The Bourbons gave Spain a more modern look, but at the end of the eighteenth century there were 200,000 clergymen and the unproductive population continued to proliferate at the expense of the country’s underdevelopment. More than 10,000 towns and cities were still subject to the seignorial jurisdiction of the nobility and thus outside the king’s direct control. The latifundia and the institution of entailed estates remained intact, along with obscurantism and fatalism. Nothing had improved since the era of Philip IV when a group of theologians, examining a project for a canal between the Manzanares and the Tagus, had ended their deliberations by declaring that if God had wanted the rivers to be navigable, He himself would have so arranged it.
THE DISTRIBUTION OF FUNCTIONS BETWEEN HORSEMAN AND HORSE
Marx wrote in Chapter 3 of the first volume of Capital: “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation.”
Plunder, internal and external, was the most important means of primitive accumulation of capital, an accumulation which, after the Middle Ages, made possible a new historical stage in world economic evolution. As the money economy extended, more and more social strata and regions of the world became involved in unequal exchange. Ernest Mandel has added up the value of the gold and silver torn from Latin America up to 1660, the booty extracted from Indonesia by the Dutch East India Company from 1650 to 1780, the harvest reaped by French capital in the eighteenth-century slave trade, the profits from slave labor in the British Antilles and from a half-century of British looting in India. The total exceeds the capital invested in all European industrial enterprises operated by steam in about 1800.14 This enormous mass of capital, Mandel notes, created a favorable climate for investment in Europe, stimulated the “spirit of enterprise,” and directly financed the establishment of manufactures, which in turn gave a strong thrust to the Industrial Revolution. But at the same time the formidable international concentration of wealth for Europe’s benefit prevented the jump into the accumulation of industrial capital in the plundered areas: “The double tragedy of the developing countries consists in the fact that they were not only victims of that process of international concentration, but that subsequently they have had to try and compensate for their industrial backwardness—that is, realize the primitive accumulation of industrial capital—in a world flooded with articles manufactured by an already mature industry, that of the West.”15
The Latin American colonies were discovered, conquered, and colonized within the process of the expansion of commercial capital. Europe stretched out its arms to clasp the whole world. Neither Spain nor Portugal received the benefits of the sweeping advance of capitalist mercantilism, although it was their colonies that substantially supplied the gold and silver feeding this expansion. As we have seen, while Latin America’s precious metals made deceptive fortunes for a Spanish nobility living in a belated and contra-historical Middle Age, they simultaneously sealed the ruin of Spain in centuries to come. It was in other parts of Europe that modern capitalism could be incubated, taking decisive advantage of the expropriation of primitive American peoples. The rape of accumulated treasure was followed by the systematic exploitation of the forced labor of Indians and abducted Africans in the mines.
Europe needed gold and silver. The money in circulation kept multiplying and it was necessary to stimulate the movement of capitalism in the hour of birth: the bourgeoisie took control of the cities and founded banks, produced and exchanged merchandise, conquered new markets. Gold, silver, sugar: the colonial economy, supplying rather than consuming, was built in terms of—and at the service of—the European market. During long periods of the sixteenth century the value of Latin American precious metal exports was four times greater than the value of the slaves, salt, and luxury goods it imported. The resources flowed out so that emergent European nations across the ocean could accumulate them. This was the basic mission of the pioneers, although they applied the Bible almost as often as the whip to the dying Indians. The Spanish colonies’ economic structure was born subordinated to the external market and was thus centralized around the export sector, where profit and power were concentrated.
During the process, from the metals stage to that of supplying foodstuffs, each region became identified with what it produced, and each produced what Europe wanted of it: each product, loaded in the holds of galleons plowing the ocean, became a vocation and a destiny. The international division of labor, as it emerged along with capitalism, resembled the distribution of function between a horseman and a horse, as Paul Baran put it. The markets of the colonial world grew as mere appendices to the internal market of invading capitalism.
Celso Furtado notes that while most of Europe’s feudal seigneurs obtained an economic surplus from the people they dominated and used it in one way or another in the same areas, the chief aim of those Spaniards who received Latin American mines, lands, and Indians from the king was to extract a surplus to send to Europe.16 This observation helps explain the ultimate goal of the Latin American colonial economy from its inception: although it showed some feudal characteristics, it functioned at the service of capitalism developing elsewhere. Nor, indeed, can the existence of wealthy capitalist centers in our own time be explained without the existence of poor and subjected outskirts: the one and the other make up the same system.
But not all of the surplus went to Europe. The colonial economy was run by merchants, by owners of mines and of big estates, who divided up the usufruct of Indian and black labor under the jealous and omnipotent eye of the Crown and its chief associate, the Church. Power was concentrated in the hands of a few, who sent metals and foodstuffs to Europe and received back the luxury goods to the enjoyment of which they dedicated their mushrooming fortunes. The dominant classes took no interest whatever in diversifying the internal economies or in raising technical and cultural levels in the population: they had a different function within the international complex they were acting for, and the grinding poverty of the people—so profitable from the standpoint of the reigning interests—prevented the development of an internal consumer market.
One French economist argues that Latin America’s worst colonial legacy, which explains its backwardness today, is lack of capital.17 But all the historical evidence shows that the colonial economy produced bountiful wealth for the classes connected internally with the colonial system of domination. The labor that was abundantly available for nothing or practically nothing, and the great European demand for Latin American products, made possible “a precocious and abundant accumulation of capital in the Iberian colonies. The hard core of beneficiaries, far from growing, became smaller in proportion to the mass of the population, as may be seen from the well-known fact that unemployed Europeans and Creoles constantly increased.”18 The capital that stayed in Latin America, after the lion’s share went into the primitive accumulation process of European capitalism, did not generate a process similar to that which took place in Europe, where the foundations of industrial development were laid. It was diverted instead into the construction of great palaces and showy churches, into the purchase of jewels and luxurious clothing and furniture, into the maintenance of flocks of servants, and into the extravagance of fiestas. To an important extent this surplus was also immobilized in the purchase of new lands, or continued to revolve around speculative commercial activities.
In the twilight of the colonial era Alexander von Humboldt found in Mexico an enormous amount of capital in the hands of mine owners and merchants, while no less than half of Mexican real estate and capital belonged to the Church, which also controlled much of the remaining land through mortgages.19 Mexican mine operators invested their surpluses in the purchase of great latifundia
and in mortgage loans, as did the big exporters of Veracruz and Acapulco; the Church hierarchy multiplied its possessions in similar fashion. Palatial residences sprang up in the capital, and sumptuous churches appeared like mushrooms after rain; Indian servants catered to the golden luxuries of the powerful.
In mid-seventeenth-century Peru, capital amassed by encomenderos,* mine operators, inquisitors, and officials of the imperial government was poured into commercial projects. The fortunes made in Venezuela from growing cacao—begun at the end of the sixteenth century and produced by applying whips to the backs of black slaves—were invested in new plantations, other commercial crops, in mines, urban real estate, slaves, and herds of cattle.
* An encomienda was an estate granted by the Crown to the Spanish conquistadors and colonists for their services to Spain. It included the services of the Indians living on it. The encomendero was thus the owner. (Trans.)
THE SILVER CYCLE: THE RUIN OF POTOSí
Andre Gunder Frank, in analyzing “metropolis-satellite” relations through Latin American history as a chain of successive subjections, has highlighted the fact that the regions now most underdeveloped and poverty-stricken are those which in the past had had the closest links with the metropolis and had enjoyed periods of boom.20 Having once been the biggest producers of goods exported to Europe, or later to the United States, and the richest sources of capital, they were abandoned by the metropolis when for this or that reason business sagged. Potosí is the outstanding example of this descent into the vacuum.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Cerro Rico of Potosí (Mexico’s Guanajuato and Zacatecas silver mines had their boom much later) was the hub of Latin American colonial life: around it, in one way or another, revolved the Chilean economy, which sent it wheat, dried meat, hides, and wines; the cattle-raising and crafts of Córdoba and Tucumán in Argentina, which supplied it with draft animals and textiles; the mercury mines of Huancavélica; and the Arica region whence the silver was shipped to Lima, chief administrative center of the period. In the independence period the area, now a part of Bolivia, still had a larger population than what is now Argentina. A century and a half later Bolivia’s population is almost six times smaller than Argentina’s.
Potosían society, sick with ostentation and extravagance, left Bolivia with only a vague memory of its splendors, of the ruins of its churches and palaces, and of 8 million Indian corpses. Any one of the diamonds encrusted in a rich caballero’s shield was worth more than what an Indian could earn in his whole life under the mitayo,* but the caballero took off with the diamonds. If it were not a futile exercise, Bolivia—now one of the world’s most poverty-stricken countries—could boast of having nourished the wealth of the wealthiest. In our time Potosí is a poor city in a poor Bolivia: “The city which has given most to the world and has the least,” as an old Potosían lady, enveloped in a mile of alpaca shawl, told me when we talked on the Andalusian patio of her two-century-old house. Condemned to nostalgia, tortured by poverty and cold, Potosí remains an open wound of the colonial system in America: a still audible “J’ accuse.”
* A mitayo is an Indian who pays a mita, or tribute, usually in the form of forced labor in public works, especially the mines. (Trans.)
The people live off the refuse. In 1640 the priest Alvaro Alonso-Barba published in Madrid’s royal printshop his excellent work on the art of metals.21 Tin, he wrote, “is poison.” He mentioned the Cerro, where “there is much tin, although few recognize it, and people throw it aside looking for the silver everyone seeks.” Today the tin the Spaniards discarded like garbage is exploited in Potosí. Walls of ancient houses are sold as high-grade tin. Through the centuries the wealth has been drained from the 5,000 tunnels the Spaniards bored into the Cerro Rico. As dynamite charges have hollowed it out, its color has changed and the height of its summit has been lowered. The mountains of rock heaped around the many tunnel openings are of all colors: pink, lilac, purple, ochre, gray, gold, brown. A crazy quilt of garbage. Llamperos break the rocks and Indian palliris in search of tin pick like birds, with hands skilled in weighing and separating, at the mineral debris. Miners still enter old mines that are not flooded, carbide lamps in hand, bodies crouching, to bring out whatever there is. Of silver there is none. Not a glint of it: the Spaniards even swept out the seams with brooms. The pallacos use pick and shovel to dig any metal out of the leavings. “The Cerro is still rich,” I was blandly told by an unemployed man who was scratching through the dirt with his hands. “There must be a God, you know: the metal grows just like a plant.” Opposite the Cerro Rico rises a witness to the devastation: a mountain called Huakajchi, meaning in Quechua “the cerro that has wept.” From its sides gush many springs of pure water, the “water eyes” that quench the miners’ thirst.
In its mid-seventeenth-century days of glory the city attracted many painters and artisans, Spanish and Indian, European and Creole masters and Indian image-carvers who left their mark on Latin American colonial art. Melchor Pérez de Holguín, Latin America’s El Greco, left an enormous religious work which betrays both its creator’s talent and the pagan breath of these lands: his splendid Virgin, arms open, gives one breast to the infant Jesus and the other to Saint Joseph; she is hauntingly memorable. Goldsmiths, silversmiths, and engravers, cabinetmakers and masters of repoussé, craftsmen in metals, fine woods, plaster, and noble ivory adorned Potosí’s many churches and monasteries with works of the imaginative colonial school, altars sparkling with silver filigree, and priceless pulpits and reredoses. The baroque church facades carved in stone have resisted the ravages of time, but not so the paintings, many of them irreparably damaged by damp, or the smaller figures and objects. Tourists and parishioners have emptied the churches of whatever they could carry, from chalices and bells to carvings in beech and ash of Saint Francis and Christ.
These untended churches, now mostly closed, are collapsing under the weight of years. It is a pity, for pillaged as they have been they are still formidable treasures of a colonial art that fuses all styles and glows with heretical imagination: the escalonado emblem of the ancient civilization of Tiahuanacu instead of the cross of Christ, the cross joined with the sacred sun and moon, virgins and saints with “natural” hair, grapes and ears of corn twining to the tops of columns along with the kantuta, the imperial flower of the Incas; sirens, Bacchus, and the festival of life alternating with romantic asceticism, the dark faces of some divinities, caryatids with Indian features. Some churches have been renovated to perform other services now that they lack congregations. San Ambrosio is the Cine Omiste; in February 1970 the forthcoming attraction was advertised across the baroque bas-reliefs of the facade: It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. The Jesuit church became a movie house, then a Grace Company warehouse, and finally a storehouse for public charity food.
A few other churches still function as best they can: it is at least a century and a half since Potosíans had the money to burn candles. It is said of the San Francisco church, for example, that its cross grows several centimeters every year, as does the beard of the Señor de la Vera Cruz, an imposing silver-and-silk Christ who appeared in Potosí, brought by nobody, four centuries ago. The priests do not deny that they shave him every so often, and they attribute to him—even in writing—every kind of miracle: incantations, down the centuries, against droughts, plagues, and wars in defense of the beleaguered city.
The Señor de la Vera Cruz was powerless to stop the decline of Potosí. The depletion of the silver was interpreted as divine judgment on the miners’ wickedness and sin. Spectacular masses became a thing of the past: like the banquets, bullfights, balls, and fireworks, luxury religion had, after all, been a subproduct of Indian slave labor. In the era of splendor the miners made princely donations to churches and monasteries and sponsored sumptuous funerals, all solid silver keys to the gates of heaven. In 1559 the merchant Alvaro Bejarano directed in his will that “all the priests in Potosí” accompany his corpse. Quack medicine and witch
craft were mixed with authorized religion in the delirious fervors and panics of colonial society. Extreme unction with bell and canopy could, like Communion, succor the dying; but a juicy will that provided for building a church or for a silver altar could prove much more effective. Fevers were combated with the gospels. In certain convents prayers cooled the body, in others they warmed it: “The Credo was cool as tamarind or sweet spirit of nitre, the Salve warm as orange blossoms or cornsilk.”22
In the Calle Chuquisaca one can admire the time-corroded facade of the palace of the counts of Carma y Cayara, but it is now a dentist’s office; the coat-of-arms of Maestro de Campo Don Antonio López de Quiroga, in the Calle Lanza, now adorns a little school; that of the Marqués de Otavi, with its rampant lions, tops the doorway of the Banco Nacional. “Where can they be living now? They must have gone far.…” The Potosían old lady, attached to her city, tells me that the rich left first and then the poor: in four centuries the population has decreased threefold. I gaze at the Cerro from a roof in the Calle Uyuni, a narrow, twisting colonial lane with wooden-balconied houses so close together that residents can kiss or hit each other without having to go down to the street. Here, as in all of the city, survive the old street lamps under whose feeble light, as Jaime Molins relates, “lovers’ quarrels were resolved, and muffled caballeros, elegant ladies, and gamblers flitted by like ghosts.” The city now has electric light but one barely notices it. In the dim plazas raffle parties are conducted at night under the ancient lamps: I saw a piece of cake being raffled in the middle of a crowd.
Sucre decayed along with Potosí. This valley city of pleasant climate, successively known as Charcas, La Plata, and Chuquisaca, enjoyed a good share of the wealth flowing from Potosí’s Cerro Rico. Here Francisco Pizarro’s brother Gonzalo installed his court, as sumptuous as any king’s; churches and spacious residences, parks and recreation centers sprouted continuously, together with the lawyers, mystics, and pretentious poets who put their stamp on the city from century to century. “Silence, that is Sucre—just silence. But before. …” Before, this was the cultural capital of two viceroyalties, seat of Latin America’s chief archdiocese and of the colony’s highest court of justice—the most magnificent and cultured city in South America. Doña Cecilia Contreras de Torres and Doña María de las Mercedes Torralba de Gramajo, señoras of Ubina and Colquechaca, gave Lucullan banquets in a contest to squander the income from their Potosí mines. When their lavish fiestas ended they threw the silver service and even golden vessels from their balconies to be picked up by lucky passersby.
Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent Page 5
