisco
de Paula Sanz, who had earlier quashed dissent. The Arequipa Division of Royal
Troops opened fire; as in Quito, this ignited an urban insurrection. By the time
the smoke cleared, Paula Sanz was under arrest and the city was in rebel hands.
When Buenos Airess Juan Jose Castelli arrived in Potos, he ordered that firing squads execute the governor and his associates. Vengeance begat avenging.
Limas viceroy Abascal dispatched armies to the highlands to drive the Porteo
forces from the region. What is more, commanders were under orders to purge
the cities of all sedition. These operations had to be more extensive and dig
deeper than those that followed the Tpac Amaru revolt and could rely less on
collaboration from local caciques (as we shall see below). From La Paz to Potos,
rebel leaders were hung in the main squares and their bodies left to rot or to be
picked apart by scavenging birds. By 1816, one of the few republiquetas to survive
the savagery of Spanish repression was Ayopaya, whose guerrillas, based in the
highland hamlets of Palca, Machaca, and Inquisiui, menaced the roads and silver caravans around La Paz, Cochabamba, and Oruro.20
19. Juan Germn Roscio, Alucacin del Reglamento para la eleccin de diputados del
Primer Congreso de Venezuela Independiente de 1811, in Obras, vol. 2 (Caracas: Secretara
General de la Dcima Conferencia Interamericana, 1953), 20; Mariano Moreno, Plan de
Operaciones, in Escritos politicos y econmicos (Buenos Aires: Cultura Argentina, 1915), 307.
20. Ricardo R. Caillet-Bois, La revolucin en el virreinato, in Historia de la Nacin
Argentina, vol. 2 (Buenos Aires: Academia Nacional de Historia, 1936), 15255; Charles W.
Arnade, The Emergence of the Republic of Bolivia (Gainesville: Univ. of Florida Press, 1957), 3536.
404
In the borderlands of the Banda Oriental, the crisis of sovereignty was further complicated by the competition for dominion on the shores of the Rio de
la Plata. The ratcheting up of conflict between rival autonomist and pro-junta
factions coincided withindeed, occasionedthe rapid decomposition of the
viceroyalty. In the vacuum that opened up, Portuguese armies were willingly
sucked in, giving the disequilibrium an imbalance of its own. Viceroy Francisco
Javier de Elo holed up with his troops in Montevideo, and his fighters gave up
all hope of a peaceable solution. Jos Mara Salazar, a royal naval commander,
concluded that no other methods than the force of Bayonets can pacify these
provinces now. His enemies agreed. One of the military commanders, Jos de
Artigas, gathered his cavalry to besiege the port in an early opening of the citycountry divide. His force was made up of lancers and gaucho volunteers. In the
battles that ensued, the distinction between formal and informal warfare was as
fluid as the alliances that fought them. The siege itself lasted almost three years
and turned the prosperous outpost into a hub of disease and famine. The clash
soon gave way to something more chaotic and would only partially resolve itself
by the late 1820s with the formation of an independent Uruguay. When Artigass coalition broke up in mid-1811 (and some factions threw their lot in with
the enemy when they saw the tides quickly turn), Portuguese troops began to
mass along the border. This inflamed matters. The siege of Montevideo yielded
to sacking and pillaging on both sides. Even Artigass ranks began to fill with
internal agitation; the massive refugee camp of Ayu seethed with anger and
fear. To assert his authority over the camp, Artigas ordered the public execution
of three men on criminal charges. The war of attrition was such that no single
group could assert authority until the Spanish finally evacuated Montevideo,
by which time the autonomist coalition was at open war with itself. This was
less a war conducted by standing armies than organized banditry and despoliation conducted by all sides. When Portuguese troops did finally invade under
General Diego de Souza, they faced the dilemma of most occupiers surrounded
by an armed society; they too had to resort to burning and pillaging to thwart
attacks. Where entire towns evacuated, the Portuguese moved in and began to
settle their own footholds in abandoned counties.21
The cycle from increasing intransigence to stepped-up vengeance and civil
war was especially notable in central New Spain. In Quertaro, militiamen plot21. Salazar to Ministero de Marina, 4 Dec. 1810, AGI, Estado, Buenos Aires, 79/26;
Agustn Beraza, La economa en la Banda Oriental, 18111820 (Montevideo: Ediciones
de la Banda Oriental, 1964), 1829; Pablo Blanco Acevedo, El federalismo de Artigas y la
independencia nacional (Montevideo: n.p., 1939), 7092.
405
ted the overthrow of gachupn power in response to repression in the viceregal

capital, sowing the seeds for popular mobilization. Father Miguel Hidalgo, the
moral crusader of the Bajo, proclaimed, Long live Our Lady of Guadalupe,
death to bad government, and death to the Spaniards! Four days later, his
armies plunged into the Battle of Guanajuato, culminating in sacking, plundering, and the public execution of the citys defenders. While defenders were
being mutilated, attackers broke into shops and began to parade through the
streets dressed up in fancy clothes, emboldened by pilfered alcohol; the festive
and the horrific combined in a single scene of confusion. In one September
fortnight, hundreds of thousands of Indians, blacks, and mulattos joined the
rebellion. Bishop Manuel Abad y Queipo, enraged that the rebels had painted
their standards with the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, warned of a deadly
contagion (mortfero contagio). Terror pnico swept through loyalist ranks.22 As
Spains armies in New Spain stumbled in the face of insurgents, provincial cities emptied not only of their peninsulars, but often all whites, for fear of the
governments collapse. Quertaro and Mexico City filled with refugees from
the provinces. While Hidalgos forces had some hallmarks of armies, there was
a way in which they more resembled an armed mob than an armya crowd of
some 80,000 that was poised to seize Mexico City. Behind the lines (such as they
were), a social order was in upheaval. Villagers seized haciendas. The owners
and managers were routinely killed, their bodies desecrated. Local governors
and mayors faced the same fate. One witness of the takeover of the Hacienda
Nuestra Seora de Guadalupe observed that attackers were still stabbing (the
bodies) with swords, and Santiago Cuenca cut off their heads with a long knife
given to him by Juan Agustn Gonzlez, and Luciano Telles threw them [the
heads] in a sack and tied it to the pommel of his saddle. In the pueblo of Atlacomulco, crowds rioted, looted, and killed four Spaniards. Outbursts like this
multiplied across Central New Spain. Once royalists organized and stood their
ground, the Army of the Center quickly turned the tide and levied a series of
devastating defeats. In the mayhem that followed, untold numbers of civilians
became victims of exemplary justice. After Hidalgos execution in July 1811, the
victor, General Flix Mara Calleja, ordered that his decapitated head and those
of his co-conspirators be hung in cages for ten years from Guanajuatos granary, where the worst of the rebel massacres had transpired. After that, Calleja
imposed a reign of fear. When he learned that people were tearing down his
posted decrees at night, he ordered his soldiers to find the culprits. They failed.
22. Hugh M. Hamill Jr., The Hidalgo Revolt: Prelude to Mexican Independence
(Gainesville: Univ. of Florida Press, 1966), 142.
406
Instead, 40 plebeian men were arrested, and when none would name names, 4 of
them were chosen by lot to face a firing squad.23
The fact that the cycle of violence in New Spain escalated so quickly and
swept across such vast territories (unlike the more localized and still largely
urbanized clashes in much of the rest of Spanish America) helps explain what
came after. By containing and then crushing the insurgency so decisively,
Calleja succeeded in legating to the viceroyaltys patrician classes a fear of what
might happen in the event of a renewed contest over sovereignty. This grand peur
coincided, more or less, with the restoration of Bourbon authority in Madrid.
For the next six years, it was possible to convey an impression of reconstituted
imperial sovereignty and so avert the kind of dynamics that ratcheted up the
contestation in the Northern Andes and the River Plate.
As images of bloodbaths and news of plotting filled the press and fueled
rumor mills, they could also stoke fears of treasonous behavior from within
autonomist coalitions. The Porteo regimeunderstandably paranoid about
peninsular schemes for a reconquest and federalist uprisings in the littoral
provincesannounced that all Spanish horrendas conspiraciones would invite
the harshest of penalties and declared that Artigas was a traidor a la patria!
His arrest and summary execution were ordered; his killer or captor would
earn 6,000 pesos bounty. Caracas was at odds with Puerto Cabello; Santa F
de Bogot (as it was now renamed) fought Cartagena, and so forth. The feuding
spread. As it did, the demonizing of the enemy that was once directed outward
turned inward and widened local fissures. The competition for political loyalty
mobilized popular sectors, but it also gave rise to a sense of futility among many
of the original patriotic leaders; the rebel populacho may not have been as menacing as the defenders of the junta, but they were untrustworthy. Uncensored
newspapers that once filled pages with news of a crumbling Spanish government and its cruelties in the colonies soon began to report on the dangers of
the multitude at home. In Cartagena, the victory of popular forces demonstrated precisely why they could not be trusted, at least from the point of view of
centralists like Nario, whose Bagatela was almost as vitriolic about the masses
as it once was about the Spanish government. Events in Cartagena drove him to
distraction. From the neighborhood of Getseman, black and mulatto militias
23. Christon I. Archer, La Causa Buena: The Counterinsurgency Army of New
Spain and the Ten Years War, in The Independence of Mexico and the Creation of the New
Nation, ed. Jaime Rodrguez O. (Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center, 1989), 85, 90,
93; Eric Van Young, The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology, and the Mexican Struggle
for Independence, 18101821 (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2001), 98, 129, and for the
case of Atlacomulco, see chap. 15.
407
organized by the Cuban-born mulatto Pedro Romero took up light arms and
began to patrol their own streets to defend themselves against their own local
authorities, which wanted them disarmed. The Getseman battalions became
the core of the armed forces of the city and soon found themselves defending
the city against Spanish attacks (mainly from Santa Marta) and centralists from
Cundinamarca.24
As local coalition governments weakened, their publicists worried about
the limits of citizenship. No longer was the threat from the enemy without,
but the danger within. By 1812 in Caracas, the independence coalition traded
accusations of treason, and on April 12 of that year the crumbling government
promulgated the death penalty for treasonous acts. All opposition, the decree
cried out, was treason because it was, by definition, an expression of particular
interests against the general will of a newly freed public. Monteagudo, a witness to the fragmentation of the River Plate region, pointed to the persistence
of destructive and antisocial passions; for a people tutored only in centuries of
tyranny there were no virtues. A people who so suddenly passes from servitude
to liberty is in close danger of precipitating itself to anarchy and then regressing to slavery. The danger, he noted (some would say prophetically), was that
passions would renew a more pernicious internal war against liberty than one
waged with all the weapons of tyrants.25
Internalized violence begat despair, heightened suspicion, justified spying,
and raised the temptation to deal with the growing instability with yet more
violence. When the first Venezuelan government crumbled in July 1812 and
prepared to withdraw, a handful of its younger leaders, Simn Bolvar among
them, schemed to turn their president Francisco de Miranda over to the Spanish
commander to face imperial magistrates. They were furious at him for allegedly
24. Juan Canter, La Asamblea General Constituyente, in Historia de la Nacin
Argentina vol. 6 (Buenos Aires: Academia Nacional de Historia, 1936), 183; Vronique
Hbrard, Opinin Pblica y representacin en el Congreso Constituyente de Venezuela
(181112), in Los espacios pblicos en Iberoamrica: Ambiguedades y problemas, siglos XVIII
y XIX, by Franois-Xavier Guerra, Annick Lamprire, et al. (Mexico City: Centro
Frances de Estudios Mexicanos y Centroamericanos / Fondo de Cultura Economica,
1998), 21124; Alfonso Mnera, El Fracaso de la Nacin: Region, clase, y raza en el caribe
colombiano (17171810) (Bogot: Banco de la Repblica, 1998), 179192; Marixa Lasso,
Myths of Harmony: Race and Republicanism during the Age of Revolution, Colombia 17951831
(Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), 4446.
25. Bernardo Monteagudo, Observacin, in Escritos Politicos (Buenos Aires: n.p.,
n.d.), 5758; Gustavo Montoya, Pensamiento poltico de Bernardo Monteagudo, in La
independencia del Per y la fantasma de la revolucin (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos,
2002), 15288.
408
betraying the cause (though there is some evidence that Bolvar himself was on
the verge of switching sides preemptively). Miranda, arrested and taken away
in chains, would waste away in a cell in Cdiz. By late 1812, the new local ruler
Domingo de Monteverde announced to his government that Venezuela was
now pacified. Like so many claims to victory in fratricidal conflicts, this was
premature. Behind the lines, the province was in upheaval. Though the republican leadership had fled, local chieftains filled the void; Jos Francisco Bermdez, Santiago Mario, and the mulatto Manuel Piar mobilized slaves and freed
blacks in the east and eventually helped drive Monteverde from the capital. The
seesaw continued; the second republic was even weaker, and more short-lived,
than the first. Each side was strong enough to neutralize its adversary; none had
the power to impose a decisive victory.26
What happened in Venezuela reveals, in extremis, a more general pattern:
where there was a standoff and the armed conflict disintegrated the lines that
divided camps from each other, violence engulfed noncombatants. Mario, for
instance, capped victories with butchery. After taking Cuman, he ordered the
execution of 47 Spaniards and creoles; Barcelona saw 69 of its citizens shot. The
life of such men, he noted, was incompatible with the existence of the State.
Royalist reprisals were not far behind. As civilians and soldiers fled before the
republican caudillos, they also regrouped. And they responded in kind. The
Canarian shopkeeper Francisco Rosete pushed back through the valleys of Tuy,
liberating slaves along the way, and when he reached Ocumare his retaliatory
campaign ended with systematic desecration of civilians: noses, ears, breasts,
sexual organs were all systematically and publicly sliced off the bodies of captives, ending with mass decapitation. When Bolvar got the news, in a white
fury he ordered the immediate execution of every captive Spaniard; this was
the beginning of the War to the Death. The political violence reached a fever
pitch at the hands of Jos Toms Bovess Lancers, whose axial years of carnage
became the core of Arturo Uslar Pietris classic fictional account, Las lanzas coloradas. The Asturian merchant turned his multiracial recruits into a slaughtering
machine that worked over the Llanos in 32 months (until a spear did him in
on the plains of Urica in December 1814). In units of 50 to 60 horsemen, they
were organized not so much to win open battles with republican forces (though
this did occur), but more to establish territorial control through fear, sweeping
into towns and pillaging, raping, and murdering the occupants into submission.
Boves was not always a mass murderer; he became one. His early fighting did
not show the signs of the calculated sadism that eventually accompanied his
26. Oficio de Domino Monteverde, 22 Nov. 1812, AGI, Estado, Caracas.
409
Lancers. At first, Boves wore no uniform and often went shirtless; the fighting
was more spasmodic and his troops less organized. But by the middle of 1814 his
vestments had become more formal and his methods of terrorizing more elaborate. The turning point appeared when he learned of a civilian plot to infiltrate
his ranks at Espino. Boves sought revenge. He caught the plotters and ordered
their execution. Even the whistle-blower lost his head. This was followed by a
victory celebration in which Boves paraded the heads of his victims on top of
pikes, marching them around town with a band of musicians. After the Battle
of Victoria in June 1814 (where a trounced Bolvar had fled), Boves took morbid delight in his victory, mixing the festive with the funereal: he dined with a
captured commander Colonel Diego Jaln, then publicly humiliated him before
his fellow captives, ordering 200 lashes. Then they all watched his execution; his
head shared the fate of others, displayed at the end of a pike for all to see. The
night after another battle, an insouciant Boves invited the townswomen to a
banquet, after which, whip in hand, he ordered them to dance while, beyond the
walls, their husbands and brothers were rounded up and massacred.27
Bovess violence and the local calculus of pain still await in-depth historical
research. His actions and those of his like-minded peers across the Llanos illustrate the ways in which perpetrators wavered between the domain of politics
and the realm of theater. But one should not lose sight of the strategic purposes
of the slaughter. Consider the way preying and pillaging became commonplace
in the Platine borderlands, where power rivalries were more internationalized.
Unlike the Llanos of Nueva Granada and Venezuela, popular monarchist forces
were for the most part hemmed in at Montevideo. The furies of rural violence
stemmed from a different source, for in the countryside it was Portuguese divisions that were bogged down in a brutal cat-and-mouse war with guerrillas.
While Joaquina Carlota was plotting from Rio de Janeiro to reestablish a Bourbon monarchy in the borderland region with herself on the throne (in advance
of her reconquest she had sent a printing press and some personal goods,
including, allegedly, her jewels), she had to wait for her armies to put down the
insurgency, which was on the run by mid-1812. But the war had degenerated
into a cruel exchange of guerrilla ambushes and army depredations of civilian
27. The work on Boves and his epigones is more extensive than deep. For details, see
John Lynch, Simn Bolvar: A Life (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2006), 76, 8287; Stephen
K. Stoan, Pablo Morillo and Venezuela, 18151820 (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1974),
5255; Toms Prez Tenreiro, Jos Toms Boves: Primera lanza del rey (Caracas: Ministerio
de Defensa, n.d.), 9192. Perhaps the best single study is Germn Carrera Damas, Boves:
Aspectos soci-econonmicos de su accin histrica (Caracas: Ministerio de Educacin, 1968), which
emphasizes how pillaging was a war technique.
410
hamlets. The empresss field marshal, General Gaspar Vigodet, formally acting
on orders of the Spanish Regency, defended his actionsnoting among other
things that his proxy war would free the Spanish armies to stamp out rebellions
in the Andesto create a vast multilingual coalition of regal armies crushing
insurgents in the backlands to restore what the French Revolution came perilously close to annihilating: imperial monarchy.28
For all the grand designing, the situation on the ground was highly unstable and in some places led to wholesale dislocations. Wherever the fighting
became inconclusive and protracted, refugees filled churches and overwhelmed
the meager supplies of the armies that could not protect them. As Bovess slaying frontier moved eastward, encroaching on the capital, panic seized Caracas.
Families of all ranks began to pack carts and horses to prepare to flee. Bolvar
gave the order to evacuate, starting with his own emaciated troops. Civilians
streamed out of the city and made for Barcelona and Cuman, starving, shoeless, and petrified. Bolvars troops could not defend them. The stragglers at
Aragua were simply wiped out. Royalist troops went on hunting expeditions,
killing refugees en route to Barcelona. Towns swollen with refugees became
easier targets for the marauders, who did more than kill. One royalist chieftain,
Francisco Morales, took care of Maturn, and gloated that he personally raped
every woman of the town.29 Fear and flight also possessed the Banda Oriental,
where noncombatants also became excuses for target practice and bodily desecration by both sides. As Portuguese armies moved forward, burning and pillaging, the exodus began: up to 80 percent of the rural populationestancieros,
merchants, peons, and slavesbegan their long march north to the littoral,
where federalist chieftains were preparing their recruits. Meanwhile, Spanish
royalists, plundered and immiserated in a blockaded Montevideo, also sought
refuge, fleeing to Brazil and after 1814 back to Spain. News from far away could
spark a stampede of frightened civilians. In early 1815, following rumors that
Ferdinand was sending his massive expeditionary force to the River Plate, all
sides began to pack their bags for fear of an all-out war. A resolution of March
1815 announced that all Spaniards suspected of collusion with Madrids reconquista would face the consequences for their treason. Jos Battle y Carre, for
instance, fled, leaving his wife and children behind, hoping to rescue them later
and praying that that class of woman would not be persecuted. In September,
Artigas began rounding up Spanish and Portuguese subjects, as well as his cre28. AGI, Estado, Buenos Aires: Jos Mara Salazar to Min. de Marina, 1 Sept. 1810,
79/38; Vigodet to Joaquina Carlota, 22 June 1812, 79/59.
29. Lynch, Simn Bolvar, 86.
411
ole opponents, and herding them into a concentration camp he called, without
irony, Purification. Then he gave away their property to free blacks, zambos,
indios, and poor creoles in proclamations that rolled off Princess Carlotas old
printing press. When the Portuguese armies (once more with the complicity of
Buenos Aires) returned in 1816, they trounced the artiguista forces, wiping them
out in a succession of battles. But this time the Luso-Brazilian campaign was a
longer and more brutal one. General Federico Lecors army became an occupation force. While the Banda Oriental had been converted into an embattled
province of refugees perpetually in search of shelter, Lecors divisions were surrounded by guerrillas, and so lashed out at defenseless civilians in the standard
style of counterinsurgency. Fed up, an entire regiment of Artigass plebeian
force comprised of freed slaves surrendered on condition they would be allowed
to seek refuge in Buenos Aires, where they were welcomed with open, if somewhat duplicitous, arms. This phase of the protracted war ended at Tacuaremb
with Artigass final defeat, his personal flight to Paraguay, and the Portuguese
annexation of the province to Brazil, setting the stage for another decade of
direct conflict with Buenos Aires.30
Body parts and cadavers became instruments of politics; public executions and torture were intended to terrorize noncombatants into either submission and loyalty or flight and exit, these being two pendular alternatives in
the deterioration of public life. The violence served to constrain the features of
an emerging public sphere in late colonial Spanish Americathe formation of
public opinion in the press, deliberation in town councils and business associations, and debate in the salonsthat had been such a prominent part of the
contest over sovereignty in the aftermath of the French invasion. The politics
of terror was not an end in itself: these lethal crowds also acted as magistrates
issuing justice (in their view) as a way to exterminate the enemy. What started
out as a campaign against corruption, or as shaming rituals with the hanging of
a few royalists and rebels, had now become mass killing, a cleansing operation
of ever greater proportions. Historians once tended to see killing and maiming
like this as a breakdown of normal war into deviant personalized vendetta,
as a failure to cohere armies as prototypical affiliates for nations coming into
being stocked with citizens in arms, as an aberration from a normative sequence
of state formation. But we might also see this in reverse, as a rite more familiar
30. Manuel Diego to Consulado, 30 Sept. 1812, AGI, Consulado, 345; Blanco Acevedo,
El federalismo de Artigas y la independencia nacional, 200209; Beraza, La economa en la Banda
Oriental, 7387; Luca Sala de Touron, Nelson de la Torre, and Julio C. Rodriguez, Artigas
y su revolucin agraria, 18111820 (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1978), 7197.
412
to early modern historians that did not automatically subside with the creation
of modern states, whose own birth could even augment it. Thus we could see it
as the extreme violence of crowds who behaved strategically and who saw their
cause as legitimate and their method as logical, as militarized groups with more
or less aptitude for regimentation that assumed the role of justice-dispensing
magistrates where the state has collapsed. It is a subset within a broader family
type of civil war. Such a view helps explain why noncombatants got swept up in
the fratricide with such malice.31
One anonymous limeo lamented to his sovereign in 1810 that the appeal
of rebellion to many of his subjects reflected less the sense of ingratitude to the
king (which could be remedied because all children could learn gratitude) than
something more pernicious and not easily cured: love of tyranny.32 While the
view of rebels as deadly agents, not mere malcontents, spread with the fighting,
the fighting was hardly the expression of some prepolitical logic but rather was
the function of the (im)balance of forces. Consider Peru, where Viceroy Jos de
Abascal, the spiritus rector of continuism, responded to rebellions with an iron
fist and thus projected a view of how to dispense with those who loved godless tyranny over the rule of a beneficent Bourbon king. Having driven Buenos
Aires armies from the highlands, Abascal assured the Spanish government that
we can restore in motion the minerals of Potos. What is more, he added,
between his armies in the Andes and the royalists troops in Montevideo (this
was written before the citys evacuation), the governments pincers could now
squeeze Buenos Aires back into submission. After all, he had mopped up Pasto,
Quito, and Alto Peruin the latter two cases leaving behind the trademark
odor of plunder and executions. And the news from Santa F and Buenos Aires
regarding their imminent collapse confirmed that only force would compel
insurgents to enter reason.33
Discourses such as these have appealed to those fond of coercive solutions to
political impasses, especially those who happen to favor their own lust for power.
This was certainly true for Ferdinand, who was determined to restore imperial
grandeur. It also had an aura of plausibility: Callejas and Abascals counter
31. Paul Friedland, Beyond Deterrence: Cadavers, Effigies, Animals and the Logic of
Logic of Executions in Pre-Modern France, Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques 29,
no. 2 (Summer 2003): 295318; Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern
France (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1975), 15462.
32. Anonymous letter, 10 Aug. 1810, AGI, Indiferente General, 1568.
33. AGI, Estado, Lima: Jos Abascal to Secre de Estado, 23 May 1812, 74/2; Jos
Abascal to Secr de Estado, 13 Oct. 1812, 74/8; Marquz de la Concordia to Secr de Estado,
25 Jan. 1813, 74/51; Joaquin de la Molina to Consejo de la Regencia, 23 July 1813, 74/72.
413
insurgencies in Mesoamerican and Andean hamlets subdued the uprisings; Buenos Aires itself was free but the littoral and borderlands were engulfed in civil
war or occupied by Portuguese armies; and in Venezuela and Nueva Granada,
fledgling self-rule movements collapsed into fratricidal conflict. In this context,
the restored emperor chose to rebuild his empire by arrogating to himself the
providential powers of the avenger, despite the warnings of some of his envoys
and ministers that the delicate impasse was leaning his way without the need for
a massive intervention. There was a political reason for this decision: to resolve
Trotsky and Tillys revolutionary situation, in which the task of the revolution or the counterrevolution is to reintegrate state power through the exercise
of force. This is what Ferdinand sought. But there was also a historic memory of violence nurtured by Abascal and loyalists, inscribed in consultas to the
(restored) Council of the Indies arguing that some evildoers took advantage of
the French invasion to take power for themselves, to introduce libertinaje of the
press in order to corrupt public opinion and demoralize the people. What
was needed was a decisive crushing of impiety and insurrection, a purging
of all the prejudicial novelties introduced to our constitucin indiana. Send an
Inquisitor! pleaded one cleric. The full force of the Spanish Empire would be
dedicated to a massive cleansing operation to root out evil and corruption as the
precondition for a new peace premised on the solemn and general forgetting
of the past. This would be a war to bring real peace. Pacification plans were
laid to reconquer the provinces from rebellious infidels and restore the image of
a Padre tierno among subjects who had been seduced to forget his magnanimity. For this the king needed an avenging angel to deliver the message, to root
out the sources of liberal venality, and to destroy the false gods of constitutional
idolatry.34
The angel was Brigadier General Pablo Morillo, and his task could not
help but erase what was left of the lines between combatants and noncombatants. But it would be unfair to charge the fernandina counterrevolution with
singlehandedly turning the unarmed into victims. We have seen evidence that
armed crowds could quickly mutate into plebeian armies and that sieges and
pillaging were becoming methods of warfare on all sides. The lines had become
all but meaningless. Whole towns and cities became targets, not just their
defenders. By the time Morillo arrived to liberate the province as a prelude
to pacifying the Andes and eventually choking Buenos Aires into submission,
34. AGI, Indiferente General: Consultas del Consejo de Indias, 3 Oct. 1814, 1568;
Consulado to Secr de Estado, 7 Mar. 1815, 2320. Memorial del doctor Juan Antonio Queipo,
21 Dec. 1816, AGI, Estado, 71/81.
414
it really meant wresting control from royalist chieftains and disbanding their
plundering bands. (This was a mistake whose consequences became clear later,
when republicans like Jos Antonio Pez filled the rural vacuum with guerrilla
forces of their own.) A senior cleric, who had joined the republicans in 1811 but
was appalled by what followed, switched sides, applauding the pacification in
Venezuela as the restoration of Gods authority and sharing his own tactical
recommendations for liquidating the Antichrists.35
The next stop was Cartagena, the gateway to Nueva Granada. Morillos
forces besieged the port for 106 days, promising food and mercy in return for
surrender. Though many immediately swore loyalty to Ferdinand to avoid
recriminations, Cartagena held out, and its leaders responded by pulling their
Spanish prisoners out of jail and dragging them through the streets before
shooting them on the ramparts of the fort for the besiegers to witness. But starvation finally brought the city to its knees, and it surrendered. When Morillo
marched in, he was greeted by the stench of death: six thousand people had died
from disease or starvation, and their corpses had to be mounted on huge pyres
for burning to control the contagion. The city, noted Morillo, was a most
horrific spectacle. A group of merchants petitioned the king, thanking him for
sending a destroyer of our past anarchy, and real restorer of the peace under
which we now live.36
This reconquest (how deliberate was this allusion to the crusade against
Muslims in the peninsula in the fifteenth century is unclear) was as bloody as it
was rapid. As with Boves, Bolvar, and Artigas, however, the degree and nature
of violence mutated according to circumstance. Morillo was not vicious when
he took Cartagena. The siege decimated the port, yet he pardoned opponents.
But he soon found himself fighting on several fronts; some fronts had vaporized
altogether in spite of his efforts to make this a conventional war. Back in Venezuela, the occupiers soon found themselves surrounded by revitalized insurgents. Morillo began to worry about the feasibility of the whole operation as his
reconquering front expanded and exposed itself to rebels. What was worse, the
liberation in Nueva Granada was not going cleanly. Morillo agonized. Indeed,
he offered to resign his commission but was turned down. Stuck with war on all
35. Juan Antonio de Rojas Queipo sobre la pacificacin de Venezuela, 21 Dec. 1816,
AGI, Estado, Caracas, 18.
36. Sobre el restablemimento del Consulado de Cartagena de Yndias; 10 Dec. 1816,
AGI, Gobierno, Santa F, 961; Mnera, El fracaso de la nacin, 212; Christiane Laffite Carles,
La costa colombiana del Caribe (18101830) (Bogot: Banco de la Repblica, 1995), 23638.
415
fronts, or no fronts, his justice took a cruel turn. After pulling down an already
weak government, the avengers sought to ensure that it would never revive. After
executing the 25-year-old president, Liborio Meja, Morillo issued a public statement in November 1816 to the pacified Neogranadines in which he promised a
new reign of peace and justice. The assumption was, as with many self-styled
liberators, that the population was living under tyranny (in this case a treasonous, republican, ungodly regime) and that it was awaiting deliverance. But in this
case, deliverance did not mean leading the oppressed from the lands of republican pharaohs but rather eliminating the oppressors and purging the country of
those who worshipped false idols. The army of brothers, announced Morillo,
has brought an end to war. But peace meant getting rid of those who burn
towns, hang their inhabitants, destroy the country and do not respect sex or age,
who replace the peaceful farmer and his sweet customs with a ferocious guerrero
and the minister of Vengeance of an irritated Sovereign. The proclamation was
posted all over the capital and was followed by mass arrests and killings not just
of men who were involved in republican rule, like Camilo Torres, but of those
who sympathized with it. The avenger signed a death sentence for the scientist Francisco Jos de Caldas. A Tribunal of Purification hunted down suspects,
seized their properties, and processed their cases. Three hundred were publicly executed, many of their heads sent to adorn the central squares around the
viceroyalty. According to Victor Uribe, one quarter of the viceroyaltys lawyers
were executed in an effort to expunge dissident letrados.37
In New Spain, while the insurgency of 1810 shocked and frightened the
viceroyaltys gentry, the rebel forces were soon crushed. But the victors wanted
more than a battlefield triumph. They wanted vengeance and a deterrent. Herein
lay a dilemma. Much of the army was made up of Mexicans, which prompted its
commanders to hesitate before ordering them to wipe out the rebels. As viceroy,
Calleja recognized that terror could be counterproductive. When he heard that
one of his commanders burned the towns of Medelln and Rancho de Tejar near
Veracrz, he informed the colonel that we do not wish to convert the country
into a frightful desert and increase the evils that exist and the hatred with which
measures of this nature are viewed. His successor found himself in the same
37. Morillo Proclamation to Viceroyalty, 15 Nov. 1816, AGI, Estado, Santa F, 57/34;
Laura F. Ullrick, Morillos Attempt to Pacify Venezuela, Hispanic American Historical
Review 3, no. 4 (Nov. 1920): 53945; Victor M. Uribe, Kill all the Lawyers! Lawyers
and the Independence Movement in New Granada, 18091820, The Americas 52, no. 2
(May 1995). For more on this kind of model of purging, see Michael Walzer, Exodus and
Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985).
416
position and likewise wavered between appealing to loyalties and giving in to the
temptations of exemplary justice. Yet, Calleja also knew that long sieges would
pin down his forces and prevent them from expanding the frontier of Spanish
peace. Towns like Zitcuaro, Cuautla, and many others were pillaged, burned,
and in some cases demolished to deliver the message to other rebel posts to give
in. Summary execution of captured officers became standard practice. Anyone
captured with weapons or caught in suspicious acts was to be shot and the cadaver
mounted publicly. And if viceroys wavered, local commanders tended not to;
their fears often led them to be much less squeamish about harsh measures.38
Avengers enhanced the cruelty on all sides. In Mexico, royalist triumphs
and repression deepened the hatred of gachupines. Jos Vicente Gmez began,
around late 1812, to castrate his Spanish captives; assassinations became routine
as hatred simmered below the surface of the restored viceroyalty. This was the
backdrop to Bolvars proclamation of a War to the Death in June of 1813. Justice demands vengeance, he intoned. But at the same time he invited Spaniards
to follow a path of reconciliation and friendship, to live peacefully among
us if they would cooperate and share fealty to the Republic. Those who did not
would be considered an enemy, treated as a traitor, and inevitably shot. In a
later letter to the governor of Curaao, he explained this lamentable exigency.
He bemoaned the ravenous fires of war and the furies of unrest (that) agitate
the remotest settler. After accusing the reconquerors of turning on their own
sons whom he had brought forth in the land that he had usurped, the Liberator
felt that his crusaders had no option. I resolved, he concluded, to put in effect
a war to the death, in order to deprive the tyrants of the incomparable advantage of their organized methods of destruction. Until then, Bolvar had usually
rejected his commanders requests to kill civilians and reprimanded those who
sent him the dripping heads of captives. In the course of the escalation, however, the conventions of gentlemanly warfare went by the wayside. John Lynch
has noted that Bolvar viewed his struggle now as asymmetrical: Spaniards had
adopted exterminating practices even though republicans had been lenient with
Spaniards, an imbalance that put his cause on the perpetual defensive. Now,
liberating armies were under orders to keep no prisoners. This was no longer a
matter of deterring loyalists or releasing avenging furies to extirpate the enemy.
It was expedient; where fronts had evaporated and civilians were killed and desecrated, civil peace required a total war.39
38. Archer, La Causa Buena, 9294.
39. I am grateful to Alfredo Avila for the account of Jos Vicente Gmez.
Proclamation to the People of Venezuela (15 June 1813) & SB to Governor of Curaao,
417
Warfare changed more than the determination of its leaders; it also transformed the social composition of armed conflict. Some movements, like the
casta-Indian uprising in the Bajo, were born plebeian. But others mobilized
popular sectors more gradually. Cotton growers of Guerreros Costa Grande,
mulatto sharecroppers and Indian villagers, became mortal enemies of Spaniards and formed the backbone of the provinces guerrillas, which was crucial for
the continuity of the insurgency after 1814. In the Oriental borderlands, Artigass September 1815 Reglamento Provisorio enlisted plebeians, especially slaves
and Guaran Indians, to its ranks; 400 Abipones moved from the Chaco to take
advantage of land being parceled out. By 1816, there was a full-blown assault on
estate properties, which yielded to the desperate plea from estancieros and merchants for an avenging intervention, and thus the second Portuguese invasion
and its scorched-earth war on revolutionaries. The Banda Oriental came as close
as one might imagine to a cross-ethnic class war within a civil war.40 In general,
the complexion of violent upheaval varied depending on local conditions. In the
Andes, the specter of Tpac Amaru returned. What started as an urban insurrection spread to the countryside and reached deeper into lower social strata,
shredding incumbent structures of indigenous governance. When reforms of
previous years were revoked and the power of the crown (and its envoys in the
highlands) was restored, villages rose up. In Cuzco, the royalist cacique Mateo
Garca Pumacahua, a former ally in the suppression of the 1780s and again in
18089, rallied to the ayllu uprisings to contest Limas tribute and tax demands
to fund the war. In so doing, he gave the armed opposition some lethal cohesion.
The uprising spread more quickly. So did attacks on the unarmed. A crowd of
Indians seized a five-year-old Jos Rufino Echenique and his family from their
uncles estate south of Cuzco; one attacker plucked the child from the mob as
it murdered the rest of the family. In the ayllu of Ocongate, Indian villagers
formed their own military unit, which swelled to three thousand men armed
with farm tools and clubs (buenos palos), while local whites took refuge in the
church. But seasoned royal troops eventually crushed the rebels, capturing and
massacring thousands of prisoners. Pumacahua himself was executed in front
of a mass of his followers. While Abascal endorsed vicious reprisals and Limas
armies crushed the insurgency, they may have pacified the region but they did
little to bolster the regimes popular credentials. The new viceroy, Joaqun de
Valencia, 2 Oct. 1813, in Selected Writings of Bolvar, ed. Harold A. Bierck Jr. (New York:
Colonial Press, 1951), 3132, 3743; Lynch, Simn Bolvar, 73.
40. Sala de Touron et al., Artigas y su revolucin agraria, 175232; Beraza, La economa
en la Banda Oriental, 75.
418
la Pezuela, was forced to lament several years later that the opinion of the
cholos and indios is not especially favorable to the King; and among the multitude of slaves they are openly siding with the rebels from whose hands they
await their freedom. Montoneros prowled central Peru; guerrillas assaulted
royal troops in the Mantaro Valley. The viceroys troops were deserting in
droves.41
In joining sides en masse, indigenous peoples and especially slaves changed
the nature of political violence. Their claims radicalized the ideologies of the
contest. They manned militias and guerrillas. And they left in ruins old elites
whose fortunes depended on their toil. But this was not a foreordained result.
Peter Blanchards recent work illustrates how in many colonies slaves remained
loyal to the king. Ramn Piero joined Boves, arms in hand, and served with
much love and faithfulness my king. Domingo Ordoy, a slave in Montevideo,
petitioned for his freedom in Peru, having served loyally in the defense of the
River Plate. The course of war, however, shifted allegiances as the moral economy went up in flames. Revolutionaries trumped the supplicative ethos of kings
with promises of freedom. Rebel after rebel promised to release slaves from
bondage in return for their loyalty to the cause. As Artigass rebels encircled
Montevideo in 1811, they promised freedom to all slaves who belonged to Spaniards and joined the uprising. Francisco Estrada did, bolting from his master
to march under the flags of freedom. Not all slaves joined the revolution;
some seized the opportunity to flee all sides, starting with their masters. As
rebel armies neared plantations along the Peruvian coast, slaves gathered their
belongings and hit the road. And yet, innumerable captives joined the ranks
of the armies and would rise up in them as the wars dragged on. What the
process of Indian and slave mobilization did was transform the original patrician struggle into a vertical one in which plebeian sectors shaped the fate of
sovereignty. Plebeian participation raised the stakes of struggle to make it more
than a conceptual displacement of the regime; it became a shattering of the legal
fundaments that legitimated colonial exploitation. Early outrage against viola41. Pezuela to Secr de Estado, 12 Nov. 1818, AGI, Estado, Lima, 74/30; David Cahill
and Scarlett OPhelan Godoy, Forging their Own History: Indian Insurgency in the
Southern Peruvian Sierra, 1815, Bulletin of Latin American Research 11, no. 2 (May 1992):
12567; David Cahill, Una vision andina: El levantamiento de Ocongate de 1815, Histrica
7, no. 2 (Dec. 1988): 13359; Charles F. Walker, Smoldering Ashes: Cuzco and the Creation
of Republican Peru, 17801840 (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1999), 98100; Peter F.
Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexicos National State, Guerrero, 18001857
(Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996), 5253, 71.
419
tions of a moral colonial code gave way to demands for equality that invoked
ideas for new codes.42
Mobilizing plebeian sectors turned countrysides into theaters for a protracted, unwinnable war for the Spanish side. The kings representatives in
Caracas could see as much, and warned that unless the royalist cause embraced
the abolitionist one, they were doomed: We will be the victims of barbarian
fury. Military containment of the obstinate insurgents was grinding down.
As a result, avengers found themselves on perilous legal grounds. In the words
of one, we are merely the lords of the ground we walk on.43 Viceroys, once
heralded as saviors, were flooded with pleas from loyal subjects. Taxes, forced
appropriations, and continued arrests became the source of local elites disenchantment and eventual detachment from royal authority. The Cabildo of Cuzco
beseeched Lima to lift martial law and the shadow of suspicion covering the
region and to respect the honor of its good subjects. Local appeals had echoes
in the metropole, where ministers were growing increasingly anxious about the
costs, financial as well as moral, of pacification. This was most acute where the
campaign had run aground in the sands of a savage civil war. Reports abounded
of atrocities. Without salaries, soldiers had to resort to pillaging. Even one of
Morillos officers, Colonel Len Ortega, submitted a report to Madrid decrying
the conditions of the army. By November 1817, authorities in Cartagena issued
testimonies about the violences committed by the expeditionary troops. The
Secretario de Estado suggested to the Minister of War that a proper viceroy
be sent to Santa F; for too long the provinces had been subjected to the arbitrarinesses of the Chiefs and Subaltern Officers of Morillos armies. It was an
anti-political system.44 But the proposal to have civilian authorities restore
governance while generals focused on insurgents went nowhere, because the
end to the armed struggle seemed more remote than ever, in large part because
violence had so pervaded all aspects of political life.
At this stage, the issue was which side would implode first. In retrospect
it easier to see which it was, for the shifts in the rebels strategies and popular
42. Peter Blanchard, The Language of Liberation: Slave Voices in the Wars of
Independence, Hispanic American Historical Review 82, no. 3 (Aug. 2002): 499523; and
Blanchards full-length study, Under the Flags of Freedom: Slave Soldiers and the Wars of
Independence in Spanish South America (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), 41.
43. Memorial del doctor Juan Antonio de Rojas Queipo, 21 Dec. 1816, AGI, Gobierno,
Caracas, 71/18.
44. Pezuela to Secr de Estado, 29 Apr. 1817, AGI, Estado, Lima, 74/13; AGI, Estado,
Santa F, 57/35; Lozano to Garay, 2 Sept. 1817, AGI, Estado, Santa F; Minuta del Oficio
del Secretario de Estado, 29 Jan. 1818, AGI, Estado, Santa F.
420
bases gave them more stamina over the longer haul, though many inside the
struggle worried about the depth of Ferdinands reconquering appetite and fretted about the dangers of arming huge swaths of plebeian populations. Whereas
the resolve to settle the sovereignty crisis with a return to a fictive model once
enjoyed a kind of plausibility, it was equally prone to self-deception, political
intransigence, blindness to cruelty, and circular justifications of brutality. The
king stood steadfast behind his model of martial pacification. In 1817 and 1818,
the king issued personal memorials to all his officials in the Americas to spurn
all peace entreaties, especially offers of mediation. By then, Morillos troops
were on their heels, royal soldiers were soundly beaten in Chile, Limas war on
the republiquetas was grinding nowhere, and trade arteries of New Spain were
under constant assault from guerrillas. Back in Madrid, the king did not flinch,
that is, not until the regime he sought to restore collapsed under the weight of
his own costly determination. His army, amassed in Cdiz to launch another
pacification campaign in the River Plate, rose up before it could set sail, its officers demanding to put constitutional shackles on the king before doing his bidding in colonies that had lost confidence in the rhetoric of transatlantic affection. The king, bereft of an army, had no choice but to accept, following with an
exculpatory letter to all his subjects in the Americas asking that the carnage of
the past be forgotten. By then it was too late; the memory of violence acquired a
life of its own that no sovereign could rein in.45
Political violence made the process of imperial decomposition more and more
concentric: the global contest between empires ignited wars within wars, revolutions within revolutions. It is important to remind ourselves that it did not
begin with an epochal, irreversible colonial break with empire. Instability created a struggle for power and evolved into a struggle about power, and the nature
of this instability provoked all sides to violent measures to put an end to it.
The resort to violence altered basic identities and created new ones. It nurtured
a self-image of oppressed colonial peoples among those who hitherto had
imagined themselves the subjects of a distant, magnanimous monarch. It made
Spaniards feel encircled, hated, and unwelcome. These are examples of some of
the better-known, if conventional, affiliates. But what of the identities of federalist peons of the Banda Oriental, republican villagers in the Altiplano, or
popular Catholic loyalists in Pasto, for whom national or proto-national collective identities paled beside those that made sense of their struggles to defend
local meanings of sovereignty? Further research into the micro-foundations of
45. Memorial en nombre de Fernando VII, AGI, Estado, Americas, 88/3.
421
political violence can enrich our understandings of the complex relationship

between behavioreven atrocious conductand values without assuming that
one necessarily precedes or explains the other, and illuminate the interlocking
dynamics of the making of social divides and the handling of political conflict.
Violence was not the exclusive recourse of one side or another. Ransackings, public slaying, desecration of bodies, and violent humiliations appeared
from the outset in all camps as part of the repertoire, or rites, inherited and
augmented from an earlier age. Moreno called for sacrificial bloodshed in Buenos Aires while his nemesis Viceroy Abascal in Lima did the same. The events
in Guadalajara anticipated what would become more widespread elsewhere as
the struggle wore on: human bodies would become the site for resolving the
increasing polarization of politics and the radicalization within competing
coalitions. Boves and Artigas may have been at opposite ends of an ideological
spectrum, and the former was unarguably more morbid in the delight he took
in victimizing on a large scale, but the point is that they both were prepared to
make victims of people who were once their neighbors. Killing and mutilating
need to be put alongside the institutional improvisations and innovations of the
erasuch as a free press and new practices of representationas shapers of
political life as old regimes fell and new ones emerged.
Violent escalation in Spanish America cannot be simply adduced to some
basic psychology of a people who lacked civic traditions (though many, like
Bolvar, would look back at their handiwork and despair that what they had
really freed were latent furies of colonial subjects and not modern citizens). We
know of too many examples in history in which societies accustomed to living
by civic rules quickly found themselves engulfed in civil carnage. The history
outlined in this essay represents a passage of a particular sort, from violence
associated with acts of vengeance directed against particular agents (be they
venal judges, predatory tax collectors, or rabble-rousing publicists) to avenging
activities directed at groups. (A historian of early modern France calls this a distinction between vindicative and vindicatory violence.) In the first instance, the
bloodletting was more targeted, aiming to remove the wicked so that the virtuous may rule. With time, violence became more unbridled as people sought to
set things straight by force to restore an old equilibrium or create a new one.
In Spanish America this was resolved less with the decisive triumph of one side
than with the utter moral and fiscal collapse of the other.46
These examples of collective violence are reminders that they do not neces46. Stuart Carroll, Blood and Violence in Early Modern France (New York: Oxford Univ.
Press, 2006), 207.
422
sarily deviate from the normal process of institutional politics, although they
do have spiral features that surface when the originary structures of sovereignty
are shattered. We can abhor them and mourn the human losses. But to treat
them as the pathologies of ideology, the eruption of mans inner brutality, or the
outbursts of primordial enmities misses the point and the lessons that might be
derived from the histories of which they were a part. For this reason, the accent
is on political violence, which did not obey natural psychological laws or reveal
the underlying mindlessness of large groups of people, whether angry crowds or
petrified soldiers. Latin American history has been rife with examples. One that
comes to mind has been analyzed by Inga Clendinnen, for the conquest was a
history steeped in remembered bloodshed in which narratives came into being
in the course of the carnage to make sense of the otherindeed to create
an image of the otherand thus validate the (unequal) exchange of terror. The
independence revolutions can be seen in a similar way but with different meanings. If Clendinnen was grappling with the brutality of one societys assertion
over another, this essay has been concerned with how a crisis of sovereignty
set off forces that would decompose it, suggesting the need for some political
contextualization for reckoning with the longue dure of political violence in
Spanish America.47 The question of what to do with the enmities and hostilities
while creating new basic values for political communities confronts all heirs of
sovereignties created by violence, for whom politics remains a matter of life and
death. Spanish America was no exception.
47. Inga Clendinnen, Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty: Corts and the Conquest of
Mexico, Representations, no. 33, special issue, The New World (Winter 1991): 65100.

The Rites of Statehood Violence and Sovereignty in Spanish America, 1789-1821 Jeremy Adelman

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