Excerpt from The Open Veins of Latin America: Five
Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
by Eduardo Galeano[1]
This landmark work, by one of the most highly-respected writers of
Latin America, was first published in 1971 and has been reprinted over 60
times. It is a historical description of
how the developed countries established their economic hegemony over Latin
America over the last five hundred years and presents a pitiless analysis of
that hegemony´s disastrous human consequences.
The following paragraphs are an excerpt from the referenced chapter,
which is a moving denouncement of the cultural and human tragedy that was the
destruction of the Aztec and Inca Empires.
In the context of this unparalleled combination of pillaging and
genocide (both intentional and accidental), that was the Spanish conquest of
Latin America, the Philippines' own experience can be viewed with greater
clarity and perspective.
Galeano's thesis is that the wealth of the New World Indians was
their curse, and in this sense, the Philippines’ relative poverty in precious
metals was a blessing. I offer these few
pages from Galeano's book to Filipinos who are unaware of the outstanding works
of Latin American writers and as an introduction to an historical drama of which
we cannot remain any longer in ignorance:
the fate of the Indians of those other lands, who are part of our story
because, like them, we also were Indians and the spoils of the Spanish Crown.
The silver mountain of Potosí, Bolivia.
A Flood of Tears and
Blood: And Yet the Pope Said that the
Indians Had Souls
In 1581, Philip II had declared before the Audiencia
of Guadalajara,[2] that a third of the Indians of America had already been annihilated
and that those who were still alive were obliged to pay tribute for the
dead. The monarch said, additionally,
that the Indians were being bought and sold.
That they slept in the open air. That mothers killed their children to
save them from the torment of the mines.
But the Crown's hypocrisy had narrower limits than the Empire: the Crown received a fifth of the value of
the metal that its subjects extracted throughout the Hispanic New World,
besides other taxes, and the same happened in the 18th century with the
Portuguese Crown in Brazilian territory.
America's silver and gold penetrated like corrosive acid, as Engels
said, into all the pores of Europe's moribund feudal society, and, at the
service of nascent capitalist mercantilism, mining businessmen converted
Indians and black slaves into an extremely numerous "external
proletariat" of the European economy.
Greco-Roman slavery was in fact resurrecting, in a different world: to the misfortune of the Indians of the
annihilated empires of Hispanic America, we must add the terrible destiny of
the blacks wrenched away from the villages of Africa to work in Brazil and the
Antilles. The Latin American colonial economy had at its disposal the largest concentration of labor force ever known
until then, to make possible the largest concentration of wealth ever placed at
the disposal of any civilization, in the entire history of the world.
That violent tide of greed, horror and bravery did not swoop down on
these lands except at the price of native genocide: more solidly-founded recent research
attributes to pre-Columbian Mexico a population between 25 and 30 million, and
it is thought that there was a similar number of Indians in the Andean region;
Central America and the Antilles had between 10 and 13 million
inhabitants. The Indians of the Americas added up to no less than 60 million,
perhaps more, when the foreign conquistadors appeared on the horizon. One and a half centuries later they had been
reduced, in total, to just three and a half million. According to the Marquis
of Barinas, between Lima and Paita, where more than two million Indians had lived, no more than
four Indian families were left by 1685.
The Archbishop Liñán y Cisneros denied the annihilation of the Indians: "The thing is, they hid themselves,"
he said, "to avoid paying tribute, abusing the freedom that they enjoyed
and that they didn't have under the reign of the Incas."
Metal flowed unceasingly from the American veins, and from the
Spanish Court there arrived, also unceasingly, decrees that granted paper
protection and ink dignity to the Indians, whose extenuating work sustained the
kingdom. A fictitious legality sheltered
the Indians; exploitation in reality bled them to death. From slavery to the service encomienda, and
from this to the tribute encomienda and the regime of salaries, the variants in
the legal status of Indian labor did not alter their true situation beyond a
superficial degree. The Crown considered
the inhumane exploitation of aboriginal labor so necessary, that in 1601 Philip
III issued rules prohibiting forced labor in the mines and, simultaneously,
sent other secret instructions to continue it, "in case that measure
causes production to slow down."
Likewise, between 1616 and 1619, the Royal Inspector[3] and Governor Juan de Solórzano carried out an investigation on the working conditions
in the mercury mines of Huancavélica: "...the
poison penetrated to the very bone marrow, debilitating the limbs and provoking
constant chills, and the workers died, in most cases after four years," he
reported to the Council of the Indies and to the king. But in 1631, Philip IV ordered that the same system be continued, and his
successor, Charles II, reissued the decree some time later. These mercury mines were directly exploited
by the Crown, unlike the silver mines, which were in the hands of private
businessmen.
In three centuries, the rich river of Potosí[4] burned, according to Josiah Conder, eight million lives.
The Indians were torn away from their agricultural communities and
herded, together with their women and children, to the mountain. Of every ten who marched toward the high
frozen wastelands, seven never returned.
Luis Capoche, owner of mines and mills, wrote that "the roads were
crowded, as though the entire kingdom were moving." In the communities, the Indians had seen
"many women return, afflicted, without their husbands, and many children
orphaned of their parents" and they knew that in the mine awaited "a
thousand deaths and disasters." The
Spaniards covered hundred of miles of the surrounding areas in search of labor. Many of the Indians died on the road before
reaching Potosí. But it was the terrible
conditions of work in the mine that killed the most people. The Dominican Fray Domingo de Santo Tomás denounced to the Council of Indies, in 1550, soon
after the mine opened, that Potosí was "hell's mouth" that annually
swallowed Indians by the thousands and thousands, and that the rapacious miners
treated the natives "like animals with no owners." And Fray Rodrigo de Loaysa would later say, "These poor Indians are like sardines
in the sea. Just as the other fish
pursue the sardines to capture and devour them, so all in these lands pursue
the miserable Indians...." The chiefs of the communities had the
obligation to replace the mitayos[5] who died, with new men from 18 to 50 years of age. The distribution corral, where the Indians
were assigned to the mine and mill owners, a gigantic field with stone walls,
is now used for the workers to play football; the prison of the mitayos, a shapeless mountain of ruins, can
still be seen from the entrance to Potosí.
In the Compilation
of Laws of the Indies (Recopilación
de Leyes de las Indias) there is no lack of decrees from that time establishing
the equality of rights of Indians and Spaniards to exploit the mines, and
expressly prohibiting that the natives' rights be harmed. Formal history -- dead letters which in our
times gather together the dead letters of past times -- would have nothing to
complain about, but while legislation over Indian labor was debated in endless
files and the talents of Spanish jurists exploded in ink, in America the law
was "observed but not fulfilled."
In the facts, "the poor Indian is a coin," -- as Luis Capoche
says -- "with which everything needed is found, as with gold and silver,
and much, much better." Numerous
individuals presented proof of their status as mestizos before the courts so
that they would not be sent to the tunnels, or sold and resold in the markets.
Towards the end of the 18th century, Concolorcorvo, in whose veins Indian blood flowed, disowned his kin
in this way: "We do not deny that the mines consume a considerable number
of Indians, but this does not proceed from the work they do in the silver and
mercury mines, but from the libertine ways in which they live." The testimony of Capoche, who had many
Indians under his employ, is illustrative in this sense. The glacial temperatures of the outdoors
alternated with the infernal heat of the mountain's depths. The Indians entered into these depths,
"and in most cases they were taken out dead, and others with heads and
legs broken, and in the milling machines they are injured everyday." The mitayos
made the metal fly into shattered fragments with blows from their
pickaxes. Later they carried it on their
backs, up ladders, by candlelight.
Outside the tunnel, they moved the long wooden axles of the milling machines or melted the silver in
fire, after grinding and washing it.
The 'mita' was a machine for grinding Indians. The use of mercury for the extraction of
silver through amalgamation poisoned as much or more than the toxic fumes
released by the earth's bowels. It made
the hair and the teeth fall out and provoked shivering that could not be
stopped. Men poisoned by mercury would
drag themselves through the streets begging for alms. Six thousand five hundred bonfires burned at
night on the rich mountain's slopes, and in these fires the silver was worked,
using the winds sent by "glorious St. Augustine" from heaven. Because of the smoke from the ovens there was
no grass or planting within a radius of six leagues[6] around Potosí, and the emanations were no less implacable with the
bodies of the men.
There was no lack of ideological explanations. The bloodletting of the New World was
converted into an act of charity or a reason for faith. Together with guilt there arose an entire
system of alibis to soothe the guilty consciences. The Indians were converted into beasts of
burden because they could carry a greater weight than the weak backs of llamas,
and along the way it was proven that, in fact, the Indians were beasts of
burden. A viceroy of Mexico considered
there was no better remedy than work in the mines to cure the "natural
wickedness" of the Indians. Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, the Humanist [sic], sustained that the Indians
got the treatment they received because their sins and idolatries constituted
an offense against God. The Count
of Buffon declared that no trace could be observed in Indians -- cold, weak
animals -- of "any activity of the soul." The Abbott
De Paw invented an America where depraved Indians mixed with dogs who could not
bark, cows whose meat was not edible, and impotent camels. The America of Voltaire, inhabited by lazy and stupid Indians, had pigs whose
navels were on their backs and bald, cowardly lions. Bacon, De Maistre, Montesquieu, Hume and Bodin refused to recognize as their fellowmen the "degraded
men" of the New World. Hegel spoke of the physical and spiritual impotence of America and
said that the Indians had perished after a single puff from Europe.
In the 17th century, Fr. Gregorio García sustained that the Indians were of Jewish ancestry, because,
like the Jews, "they are lazy, they don't believe in the miracles of Jesus
Christ and they are not grateful to the Spaniards for all the good they have
done them." At least, this priest
did not deny that the Indians descended from Adam and Eve. Many were the theologians and thinkers
unconvinced by the papal bull of Paul III, issued in 1537, which declared the Indians "authentic
men." Fr. Bartolomé de las Casas agitated at the Spanish Court with his denouncements
against the cruelty of the conquistadors of America. In 1557, a member of the royal council
answered that the Indians stood on too low a step on the ladder of humanity to
be capable of receiving the faith. Las
Casas dedicated his passionate life to defending the Indians from the miners'
and encomenderos' excesses. He said that
the Indians preferred to go to hell to avoid meeting Christians.
Indians were "commended" to the conquistadors and
colonizers for them to catechize. But
since the Indians owed the "encomendero" personal services and
economic tribute, there wasn't much time left over to lead them along the
Christian path to salvation. In
recompense for his services, Hernán Cortés had received 23,000 vassals; Indians were distributed at the
same time as lands were awarded through royal grants, or they were obtained
through direct plundering. From 1536 on,
the Indians were granted under encomiendas, together with their descendants,
for a period of two lifetimes: that of the encomendero and of his immediate heir. From 1629 on, the regime began to spread in
practice. Lands were sold with the
Indians in them included. In the 18th century, the Indians, the survivors,
assured a comfortable life for many generations to come. Since the conquered gods persisted in their
memory, there was no lack of saintly alibis for the usufruct of their labor by
the victors: the Indians were heathen; they did not deserve another kind of
life. Past times? Four hundred twenty years after the Bull of
Pope Paul III, in September 1957, Paraguay's Supreme Court issued a circular
apprising all the judges of the country that "the Indians are as much
human beings as the other inhabitants of the republic...." And the Center of Anthropological Studies of the Catholic University of
Asunción subsequently carried out a revealing survey in the capital and in the
interior: out of every ten Paraguayans,
eight believed that "the Indians are like animals." In Caaguazú, in Alto Paraná and the Chaco, Indians are hunted like animals, sold at low prices and
exploited under a regime of virtual slavery.
Nevertheless, almost all Paraguayans have Indian blood and Paraguay
never tires of composing songs, poems and speeches in homage to the "Guaraní soul."
[1] Tr. Cedric Belfrage. New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1973.
Reprinted by Permission.
[2] Galeano defines the audiencia as “a judicial district as well as a judicial,
administrative and advisory body. In Mexico,
it was the supreme court of administration and judgment.” This was because Mexico was a
Viceroyship. The Audiencia in all other
points had to forward its cases to Mexico, Peru or Spain for final ruling;
likewise the Holy Inquisition.
[3]
"Visitador" in the original.
[4] Fabled Bolivian mountain, practically solid
silver.
[5] From
"mita", system of forced labor enforced by the Incas to provide manpower
for their public works projects and their mines. In order to maintain these projects, the
Spaniards continued the mita, forcing
Indian communities to provide a certain number of workers for specified periods
of time, usually a year or more. In
Peru, the mita survived throughout
the colonial period and was not abolished until 1821 (Historical Dictionary of the Spanish
Empire, 1402-1975).
[6] The
equivalent measure of a league in kilometers varies according to different
writers I have read, but this would be between 24 and 30 kms.
No comments:
Post a Comment