by Marie Arana
BRED IN THE BONE
It’s not my fault. It’s just my nature.
—Aesop
Anthropologists have a name for a mind-set born of hundreds of years of history: they call it transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. It is an emerging science, with much still to discover and understand, but the implications about the ways a social environment can influence the biology of an entire generation or a race of people are broadly suggested and profound. Some studies have focused on the ways that stress, social pressure, and hardship have affected certain races over generations. Others conclude that the effects of violence committed against a single parent can be passed on to a fetus in concrete genetic ways. A holocaust or attempted genocide, for instance, can have an abiding effect on the unborn. As can domestic violence. As can war. What does this suggest about an entire people whose history is steeped in violence and whose present generations to this day live with the echoes of brutality and bloodshed?
Latin American historians summon the ancient Greek fabulist Aesop to explain how such histories are not easily lost. It is a simple but memorable story. As Aesop tells it, a scorpion and a frog met one day on the bank of a river, and the scorpion, unable to swim, asked the frog to carry him across on its back. The frog asked, “How do I know you won’t sting me in the journey?” The scorpion answered, “Fool! If I sting you, we’ll both drown!” Satisfied, the frog allowed the scorpion to mount his back, and the two set out across the water. But halfway to the other shore, the scorpion leapt out and stung the frog. The frog, sensing the poison course through him, gasped, “Why in the world did you do that?” The scorpion shrugged and said, “It’s not my fault. It’s just my nature.”
For Aesop, this inexplicable, core impulse was nature as the Greeks truly meant it. Physis. In Latin, natura. An essential quality, an innate disposition so ingrained that it is coded in our physical, chemical, biological selves. Some creatures are programmed to sting. Others will be stung. Over time, that behavior is learned, digested, imprinted on the self as surely as an Icelander, in all likelihood, has blue eyes, and an African is born with dark brown.
In other words, an inclination to violence can be a tangible, traceable pattern. The story of Latin America as we know it began with a confrontation so cataclysmic that it had a swift and dire impact. It didn’t happen in a vacuum. The protagonists involved had brought separate, highly articulated histories to the moment. As for the indigenous, the most powerful among them were deeply attuned to their land and their gods; they were ambitious, evangelical, militaristic, sanguinary, with a highly developed sense of their mission and dominion. The invading conquistadors from Spain and Portugal were similarly attuned to king and god; they were equally ambitious, evangelical, militaristic, sanguinary, and they had fought Semite “infidels” in bloody, righteous wars for centuries—killing, enslaving, or expelling a half million in one decade alone—sharply honing a sense that they were the chosen ones.
Some contemporary historians depict the moment of first contact as unequal from the start: ruthless violence on the part of the Spaniards; a corresponding awe, naiveté—even cowardice—on the part of the indigenous. The evidence tells us this is not so. The great, developed civilizations—the Mexica, Inca, and Muísca—were all too willing and able to fight. Their natures and histories disposed them to do so. The surprising, inopportune arrival of the Spanish, the crippling disease they brought with them, the reeling horses, terrifying mastiffs, the miraculous “thundersticks,” the alien battle conventions, the disorienting lies and deceit—all these contributed to the defeat of the great indigenous nations. It was not because they didn’t know how to make war, and certainly not because they trembled at the prospect.
At the heart of that centuries-long confrontation was a deeply ingrained conviction—long instilled in the Spanish as well as in their indigenous counterparts—that extreme violence was justified, that invaders were often victors, that a strong arm would be necessary to keep the new order in place. Although Spain’s Council of the Indies enacted laws to prevent adventurers from excessive acts of cruelty, the men on the front lines of conquest paid little attention to them. These were men well accustomed to countermanding orders and rebelling against their superiors. Cortés, Balboa, Pizarro—they had all bucked the system at some juncture of their careers, disobeyed the rules, launched out on their own. Although they paid voluble lip service to the king and their Christian faith, they had brought wild, rebellious impulses with them. Balboa, after all, had ignored all orders and appointed himself supreme leader in Castilla de Oro. Cortés had followed his example in Veracruz. In Paraguay, one of the conquistadors had gone so far as to put Governor Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca on a ship and send him back to Spain in irons. Pizarro had snubbed his immediate bosses in favor of conducting his own version of conquest. They fought with one another, fought with their superiors. Finding themselves in pagan territory, beyond the reach of the Church or Spanish courts of justice, most exercised a wanton barbarity, and even the seemingly most principled among them did not try to stem the abuses. Rapacity, gold fever, a desperate courage against overwhelming odds, a hyperinflated sense of superiority, a basic contempt for the Indian—call it what you will—these are the impulses that galvanized them, and the effects on the indigenous world were cataclysmic.
When European intellectuals began to raise moral arguments against the spiraling genocide, the enslavement of whole populations, the hard labor under penalty of death, and the unbridled exploitation—Spanish adventurers argued that all these should be permissible, because banishment (the usual punishment for prisoners of war) was impossible in these latitudes, as was imprisonment. Moreover, they insisted, the “Indians didn’t suffer whippings in the same way the Spanish did, because they lacked the same sense of honor.” Indeed, they argued, harsh, penal labor might even be salutary for the heathen. In the process of regular, systematized labor, an Indian might acquire a suitable trade. Perhaps even good manners.
As Spain realized the magnitude of its luck and locked down on its newly won territories, the colonial structure it imposed was punitive in the extreme. Absolute rule became the hallmark. It is almost as if the Spanish understood from the very start that the only way they could hold on to their shining prize was to install a strictly authoritarian, suffocating vice. From the outset, as Spain began to pour governors, treasurers, and artisans into its colonies—as silver and gold began their steady, exhilarating flow from Mexico and Peru—the royal court insisted that viceroys and captain generals report directly to the king, making him the supreme overseer of American interests. King Carlos soon had many reasons besides precious metals to protect his grip on the American bonanza. Spain now controlled the entire world supply of cocoa. It extracted copper, indigo, sugar, pearls, emeralds, cotton, wool, tomatoes, potatoes, and leather from the New World and rerouted all of it from storehouses in Cádiz to points around the globe.
To prevent its colonial populations from trading in these goods themselves, Spain carefully constructed a rigid system of domination. All foreign contact was forbidden. Movement between the colonies was closely monitored. Contraband was punishable by death. No foreigners could visit the colonies without permission from the king. Only the Spanish born could own businesses, and no American-born subjects, no matter how aristocratic, were permitted to plant their own grapes, own their own vineyards, grow tobacco, make spirits, or propagate olive trees. And no American—even if his parents were Spanish born—could vote or take part in government. The Tribunal of the Inquisition, which Ferdinand and Isabella had put in place years before to keep a firm hold on the empire, called for penalties of death or torture for any number of perceived transgressions: books or newspapers could not be published or sold without express permission of the Council of the Indies, and many a rebel intellectual would be imprisoned and tortured for that crime. Colonials were barred from owning printing presses. Indeed, when Simón Bolívar, liberator of six republics, undertook his wars of indepen
dence in the early nineteenth century, he made a point of hauling a printing press onto the battlefield as a direct provocation to the Spanish masters. Under the king’s rule, the implementation of every colonial document, the approval of every venture, the mailing of every letter was a long, costly affair that required Cádiz’s approval. And woe to any foreign vessel that crossed into New World waters: non-Spanish ships were assumed to be enemy craft and attacked.
* * *
Stringent government was nothing new to indigenous America. What was new was that it was being enforced by a conquering tribe thousands of miles away. All the same, the basic parameters of conquest seemed familiar: Laws would subject them to the whims of a distant overlord. Their language, their customs, their gods—even their places of residence—would change according to alien needs and desires. The most disorienting aspect of all of this was that the conquerors they had been fighting for generations—the lordly Incas, ruthless Aztecs, powerful Muíscas—were now among the conquered, too.
It was thought that the Inca ruler Pachacutec, among the most successful in extending the Empire of the Sun, had perfected the art of conquest. It was he, after all, who had established the highly successful method of conquer and divide. Once a tribe was defeated in war, Pachacutec would divide it into two, north and south. The upper half would be called hanan; the lower, hurin. He would then goad the districts into competing against each other. Sundered geographically and psychologically, a population would be too preoccupied about its brother enemy to care much about its conqueror, and too exhausted to mount a unified rebellion against the Incas. To perpetuate these radical divisions—and create a Montague versus Capulet level of animus—the Incas instigated outright violence between the districts, even battle. The scheme was downright Machiavellian, highly strategic, meant to achieve several goals at once: maintain supremacy, forge skilled warriors for the Incan armies, foment useful jealousies, ensure widespread subjugation, yet keep the overall peace. Ritual battles became deeply ingrained in the social structure of the Andean people. So profoundly rooted, in fact, that, like the scorpion’s sting, they emerged as the default reaction. Ritual violence has persisted through the centuries in the highlands of Peru. It has persisted, in truth, throughout the Latin American cosmos.
There is a great deal of evidence for this. Just as the Spaniards kept good records of every ounce of silver they took from the New World, every slave they brought into it, every newborn Indian whose soul the Church could now claim, they kept track of the bloody, recurring confrontations among the indigenous as they persisted—largely unchecked—throughout the course of colonial rule. The ritual battles were held seasonally, on festival days. If villagers had hoes, they used hoes to bludgeon one another; if they had stones, they used stones. It was understood that it was a matter of pride: a man fought for his district—his corner of the region, his little gang—and there was nothing a colonial overseer could do or would do to curb it. Eventually the Spaniards saw that these were rivalries they could exploit, twist, use to control their subjects. It became convenient to point to atrocities wrought by one Indian against another; point at how savage and violent the indigenous population truly was. By the late 1700s, in staged battles between Cuzco’s Hanan and Hurin factions, Spanish courts documented cases in which children were being killed in the crossfire. And yet no charges were pressed; everyone understood that this was just how things were.
Even now, in full flower of the twenty-first century, Bolivians of the altiplano hold an annual festival called the Tinku, an ancestral ceremony that has taken place for seven hundred years. In it, thousands of villagers gather on an open stretch of land to get drunk and fight with sticks or stones, often to the death. “If a person dies, it is better for the fields,” one man observes, wryly alluding to the ancient practice of spilling sacrificial blood upon the earth to make the crops grow. No police will try to stop it. The authorities understand that this is a day when frustrations will be vented, a people’s existential wrath unleashed, and an age-old tradition honored. “Tinku is violent, but peaceful,” a humble miner offers. “It is like man and woman, above and below, light and shadow.” When morning comes, the sun will rise over the carnage, and, for the living, life will go on. Rivals will shake hands and say, “Thank you, brother; we have tested each other.” Men will return to their labors. Widows will bury their dead. And Pachamama—Earth Mother—will swallow her blood sacrifices.
REBELLION
What concerns us most about the Inca civilization is not what has died but what remains.
—José Carlos Mariátegui, 1928
The ancient Indians had always been punctilious about giving Pachamama—or Coatlicue or Bachué—her seasonal quota of blood offerings. Humans were killed to end a drought, stop an earthquake, counter an eclipse. Virgins were strangled and thrown into Lake Titicaca, the umbilical of the world, to ensure fertility and abundance. Prisoners of war were dragged into temples in Mexico or Peru, beheaded, flayed, gutted, and left to pool their blood on stone altars. But these were premeditated, religious acts of violence, prepared meticulously by high priests, supervised ceremoniously, and practiced diligently for a thousand years. In the scant forty years between Columbus’s landing and Pizarro’s conquest of Peru, however, the violence was raised to an altogether different level. The killing fields of the Americas fed Pachamama a veritable ocean of human blood.
Scholars claim that a mere twenty-one years after Columbus’s landing in the Bahamas, the swarming, heavily populated island of Hispaniola was effectively deserted. Almost eight million Amerindians had been killed by violence, abuse, or disease. Many, unwilling to entrust their fate to the invaders, committed suicide or perished in their attempt to escape. Within a few generations following that first encounter in the Caribbean, the vast majority—as many as 95 percent—of Latin American native peoples had been exterminated. Far from deserving to be memorialized by splendid monuments and grand avenues (as they are) from Caracas to Montevideo, the conquistadors need to be seen as all the evidence reveals them: as looters, liars, murderers, enslavers, oppressors—perpetrators of a hecatomb so vast and so enduring that it is difficult at this distance to truly comprehend it.
But belligerence and ambition were not the only tools of war the Europeans brought with them. There was also the scourge of smallpox, the secret weapon that Spanish conquistadors didn’t even know they had. An anthropologist claims that one lone slave, arriving gravely ill in Mexico in 1520, months after Cortés’s landing, was all it took to infect an entire population. Seeing the effects of a devastating plague all around them in that unfamiliar land, Cortés and his men could not possibly have factored in the science. To them, the magnitude of the dying was sure confirmation that God was on their side. To Montezuma and the Mexicans, it was a demoralizing signal that their gods had abandoned them. Even though Cortés landed on those shores with little more than six hundred men and the bizarre conviction that he could take on a military state of any size, his ambition suddenly seemed viable. All he needed to do was employ the ruthless butchery he had learned from his hard-bitten cohort in the Caribbean. When he sensed one of his men was disloyal, he executed the offending soldier on the spot. When he suspected an Indian of spying, he chopped off his hands and sent him, stumps bleeding, to the enemy camp. He deployed a deceptive diplomacy, made a few advantageous alliances, brandished guns in the face of spears, steel as opposed to oak, and lost only two hundred men in the enterprise. To understand the impact of the ensuing onslaught, the numbers say it best: by 1618, less than one hundred years later, Mexico’s buoyant, indigenous population of about twenty-five million had plunged to a feeble one and a half million. It had lost more than 90 percent of its people. One year later, the Atlantic slave trade of African blacks to Latin America began.
That general trajectory was essentially the same with the Incas, since Pizarro was able to follow Cortés’s winning strategy to the letter. Pizarro landed on the Peruvian coast with only 168 men and proceeded thr
ough that war-torn, beleaguered land to take on an empire of millions. Smallpox had preceded him, passed along from one seafaring indigenous merchant to another, until it broke into a full-fledged epidemic that ripped through much of South America by 1526. Pizarro’s arrival in 1531, on the tail of that viral visitation, could not have been more fortunate for Spain. Even as disease was consuming the Inca Empire, the sons of Huayna Capac were sending their armies against each other in a mad hanan and hurin—north-south—war their father had effectively conceived. Once Pizarro killed Atahualpa and Huascar, and two more Lord Incas were slain in a relentless effort to exterminate the ruling class, the empire appeared to be beheaded. But they hadn’t gone gently: within six years of conquest, the Incas had mounted a number of major, well-planned, and bold rebellions against their would-be masters. The last hereditary Lord Inca, Tupac Amaru—born twelve years after the arrival of the Spaniards—held out in the mountains, fighting the Spanish forces until they finally hunted him down in 1572, brought him to Cuzco with a rope around his neck, and executed him in a public spectacle for all to see. It was, according to an observer, a terrifying sight for the fifteen thousand Indians who were forced to witness the decapitation. Seeing the nephew of Atahualpa and Huascar brought to his knees and murdered, after witnessing forty years of an effort to exterminate every trace of Inca rule, the crowd raised such a loud lament that it “deafened the skies, making the heavens reecho with a terrible wailing.”
By then, Francisco de Toledo, the viceroy who had arrived to govern the valuable, sprawling colony of Peru, claimed to be appalled at the “imbruted Spaniards” of this savage New World. In time, however, he abandoned that indignation and sent what was left of the indigenous to the mines, establishing a full-fledged silver economy that had more drastic consequences than the swords of conquest. Ten years later, the vast majority of the hemisphere—the entire South American continent, all of Central America, and North America as far as California—belonged to the Spanish king. Fifty years later, more than half the population of that area had been lost to diseases brought by white men: smallpox, tetanus, typhus, leprosy, and yellow fever, as well as a number of pulmonary, intestinal, and venereal diseases. (In come cases, the contagion was purposeful, proliferated by distributing infected blankets or tainted baubles to unsuspecting tribes.) Forty percent more perished from wars, executions, starvation, and hard labor—even suicide, as tribes fled the onslaught and lost themselves to the inhospitable wilderness of mountain and jungle.
