Silver, Sword, and Stone

by Marie Arana

  Cortés’s and Pizarro’s conquests were soon producing: Robins, Mercury, Mining, and Empire, 4–6.

  An intense theological debate soon arose: Rolena Adorno, The Polemics of Possession in Spanish American Narrative, 82–86.

  “heretics, schismatics, accursed of God”: K. W. Swart, The Black Legend During the Eighty Years War (Amsterdam: Springer Netherlands, 1975), 36–57.

  As much as two million to three million pesos: All the following information on Sino-Spanish trade is from Frederick W. Mote and Denis Twitchett, eds., The Cambridge History of China, vol. 8, The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, pt. 2 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 389–96.

  Striking a productive vein in Potosí: J. R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History, 203.

  Fleets that shipped silver to the Orient: Mote and Twitchett, Cambridge History: Ming Dynasty, 389–96.

  Potosí celebrated the coronation: Luis Capoche, Relación general de la villa imperial de Potosí (Madrid: Atlas, 1959), https://archive.org/stream/RelacionGeneralDeLaVillaImperialDePotosiLUISCAPOCHE.

  “Vale un Potosí!”: Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha, pt. 2, ch. 71, “Si yo te hubiera de pagar, Sancho —respondió don Quijote,—conforme lo que merece la grandeza y calidad deste remedio, el tesoro de Venecia, las minas del Potosí fueran poco para pagarte; toma tú el tiento á lo que llevas mío, y pon el precio á cada azote.”

  All indigenous males between eighteen and fifty: Acemoglu and Robinson, map 1, the mining mita catchment area. Also in Peter Bakewell, Miners of the Red Mountain: Indian Labor in Potosí, 1545–1650, 181.

  but most hardly resisted: Bakewell, 44–45.

  mining had never been so ruthless: Rostworowski, Historia del Tawantinsuyu, 184.

  “Your excellence, I am the captain of these people”: Alonso Enriquez de Guzmán, Libro de la vida y los costumbres de Don Alonso Enríquez de Guzmán, 70–71; Sancho Rayon and de Zabalburu, Coleccíon de documentos inéditos para la historia de España, 85:291 (my translation). “Apo, yo soy capitán desta gente, y hasta agora que eres venido á esta tierra á ponella en razón, yo he andado alzado . . . por los muchos agravios de que después que entraron los cristianos en esta tierra hemos recibido. . . . antes éramos señores y agora somos esclavos. No solamente han querido los cristianos que los sirvamos, como nos servíamos, el caballero como caballero y el oficial como oficial, y el villano como villano, sino que á todos nos hacen unos, todos quieren que les trayamos las cargas á cuestas, que seamos albañiles y les hagamos las casas, que seamos labradores y les hagamos las sementeras. Mira si ha sido razón que se nos haga de mal.”

  As his corpse decomposed, puddles of mercury: Brown, ch. 8.

  Legions of Indians disappeared into the mountains: Pedro Pablo Arana, Las minas de azogue del Perú (Lima: Imprenta El Lucero, 1901), 14. Pedro Pablo Arana, governor of Cuzco, senator of Peru, and candidate for vice president of the country in 1899, was my paternal great grandfather. He became owner of the infamous mines of Santa Barbara (which were on his property in his hacienda in Huancavelíca) long after they had been abandoned by the Spaniards.

  Mothers broke their children’s bones: Archivo de Indias, Audiencia de Lima, legajo 442, Joseph Cornejo to Patiño, San Ildefonso, August 27, 1734.

  “living images of death, black shades of eternal hell”: Salinas y Córdova, Memorial de las historias, 297.

  that to be made to mine was a virtual death sentence: John Miller, Memoirs of General Miller in the Service of the Republic of Peru (New York: AMS, 1979), 207.

  a hell of a different kind: Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela, Relatos de la villa imperial de Potosí (1705) (La Paz: Plural, 2000), 180.

  By 1825, when Simón Bolívar’s armies finally liberated those lands: Pedro Pablo Arana, Azogue, 14.

  “I am rich Potosí. Envy of all kings”: “Soy el Rico Potosí. Del mundo soy el tesoro. Soy el rey de los montes. Envidia soy de los reyes.” Wilson Mendieta Pacheco, Potosí, patrimonio de la humanidad (Potosí, Bol.: El Siglo, 1988), 9.

  “Out of its great wealth, the republic of Spain”: Martín González de Cellorigo (1600), quoted in J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 140.

  “easy money”: Ibid.

  Epigraph; “One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution”: George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (New York: Knopf, 1987), 276.

  “The Indies and Spain may be two powers under the same ruler”: Charles de Secondat baron de Montesquieu, L’Esprit des lois (1748), in Oeuvres de Montesquieu (Paris: Dalibon, 1822), 3:456. (My translation.)

  Never in the history of Spanish America: Carlos Marichal, Bankruptcy of Empire: Mexican Silver and the Wars Between Spain, Britain and France, 1760–1810, 20. Also on p. 4: “As the richest tax colony of the 18th century, the viceroyalty of New Spain served as a fiscal sub-metropolis that assured the capacity of the imperial state to defend itself in a time of successive international conflicts.”

  a dizzying 250 million silver pesos: Ibid., 18.

  compensated with titles of nobility: Ibid., 85.

  In the autumn of 1807, when Napoleon I invaded Spain: Arana, Bolívar, 82–86.

  The prolific veins of the Veta Madre: Margaret E. Rankine, “The Mexican Mining Industry in the Nineteenth Century,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 11, no. 1 (1992): 29–48.

  “We slip in between!”: George Canning, in H. W. V. Temperley, “The Later American Policy of George Canning,” American History Review 11, no. 4 (July 1906): 781, quoted in Arana, Bolívar, 347.

  Thomas Jefferson’s smug suggestion: Jefferson to Archibald Stuart, 25 January 1786, Paris, in The Works of Thomas Jefferson 4:188, ed. Paul Ford, quoted in Arana, Bolívar, 74.

  One British company impounded black slaves to work the pits of Minas Gerais: Courtney J. Campbell, “Making Abolition Brazilian: British Law and Brazilian Abolitionists in Nineteenth-Century Minas Gerais and Pernambuco,” Slavery & Abolition 36, no 3 (2015): 521–43.

  American enterprises were investing hundreds of millions: Mexican Mining Journal 8, no. 1 (January 1909): 14.

  CHAPTER 5: BLIND AMBITION

  Epigraph; “In the long course of history”: Ludwig Von Mises, Nationalökonomie: Theorie des Handelns und Wirtschaftens (Geneva: Editions Union, 1940), 441.

  Legend has it that Ai Apaec: All descriptions of Ai Apaec here are taken from Ulla Holmquist, curator of the Larco Herrera Museum, the institution of record on the Moche culture, in Pueblo Libre, Lima, Peru. Also Juergen Golte, Moche Cosmología y Sociedad (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos), 2009, and Rafael Larco Hoyle, Los Mochicas (Lima: Museo Arqueológico Rafael Larco Herrera), 1942.

  There is a reason why Indians of Latin America are hesitant: There is plenty of evidence for this in chronicles by the descendants of royal indigenous houses. As one example, Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela recorded this testimonial from a lowly Indian in his history of Potosí: “decidles que al mal hombre Hualca, lo ha de castigar el gran Pachacamac, porque les ha descubierto el Potocsi, que a ninguno de nuestros Ingas se lo dio; y que si quieren paz y no guerra que se vayan de aquí y nos entreguen a Hualca para castigarlo en nombre de Pachacamac, y por haber faltado a la orden que nos dio a todos de que no sacásemos la plata del cerro.” Arzáns, Historia de la villa imperial de Potosí (1965), 1:39.

  priests have called him a demon—a devil who reigned over the mines: Pascale Absi, “Los Hijos del diablo,” in Demonio, religión y sociedad entre España y América, ed. Fermín del Pino Díaz, 271.

  Early chronicles tell us: “en lugar della usaban desta letra T, así, en lugar de decir Dios suelen pronunciar Tios.” Cobo, Historia, 1:155.

  Epigraph; “¡Oh, Perú de metal y de melancolía!”: “Oh, Peru of metal and melancholy!” From the poem “A Carmela, la Peruana,” Federico García Lorca, Obras 2:416 (Madrid: Akal, 1998).

  Peru is booming these days: The material on La Rinconada is adapted and updated from
Arana, “Dreaming of El Dorado.”

  Minerals are the country’s main export: I owe this phrase to William Finnegan, “Tears of the Sun,” New Yorker, April 20, 2015.

  In 2009 Peru extracted a total of 182 tons of gold: “World Gold Production by Country,” USAGold, accessed January 30, 2019, www.usagold.com/reference/globalgoldproduction.html.

  “In all history . . . only 161,000 tons of gold”: Brook Larmer, National Geographic, January 2009.

  But multinational giants are not the only ones: Suzanne Daley, “Peru Scrambles to Drive Out Illegal Gold Mining,” New York Times online, July 26, 2016.

  Investigators report that more than a quarter of all gold: Organized Crime and Illegally Mined Gold in Latin America (Geneva: Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, April 2016), https://arcominero.infoamazonia.org/GIATOC-OC_Illegally-Mined-Gold-in-Latin-America-3c3f978eef80083bdd8780d7c5a21f1e.pdf.

  “Illegal mining is crowding out the legal”: Guillermo Arbe Carbonel, an economist with Scotiabank, quoted in Daley, “Peru Scrambles.”

  twice as profitable as trafficking cocaine: “Muestra retrata el verdadero rostro de la minería ilegal,” La República (Perú), May 24, 2017; Heather Walsh, “In Colombia, Gold Mining’s Becoming More Dangerous Than Cocaine,” Financial Post (Can.), October 12, 2011.

  Deforestation from mining in the Peruvian Amazon alone: Dan Collyns, “Extent of Peruvian Amazon Lost to Illegal Goldmines Mapped for First Time,” Guardian (UK edition), October 29, 2013; Jonathan Watts, “High Gold Prices Causing Increased Deforestation in South America, Study Finds,” Guardian (UK edition), January 14, 2015, and “Brazilian Court Blocks Abolition of Vast Amazon Reserve,” Guardian (UK edition), August 30, 2017. The exact figures went from 5,350 acres per year to 15,150 after 2008. They remained so for many years.

  equivalent to wiping out an area the size of Manhattan: J. Watts, “Amazon Deforestation Picking Up Pace, Satellite Data Reveals.” Guardian (UK edition), October 19, 2014. Metropolitan Denver is 153 square miles, Manhattan is 22.82 square miles; 402 square kilometers (155 square miles) were cleared in Brazil in September 2014. A. Fonseca, C. Souza Jr., and A. Veríssimo, Deforestation Report for the Brazilian Amazon (Belém, Br.: Institute of Man and Environment of the Amazon, January 2015), www.imazon.org.br.

  it cleans up our global emissions: Trista Patterson and M. Sanjayan, “Amazon: Lungs of the Planet,” BBC Future online, video, November 18, 2014. 3:57, www.bbc.com/future/story/20130226-amazon-lungs-of-the-planet.

  up to $460 million on the open market: A diachronic graph of gold prices at current (and constantly fluctuating) rates can be found on Gold Price, www.goldprice.org.

  Today there are seventy thousand souls: “Puno,” Diario Correo (Peru), March 4, 2015, https://diariocorreo.pe/edicion/puno/la-ciudad-mas-alta-del-mundo-y-sombrio-esta-ubicado-en-puno-video-696750/3.

  On average, a miner in La Rinconada earns $170: Fritz Dubois, Peru 21, 31 mayo 2012. For size of family, see Niños que trabajan: en minería artesanal de oro en el Perú, Scribd, https://www.scribd.com/document/67842098/NINNOS-QUE-TRABAJAN-PIAZZA.

  thousands of hoodwinked, prepubescent girls: A lawyer and social worker, Leon Quispe, who has dedicated himself to the welfare of the community, estimates that anywhere from five thousand to eight thousand girls, some as young as fourteen, move through La Rinconada’s cantinas in any given year. They are held captive as sexual slaves. Leon Quispe, interview by author, Puno and La Rinconada, February 7–15, 2012. Follow-up interview with Quispe, Puno, February 20, 2016. See also “Trata de personas continúa impune en infierno de La Rinconada,” La República (Perú), June 9, 2016.

  HIV and tuberculosis are common here: “Mineros de La Rinconada portan tuberculosis y VIH-Sida,” Diario Correo (Perú), March 25, 2015.

  an average miner—the highest paid in Latin America: Heraclio Castillo, “Salarios en minería del estado,” Zacatecas en Imagen (México), February 12, 2013, www.remam.org/2013/12/salarios-en-mineria-del-estado-mas-altos-en-el-pais/.

  In Cajamarca, which has poured nearly $1.5 billion: Peru, the largest producer of gold in the world, produced 151 tons in 2017, equaling $5.5 billion. Of that total, Cajamarca produced 33 tons or $1.3 billion. Xinhua, February 7, 2018. One mine alone, Yanacocha, has produced 35 million ounces of gold in the last twenty-five years. Ben Hallman and Roxana Olivera, “Gold Rush,” Huffington Post, last modified April 15, 2015, http://projects.huffingtonpost.com/worldbank-evicted-abandoned/how-worldbank-finances-environmental-destruction-peru.

  three in four residents live in numbing poverty: It was approximately 76 percent in 2005, 51 percent in 2015. Map of Provincial and District Poverty 2013 (Lima: Instituto Nacional de Estadística e Informática, 2015). El Fondo de Cooperación para el Desarrollo Social (FONCODES), 2005 and 2015.

  Epigraph; “To live perpetually at the mercy of two colossuses”: Mario Vargas Llosa, “Socialism and the Tanks,” in Making Waves, ed. and trans. John King (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), 79.

  championed in the 1950s by US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles: Dulles worked for the law offices that represented United Fruit, and he remained on its payroll for many years; Allen Dulles sat on its board of directors. Secretary Dulles lobbied President Dwight Eisenhower to plot a military coup against President Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala to protect United Fruit’s interests. Rich Cohen, The Fish That Ate the Whale (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 186. See also: Cesar Ayala, American Sugar Kingdom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 48–74.

  they hired death squads: Gary Giroux, Business Scandals, Corruption, and Reform: An Encyclopedia (Denver: Greenwood, 2013), 50.

  the US military invaded Latin America twenty-eight times: Dan Koeppel, Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World (New York: Penguin, 2008), 63.

  the most important agricultural product cultivated in South America: Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1985), 71–73.

  A German traveler in the sixteenth century: Ibid., 134.

  “White gold” . . . “Mother of slavery”: “ ‘The Slave Trade Developed Western Societies and Plunged Africa into Underdevelopment,’ ” interview with the writer and professor Didier Gondola, Rebelión, last modified April 24, 2009, www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=84242.

  By the nineteenth century, more than six million tons: Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 73.

  Today almost two billion tons: Groupes Sucres et Danrées, Sucden online, last modified January 30, 2019, www.sucden.com/en/products-and-services/sugar/global-trade-flows; see also “raw sugar trade,” “world sugar trade” on the same website.

  “I do not know if sugar and coffee are essential to the happiness of Europe”: J. H. Bernardin de Saint Pierre, Voyage to Isle de France, Isle de Bourbon, The Cape of Good Hope (1773), quoted in Mintz, Sweetness and Power, frontispiece.

  country with the largest hydrocarbon reserves: Johannes Alvarez and James Fiorito, “Venezuelan Oil,” ENG-297, Ethics of Development in a Global Environment, Stanford University, June 2, 2005.

  In the early 1900s, a number of London banks invested: Robert Burroughs, Travel Writing and Atrocities: Eyewitness Accounts of Colonialism (New York: Routledge, 2011), 124. Julio César Arana’s Anglo-Peruvian Rubber Company, which held a fierce monopoly on rubber extraction in the Putumayo region and was responsible for a hecatomb of cruelties perpetrated on the Amazon people, was controlled by a board of directors out of London and financed by London banks. See Ovidio Lagos, Arana, Rey de Caucho (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2005). I have also written about Julio César Arana in my memoir American Chica (New York: Dial Press, 2001).

  earning the equivalent of $5 billion a year: The Peruvian newsmagazine Caretas reported, in a history of the powerful Morey family of Iquitos—the family that ran all the barges in that neck of the Amazon River—that the Anglo-Peruvian Rubber Company (for whom the patriarch Luis Felipe Morey worked) was exporting 3.8 million pounds of r
ubber a year, rubber being worth one pound sterling per pound at the time. “La Familia Morey y Otros Entronques Historicos,” Raúl Morey Menacho, Caretas, no. 1351 (February 23, 1995); 3.8 million GBP (Great British Pounds, or pounds sterling) in 1900 is worth 4.2 billion GBP today, which translates to $5.5 billion (“relative output worth”), Measuring Worth, accessed January 30, 2019, www.measuringworth.com. I interviewed Humberto Morey extensively about the company for my memoir, American Chica.

  American middlemen muscled their way into the coffee business: US Federal Trade Commission, as explained in Cid Silveira, Café: Un drama na economia nacional (Rio de Janeiro: Editôra Civilização Brasileira, 1962).

  “The day is not far distant when three Stars and Stripes”: President William Taft in 1912, quoted in Liberalization and Redemocratization in Latin America, ed. George Lopez and Michael Stohl (New York: Greenwood, 1987), 258.

  marines were sent in “to protect the lives and interests of US citizens”: Galeano, 107–8.

  “I know he is an SOB”: Lopez and Stohl, Liberalization and Redemocratization, 258. This quote is variously attributed to Secretary of State Cordell Hull about Rafael Trujillo, or to Franklin D. Roosevelt about Anastasio Somoza. It is also claimed to have been said by FDR in reference to Generalísimo Francisco Franco of Spain. The conjecture by many historians and journalists is that it was probably a phrase used generally in the day about dictators and strongmen whom the United States supported. Kevin Drum, “But He’s Our Son of a Bitch,” Washington Monthly, May 16, 2006.

  “I spent thirty-three years and four months in active service”: Excerpt from a speech delivered in 1933 by Major General Smedley Butler, USMC. Leo Huberman, We the People (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), 252; “Smedley Butler on Interventionism,” Federation of American Scientists online, accessed January 30, 2019, https://fas.org/man/smedley.htm.

  As one historian explains: they didn’t have to be: Will Fowler, Latin America Since 1780 (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2016), 67.