Silver, Sword, and Stone

by Marie Arana

  Latin American historians: One of them is Louis A. Pérez, the J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of History and director of the Institute for the Study of the Americas at the University of North Carolina. On November 5, 2015, Pérez delivered a stirring explanation of cultural differences in the Eqbal Ahmad Lecture at Hampshire College, in which he explained transgenerational epigenetic inheritance and Cuba’s historical disposition to the United States by telling Aesop’s story of the scorpion and the frog. Louis A. Pérez, “2015 Eqbal Ahmad Lecture, Louis Pérez, Wayne Smith, Hampshire College,” videotaped November 5, 2015, in Amherst, MA, 1:22.25, www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuBdKB8jX3I.

  a half million in one decade alone: This was the decade between 1482 and 1492, during Ferdinand’s war against the Granada Emirate. A hundred thousand Moors died or were enslaved; two hundred thousand Moors and two hundred thousand Jews were forcibly expelled (Kamen, 37–38). See also Joseph Telushkin, Jewish Literacy, New York: Morrow, 1991.

  contemporary historians depict the moment of first contact: Means and Wolf, White Men, 16.

  The evidence tells us this is not so: The data presented in scholarly works and symposia since 2003 (“Problems in Paradise,” American Anthropological Association Symposium on Amerindian Violence, 2003, Chicago) indicate that indigenous warfare, ritual violence, and armed conflict were prevalent in every major culture of Latin America before the conquest. Chacon and Mendoza, 4.

  miraculous “thundersticks”: David J. Silverman, Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).

  Cortés, Balboa, Pizarro—they had all bucked: To this mutinous group many could be added, but few so colorful as Lope de Aguirre, “El Loco,” who called himself Wrath of God, Prince of Freedom, King of Tierra Firme. He countermanded Gonzalo Pizarro’s orders in Peru and visited rampant cruelty on the Indians. Charles Nicholl, The Creature in the Map (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 27.

  they had brought wild, rebellious impulses with them: Arciniegas, Latin America, 137–38.

  In Paraguay, one of the conquistadors: This was Domingo Martínez de Irala, a Basque conquistador who was part of Pedro de Mendoza’s expedition to the southern regions of the continent in 1535. He helped found Buenos Aires and became captain general of Río de la Plata. Irala went against rank and accused Governor Cabeza de Vaca of being too sympathetic to the Indians and succeeded in having him shipped back to Spain as a traitor.

  When European intellectuals began to raise moral arguments: Alonso Zorita, Leyes y ordenanzas reales de las Indias Del Mar Oceano (1574) (México, DF: Secretaria de Hacienda, 1983–1984), 355–56.

  Absolute rule became the hallmark: From here to the end of this section on Spanish colonial rule, I have quoted liberally from my own work, Bolivar: American Liberator, 26–27. The sources for this information include: Leslie Bethell, The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Carlos Eugenio Restrepo, Historia de la Revolución, vol. 1; Guillermo Antonio Sherwell, Simón Bolívar (el Libertador): Patriot, Warrior, Statesman, Father of Five Nations (Washington, DC: B. S. Adams, 1921).

  It was thought that the Inca ruler Pachacuti: Betanzos, Narrative of the Incas (ca. 1576), trans. and ed., Roland Hamilton and Dana Buchanan (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996); Burr Brundage, Empire of the Inca (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963), 112–24.

  Just as the Spaniards kept good records: Bernabé Cobo, Inca Religion and Customs (1653), 135. See also Chacon and Mendoza, 120–21.

  “If a person dies, it is better for the fields”: Graham Gori, Associated Press, “Ancient and Bloody Bolivian Ritual Draws a Crowd,” Los Angeles Times, July 6, 2003.

  “It is like man and woman”: Gori, “Ancient and Bloody.”

  “Thank you, brother; we have tested each other”: Gori, “Ancient and Bloody.”

  Epigraph; “What concerns us most about the Inca civilization”: Jose Carlos Mariátegui, quoted in Wright, 275.

  Scholars claim that a mere twenty-one years: David Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford Press, 1993), prologue.

  An anthropologist claims that one lone slave: Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel (New York: Norton, 1997) e-book, ch. 12.

  by 1618, less than one hundred years later: Ibid.; Ángel Rosenblat, La Población Indígena de América: Desde 1492 Hasta la Actualidad (Buenos Aires: Institución Cultural Española, 1945), http://pueblosoriginarios.com/textos/rosenblat/1492.html.

  “deafened the skies, making the heavens reecho”: Martín de Murúa, Historia general del Perú, 2:270.

  “imbruted Spaniards”: José García Hamilton, El autoritarismo y la improductividad en Hispanoamérica (Buenos Aires: Ed. Sudamericana, 1998), ch. 1.

  silver economy that had more drastic consequences: Galeano, 43.

  Ten years later, the vast majority of the hemisphere: King Philip II of Spain ruled Portugal between 1581 and 1598, and so would have been the de facto ruler of Brazil, making this claim a resounding reality.

  infected blankets or tainted baubles: Esther Wagner Stearn and Allen Edwin Stearn, The Effect of Smallpox on the Destiny of the Amerindian (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1945), 13–20, 73–94, 97.

  by the time the Europeans got around to counting them: “Selected Death Tolls for Wars, Massacres, and Atrocities Before the 20th Century,” Necrometrics, last modified January 2012, http://necrometrics.com/pre1700a.htm#America.

  Scholars do tell us that when the Viceroyalty of Mexico celebrated: Rosenblat, La Población, 185.

  the humming human population Cortés encountered: Stannard, American Holocaust, 33.

  a veritable rainbow of crossbreeds: These eventually garnered a colorful litany of names, depending on the shade of skin—indios, cholos, mestizos, negros, pardos, zambos, mulattos, castizos, moriscos, albinos, torna-atrás, sambayos, cambujos, albarazados, barcinos, coyotes, chamizos, chinos, ahí te estás, tente en el aire, no te entiendo. Ángel Rosenblat, La población indígena y el mestizaje en América, vol. 2 (Buenos Aires: Nova, 1954), 135.

  reclaim their identity after almost two centuries: Nicholas A. Robins, Native Insurgencies and the Genocidal Impulse in the Americas, 3.

  The next large-scale uprising in the colonies: Kenneth J. Andrien, “Economic Crisis, Taxes, and the Quito Insurrection of 1765,” in Past and Present, no. 129 (November 1990): 104–131.

  bedeviled the Viceroyalty of Peru for decades: Scarlett Godoy O’Phelan, Un siglo de rebeliones anticoloniales (Paris: Institut français d’études andines, 2015), 296–305.

  exterminating not only Spaniards: “Informe de los oidores Pedro Antonio Zernudas y Lorenzo Blanco Ciceron,” La Plata, March 14, 1781, Charcas, 596, Archivo General de las Indias (AGI). “Confesión de Asensio Pacheco,” La Plata, April 18, 1781, AGI, ibid., 603, 20: Robins, Native Insurgencies, 39.

  The trouble began when a mestizo curaca: Tupac Amaru II’s name was José Gabriel Condorcanqui before he rose up against the Spanish. I have taken the lion’s share of this account of Tupac Amaru II as well as the cameo of José Antonio Galán’s insurgency directly from Arana, Bolívar, 29–30.

  “I have decided to shake off”: Tupac Amaru II in José Félix Blanco and Ramón Azpurúa, Documentos para la historia de la vida pública del Liberator de Colombia (Caracas: La Opinión Nacional, 1875), 1:151.

  Tupac Amaru had said very clearly: Ibid., 167.

  “to put an end to all Europeans”: Jan Szeminski, “Why Kill the Spaniard?,” in Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, ed. Steve Stern (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 167.

  the victorious rebels danced, drunk, on the corpses of whites: Robins, Native Insurgencies, 40–41, 54.

  they fed on white flesh: Szeminski, “Why Kill?,” 169–70.

  costing the Indians some hundred thousand lives: Bethell, History of Latin America, 3:36.

  “I only know of two, and t
hey are you and I”: J. P. Viscardo y Guzmán, Letter to the Spanish Americans (1799) (Providence: John Carter Brown Library facsimile, 2002), from the introduction by David Brading, 20.

  cut out the Indian’s tongue: Antonio Núñez Jiménez, Un mundo aparte (Madrid: Ed. de la Torre, 1994), 216–17.

  “His hands and feet will be bound by strong cords”: Ibid.

  signaled the end of Spanish dominion: Justin Winsor, ed., Narrative and Critical History of America (Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1889), 317.

  when an army of twenty thousand: Germán Arciniegas, 20,000 Comuneros hacia Santa Fe (Bogotá: Pluma, 1981).

  Epigraph; “The men who knew how to use a machete”: “Los hombres que sabían usar un machete para cortar la caña, demostraron un día que sabían usar el machete también para combatir.” Fidel y Dolores Guerra Castro, Fidel Castro y la historia como ciencia (Havana: Centro de Estudios Martianos, 2007), 106.

  monstrum horrendum: Fidel Castro, Fidel Castro: Selección de documentos (Havana: Editora Política, 2007), 11.

  handed over more than 60 percent of all sugar production: Juan Triana Cordoví, “La Maldita Bendición de la Caña de Azucar,” On Cuba, September 26, 2016.

  a few distinguished Americans had begun to grumble: Among them, noted historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who by then had founded Americans for Democratic Action with former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Minnesota senator Hubert Humphrey, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Dynamics of World Power (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), 512.

  “I believe the hour has come”: Luis Báez, Así es Fidel (Havana: Casa Editora, 2010), 2:11.

  bedraggled, hungry, sea tossed: Che Guevara, quoted in Douglas Kellner, Ernesto “Che” Guevara (World Leaders Past & Present) (Langhorne, PA: Chelsea House, 1989), 40.

  burgeoning sugar boom in Brazil: “Appendix B: Supply-Demand Balances, ‘Sugar,’ ” in Commodity Markets Outlook (Washington, DC: World Bank Group, October 2016), 58, http://pubdocs.worldbank.org/en/143081476804664222/CMO-October-2016-Full-Report.pdf.

  double the sugar output to ten million tons: Kosmas Tsokhas, “The Political Economy of Cuban Dependence on the Soviet Union,” Theory and Society 9 (March 1980): 319–62.

  CHAPTER 7: REVOLUTIONS THAT SHAPED LATIN AMERICA’S PSYCHE

  Epigraph; “They say grand projects need to be built with calm!”: Simón Bolívar, speech to the Patriotic Society, July 3–4, 1811, in Bolívar, Doctrina del Libertador, ed. Manuel Pérez Vila (Caracas: Fundación Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1992), 7.

  when an unexpected window of opportunity flung open: Much of the following account of the wars for independence in Latin America is taken from my book Bolívar: American Liberator, which has an extensive account of these events.

  Anyone who dared express sympathy: Pedro Fermín de Cevallos, Resumen de la Historia de Ecuador, vol. 3, ch. 2, Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library Foundation, www.cervantesvirtual.com.

  Epigraph; “He rode, fighting all the way, more miles than Ulysses”: Thomas Carlyle about Bolívar, in “Dr. Francia,” Foreign Quarterly Review, no. 62 (1843).

  He had little patience for those who waved banners of liberty: Arana, Bolívar, 80.

  “the sea that separates us from her”: Bolívar, “Letter from Jamaica,” Kingston, September 6, 1815, in Reflexiones políticas (Barcelona: www.lingkua.com, 2018), 63.

  That year, like dominos tumbling in a row: Arana, Bolívar, 86.

  “The art of victory is learned in defeat”: Simón Bolívar, in Felipe Larrazábal, Vida y correspondencia general del Libertador Simón Bolívar, vol. 1 (New York: Eduardo O. Jenkins, 1866), 580.

  massacred eighty thousand rebels: Bolívar, to the editor of the Royal Gazette, Kingston, 15 August 1815, in Cartas del Libertador, ed. Lecuna, vol. 1, 29, 95.

  “almost without exception were shot”: M. McKinley, Pre-Revolutionary Caracas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 171. All the information about Bolívar’s wars can be found in greater detail in my biography Bolívar: American Liberator.

  reduced civilian populations in Latin America by a third: Christon Archer, The Wars of Independence in Spanish America, Jaguar Books on Latin America, no. 20 (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 2000), 35–37, 283–92. Robert Scheina, Latin America’s Wars: The Age of the Caudillo, 1791–1899, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2003), 173, claims that in Ecuador, Venezuela, and Mexico, populations were reduced by a quarter.

  “There are no more provinces left”: J. B. Trend, Bolívar and the Independence of Spanish America (New York, Macmillan, 1948), 109.

  Epigraph; “They are children of the devil, not of the Moon and Sun”: El Inca Garcilaso, La Florida, bk. 3, ch. 26, 149.

  in unabated frenzy to sacrifice a million more: Scheina, Latin America’s Wars, 2:1845. Scheina, Latin America’s Wars: The Age of the Caudillo, 1791–1899, vol. 1 (Dulles, VA: Brassey’s, 2003), 84, specifies three hundred thousand combatants and seven hundred thousand civilians.

  almost half a million more Mexicans were lost: More than six hundred thousand is the claim in Juan González, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America (New York: Penguin, 2001).

  One-quarter of its population: Scheina, Latin America’s Wars, 2:1773. For a comparative number, see also Jan Lahmeyer, “Mexico: Historical Demographical Data of the Whole Country,” Populstat, last modified February 4, 2002, www.populsat.info/Americas/mexicoc.htm, which claims 15 percent.

  Between 1910 and 1920, the Mexican population was reduced: Sherburne F. Cook and Woodrow Borah show the native population imploding from 25.2 million in 1519, to 6.3 million by 1545, to 2.5 million in 1570, and bottoming out at 1.2 million in 1620. From some 5 million inhabitants in 1800, Mexico grew to 8 million by 1855 and to more than 15 million in 1910. So between 1519 and 1910, the population had dropped by 10 million people. Robert McCaa, “The Peopling of Mexico from Origins to Revolution” (preliminary draft), in The Population History of North America, ed. Richard Steckel and Michael Haines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), https://users.pop.umn.edu/~rmccaa/mxpoprev/cambridg3.htm. With the revolution, it dropped again by 1921 to a bit more than 14 million. Jan Lahmeyer: “Mexico: Historical Demographical Data of the Whole Country,” Population Statistics, last modified February 2, 2004.

  landowners drove out or killed Chinese railroad laborers: Enrique Krauze, “Mexico at War,” New York Review of Books, September 27, 2012.

  a full half of the peasant class: María Teresa Vázquez Castillo, Land Privatization in Mexico: Urbanization, Formation of Regions, and Globalization in Ejidos (New York: Routledge, 2004), 26.

  one of the ten most dangerous places in the world: Amanda Macias and Pamela Engel, “The 50 Most Violent Cities in the World,” Business Insider, last modified January 23, 2015; Independent (UK), April 2016.

  three of whose siblings were certifiably deranged: George Frederick Masterman, Seven Eventful Years in Paraguay: A Narrative of Personal Experience Amongst the Paraguayans (London: Sampson Low, 1870), 46.

  windows in the houses of Asunción: Julio Llanos, El Dr. Francia (Buenos Aires: Moen, 1907), 53.

  He had never forgotten that the parents: Ibid., 45–46.

  he forbade the Spaniards of Paraguay: Ibid., 36.

  “Here, under our own nose”: Thomas Carlyle, “Dr. Francia,” in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, vol. 1, Carlyle’s Complete Works (Boston: Standard, 1899), 17.

  “the only Latin American country that foreign capital could not warp”: Galeano, 188.

  His remains were later exhumed, defiled, absconded with: H. Leguizamón, letter to the editor of La Nación, June 23, 1906, in Llanos, Dr. Francia, 78–81.

  Meanwhile, a nation of 900,000: W. D. Rubinstein, Genocide: A History (London: Pearson, 2004), 94.

  In centuries to come, dictators came in a multitude: This and the following few lines ares taken directly from my own work: Arana, Bolívar, 463.

  a necessary corrective in the public mind, a mythic creat
ure: Gabriel García Márquez once said, “The only mythic creature that Latin America has ever produced is the dictator.” “Una naturaleza distinta en un mundo distinto al nuestro” [A different nature in a world different from ours], La Jornada (Mexico City), October 28, 2010, 4.

  “The most stubborn conservatism”: Ernesto Sabato, “Inercia mental,” in Uno y el universo (Buenos Aires: Editorial Seix Barral, 2003), 90.

  Peru, the jittery seat of a lapsed empire: Arana, Bolívar, 456.

  In Bolivia, just after the revolution: President Mariano Melgarejo, killed in exile in Lima, 1871. See also Lawrence A. Clayton, The Bolivarian Nations of Latin America, 22.

  In Ecuador, a roundly hated religous fundamentalist despot: President Gabriel García Moreno, an intense Catholic. Ibid., 23.

  In Quito, a dictator who tried to seize power: President José Eloy Álfaro, a Freemason, who attempted to dismantle the Church’s power, Ibid., 36.

  Epigraph; “The people get the governments they deserve”: José Martí, Ideario cubano (Havana: Municipio de la Habana, 1936), 144.

  losing half a million people—rebels and Spaniards: Scheina, Latin America’s Wars, vol. 1, quoted in “Statistics of Wars, Oppressions and Atrocities of the Nineteenth Century,” Necrometrics, last modified March 2011, http://necrometrics.com/wars19c.htm#Max-Mex.

  By 1961, two thousand of them had been executed: Hugh Thomas, Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 1460.

  By 1970, five thousand had been shot: Ibid.

  Twenty thousand more were rotting in dungeons: “Impunity,” ch. 11 in Cuba’s Repressive Machinery: Human Rights Forty Years After the Revolution (report), Human Rights Watch online, last modified June 1999, www.hrw.org/reports/1999/cuba/Cuba996-11.htm; Thomas, Cuba, 1458–61.

  con un violín, una baraja y un gallo fino: Rafael Fernández de Castro, Para la historia de Cuba, vol. 1 (Habana: La Propaganda Literaria, 1899), 315.

  “far more than tons of sugar”: Norman Gall, “How Castro Failed,” Commentary, November 1, 1971, 48.