Synopsis
This history of Colombia tells the remarkable story of a country that has consistently defied modern Latin American stereotypes - a country where military dictators are virtually unknown, where the political left is congenitally weak, and where urbanization and industrialization have spawned no lasting populist movement. There is more to Colombia than the drug trafficking and violence that have recently gripped the world's attention. In the face of both cocaine wars and guerrilla conflict, the country has maintained steady economic growth as well as a relatively open and democratic government based on a two-party system. It has also produced an impressive body of art and literature. This study traces the process of state-building in Colombia from the struggle for independence, territorial consolidation and reform in the 19th century to economic development and social and political democratization in the 20th.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author
David Bushnell (May 14, 1923 – September 3, 2010) was an American academic and Latin American historian who has been called "The Father of the Colombianists." Bushnell, one of the first Americans to study Colombia, was considered one of the world's leading experts on the history of Colombia. He regarded it as one of the least studied countries in Latin America by academic scholars in the United States and Europe, and was considered the first American historian to study and introduce Colombian history as an academic field in the United States.
From the Back Cover
"I simply cannot think of an example of recent scholarship on Latin America that I found as thoroughly rewarding and enjoyable as this study."—Charles Bergquist, University of Washington
From the Inside Flap
"I simply cannot think of an example of recent scholarship on Latin America that I found as thoroughly rewarding and enjoyable as this study."—Charles Bergquist, University of Washington
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Making of Modern Colombia: A Nation in Spite of Itself
By David BushnellUniversity of California Press
Copyright © 1993 David BushnellAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0520078020
1
Indians and Spaniards
In the beginning there were mountains, plains, and rivers, but especially mountains; no one geographic feature has so molded the history of Colombia as the Andes. They do not attain the same height that they have in Bolivia and Peru, but separated into three principal ranges—the Cordillera Occidental, between the Pacific Ocean and the valley of the Cauca River; the Cordillera Central, between the Cauca and the Magdalena River; and the broad Cordillera Oriental, which branches off toward Venezuela—they give the Colombian landscape its basic structure. They also determine temperature, climate, and ease of human access.
The greatest part of the country's land area is made up of lowland plains. Whether covered with tropical grasses or (as in the Southeast) Amazonian forest, these plains are accurately called tierra caliente , "hot land." As one rises in the different Andean ranges, however, average temperature falls and the natural environment changes. In the Cordillera Central and the Oriental, as well as in the isolated mountain outcropping of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta along the Caribbean coast, there are even a few snow-covered peaks. But the mountains also contain a string of basins and plateaus some 1,500 to 3,000 meters high that offer moderate temperatures and often the best soils and living conditions. These middle elevations have for centuries held the densest concentrations of human inhabitants; yet the earliest Colombians did not live there, since they first had to cross the lowland plains.
Pre-Columbian ColombiaNo one knows when the first human beings set foot on what is now Colombian soil, but we may assume that they were part of the great migration of Native American peoples who, having crossed over from Asia, spread out through North and then South America. Presumably,
they first encountered the present Colombian department of Chocó (adjoining Panama), a hot, densely forested area with some of the world's heaviest yearly rainfall. It was not the most attractive place to settle, but it did become permanently inhabited, by forest groups that made the necessary adaptation to the environment. The rest of the country was ultimately occupied as well, though we have no idea how long the process took, and no physical traces of most of the early occupants have been found.
The first clear evidence of human activity consists of stone chips found at El Abra, a site on the Sabana de Bogotá (the high plain that today contains the nation's capital). These chips have been dated to earlier than 10,000 B.C. On the western edge of the same Sabana, near the Falls of Tequendama (where the Bogotá River suddenly drops 140 meters straight down toward the Magdalena Valley), a similar find has been made. However, we cannot assume that the arts of civilization first developed in the vicinity of Bogotá; and both there and elsewhere, the sequence of developmental stages—the emergence of agriculture, creation of ceramics, and so forth—was exceedingly gradual and generally comparable to that found among other American Indian peoples.
The earliest native culture from which monumental remains have come down to us arose in the upper Magdalena Valley, near the headwaters of the river—in an area of ample rainfall, about 1,800 meters in altitude, and admirably suited for the growing of corn. Commonly referred to as the "San Agustín culture," from the name of the present-day municipality where the principal archeological sites are found, it flourished from at least the middle of the first millennium B.C. until after the coming of the Europeans, although possibly with some interruptions. The most impressive findings are the several hundred stone statues of human or animal figures, some over three meters in height, that apparently stood guard over tombs. Indeed, the archeological record consists mainly of burial sites, since structures for the living were obviously made from perishable materials. It is no less obvious that a society of some complexity and stratification must have existed, to carry out the works.
In other parts of the country, different native peoples, while not equaling those of San Agustín in stone statuary, were perfecting their own crafts, gaining practice in management of the ecology, and gradually creating a more complex social and political organization. One
craft that reached high levels of sophistication almost everywhere was goldwork, thanks to the widespread existence of alluvial gold deposits. These were most often found near the western and central cordilleras, but Indians who lacked gold in their own territory had little difficulty obtaining it by trade. Trade and other contact likewise existed with peoples living beyond what is now Colombia—with the Indians of Middle America, for example, and with those of what became the Inca empire to the south. Outside influences do not, however, appear to have been decisive in development of the native civilization; it is worth noting, for example, that the llama, which served as beast of burden as well as source of wool and meat in the central Andes, was not to be found beyond the present northern border of Ecuador. Thus, the native peoples of the present Colombia, like those of North America, were wholly dependent on human power for transport—even on the rivers and few lakes.
The Indian peoples who inhabited the northwest corner of South America belonged variously to the Carib, Arawak, Chibcha, and other groupings, but the greatest number formed part of the larger Chibcha family that extended into Central America and (in various pockets) Ecuador. What Chibchas mainly had in common was the fact that they spoke related languages, so that the term is above all a linguistic designation. Certainly the Chibchas varied widely among themselves in other respects. They did, though, include the two most notable peoples of pre-Columbian Colombia: the Taironas and the Muiscas. The Taironas are the only people who appear to have achieved something like a true urban civilization; the Muiscas had progressed furthest in the direction of political and territorial consolidation by the eve of the Spanish Conquest.
The Taironas lived mainly on the lower slopes (below 1,000 meters) of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, a range that rises abruptly from the Caribbean shore behind the present city of Santa Marta to beyond the snowline (see map 1). Just as the Sierra Nevada itself was cut off from the Andean cordilleras, the Taironas were isolated from other principal centers of Indian civilization, and though their territory was densely inhabited, its limited extent naturally set a limit on their total numbers. Once conquered by the Spanish, they were largely forgotten, and they did not much figure in discussions of Colombian antiquities until the 1970s, when the discovery of "Buritaca 200" (also called "Ciudad Perdida" or "Lost City") and intensified study of other
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Map 1.
Colonial New Granada, with Areas of Muisca and Tairona Civilizations
Tairona sites suddenly made contemporary Colombians aware of their achievements. These include the most impressive native engineering works found anywhere in the country: roads and bridges made of stone slabs, terracing of mountainsides for the planting of crops, and extensive construction of level platforms on which dwellings or other buildings once stood. The buildings have disappeared, but the system of platforms makes it possible to visualize a form of urban living. In addition, the Taironas produced some statuary, though not on the scale of San Agustín, and a great quantity and variety of other stone objects, goldwork, and fine ceramics. In purely qualitative terms, they were without question the outstanding Amerindian people among the precursors of modern Colombia.
The Muiscas were not equal to the Taironas in technical skill or artistic sophistication, but they were far more numerous (around 600,000,1 representing the largest concentration of Native Americans between the Inca empire and the Mayas of Middle America) and on that basis alone have tended to mold perceptions of preconquest culture and institutions. They lived in the intermountain basins of the Cordillera Oriental. The altitude of these basins, the largest of which is the Sabana de Bogotá, ranges generally between 2,000 and 3,000 meters, giving them a temperate to cool climate; the land was fertile and well watered; and the surrounding escarpments gave protection from such warlike peoples as the Panches of the upper Magdalena Valley. Apart from ritual anthropophagy, there is no real proof that the Panches were fierce cannibals, as the Spanish later claimed, but they were certainly uncomfortable neighbors.
The Muiscas were a preeminently agricultural people, living chiefly on potatoes and corn and also drinking fermented corn beer, or chicha . They were expert at making cotton textiles, from cotton obtained principally through trade; they worked gold, and they did some stone sculpturing. But they had no engineering works comparable to those of the Tairona, nor any settlements that could be described as incipient cities. Like all the other native inhabitants of the present Colombia, they had no form of writing. The Muiscas lived in single-family homes scattered amid the fields, and not just their homes but their "palaces" and temples were made of reed, wood, mud, and similar materials. To be sure, the more important structures might also have thin sheets of hammered gold hanging from the eaves—and these were inevitably among the first things to disappear when the Spaniards arrived on the scene. In some instances small children became con-
struction materials. A child would be placed in the hole dug for one of the wooden pillars that was to hold up the building; then the pillar would be set, the child crushed, and construction would proceed. This was one of a variety of human sacrifices practiced by the Muiscas and other preconquest inhabitants; but sacrifices were never even remotely on the Aztec scale.
The Muiscas possessed some salt springs in the vicinity of Zipaquirá (site of the so-called Salt Cathedral that is today a Colombian tourist attraction), from which they obtained salt for their own use and for an extensive trade with neighboring peoples. Indeed, most of their gold came not from their own territory but by way of trade. Even so, the Muiscas devised the ceremony that is the clearest model for the legend of El Dorado, literally "The Gilded Man," which the Spaniards later encountered over much of South America. As part of his installation ceremony, the local chief of one subgroup of the Muiscas would coat himself with gold dust and then would go out to the middle of sacred Lake Guatavita (around 50 kilometers northeast of Bogotá) and plunge into the icy waters. Precious stones and gold objects were thrown into the lake as offerings to the gods and, together with the gold dust, settled on the bottom. All this invited the cupidity of the Spanish once the identity of the lake was established; but their draining efforts were never successful.
Politically, the Muiscas had no overall government, although the stronger groups among them were gradually extending their rule over the weaker. At the lowest level, the basic unit of government and society was a clan type of organization, based on kinship ties. The highest-level political units have been conventionally referred to as kingdoms or confederations. When the Spanish arrived, two such confederations predominated: one centered near the present Bogotá and headed by a figure known as the Zipa; the other located about 100 kilometers northeast, at Tunja, whose leader bore the title of Zaque. Their respective "capitals," of course, were not cities like the Taironas' but mere clusters of a few ceremonial or other buildings. Neither the Zipa nor the Zaque exercised tight control over all those who in some way owed them allegiance; but they did enjoy positions of great honor and were surrounded by elaborate court ceremonial. Not even members of the Indian nobility dared to look at them in the face; and if, say, the Zipa indicated a need to spit, someone would hold out a piece of rich cloth for him to spit on, because it would be sacrilegious for anything
so precious as his saliva to touch the ground. Whoever held the cloth (all the while carefully looking the other way) then carried it off to be reverently disposed of.
The Indian leaders, whether local chiefs or heads of whole confederations, normally inherited their positions; but, as with a number of other Native American peoples, inheritance was not patrilineal. Instead, a chief was succeeded by his nephew—the oldest son of his oldest sister. There were exceptions, and the subjects apparently had some say in the matter, if only to confirm the successor in his post. But hereditary succession in the manner indicated was the rule; and, if Europeans had not interfered, it seems reasonable to assume that sooner or later either the Zipa or the Zaque would have absorbed the holdings of the other, along with certain lesser autonomous chiefdoms, thus creating a unified Muisca state. There are also signs that the Muiscas were on the verge of entering a period of more solid building activity and other advances in material civilization. All that, alas, was not to be.
The Coming of the SpaniardsOne of the numerous Spanish expeditions sent out to explore the Caribbean in the wake of Columbus's initial discovery sighted the Guajira Peninsula of what is now Colombia in 1500. Subsequently, in the early years of the sixteenth century, other expeditions touched on the Colombian coast looking for gold and pearls, Indian slaves, adventure—and the elusive waterway to Asia that Columbus himself had been seeking. Colonization was first attempted along the Gulf of Urabá, near the present border with Panama, where the town of San Sebastián was founded in 1510. From that same stretch of coast, expeditions moved both south into the interior and westward to the Isthmus of Panama, where Balboa, having assumed command of one Spanish band of explorers, happened on the Pacific Ocean in 1513.
Neither San Sebastián nor other settlements on the Gulf of Urabá proved permanent, but lasting footholds did develop elsewhere along the Caribbean coast. Santa Marta, today the oldest Spanish city in Colombia, was founded in 1526. Located on a sheltered bay, somewhat to the east of the mouth of the Magdalena, it was immediately adjacent to the country of the Taironas and also served in due course as point of departure for the conquest of the Muiscas. Cartagena, lying
to the west of the Magdalena, was founded in 1533; with an even better harbor, it would eventually eclipse Santa Marta.
Exploration and settlement had likewise been under way in western Venezuela, where Maracaibo, the later oil capital, dates from 1528. The Spanish crown had granted that area to the German banking firm of Welser, to which it owed money, in an arrangement roughly comparable to the proprietary governorships that the English government gave to such entrepreneurs as William Penn. The Germans recruited mostly Spanish soldiers and adventurers, although the commanders were German. Before long they were spilling over into territory to the west that had not been entrusted to them, lured by, among other things, the tales of El Dorado. Ultimately, one of them, Nicolás Federmann, traveled all the way to the territory of the Muiscas, by a most roundabout route; south over the Venezuelan Andes into the Orinoco basin, then westward, and finally climbing the Andes again, to come out on the Sabana de Bogotá—where he ran into other Europeans who had got there first.
Needless to say, the Spanish settlers at Cartagena and Santa Marta had also been hearing about wealthy kingdoms supposed to exist somewhere in the interior and had begun sending expeditions to find out. In April 1536 the expedition that would actually conquer the Muiscas set forth from Santa Marta, under the leadership of Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, who had been commissioned by the Spanish governor of Santa Marta to explore the headwaters of the Magdalena River. For that purpose he was given an army of about 800 men—550 foot soldiers, 50 on horseback, and another 200 in seven small boats aiming to sail up the river itself. Jiménez de Quesada was a lawyer by trade. He had come out initially to serve as chief magistrate for Santa Marta, but he proved to be about as tough-minded a commander as any of the professional soldiers of the conquest. And he did not lack opportunities to show his gifts of leadership, since trouble began almost at once. Several of the boats were lost trying to navigate the treacherous mouth of the Magdalena, and the soldiers traveling on foot or horseback (now joined by the shipwreck survivors) had to struggle against swamps, insects, disease, and every kind of annoyance. Worst of all, perhaps, there were few Indians living in the middle stretches of the Magdalena Valley to steal food from; men were reduced to making soup from their leather, and they kept dying of hunger, disease, and exhaustion by the wayside. Yet in March 1537
nearly 200 men from the original party finally got up into the highlands where the Muiscas lived.
Jiménez de Quesada made a good (if misleading) first impression on the Muiscas by hanging one of his own men who had stolen some cloth from an Indian. Not until he was approaching Bogotá did he meet active resistance, from Tisquesusa, the reigning Zipa. The Indians were easily beaten, although Tisquesusa himself managed to escape and go into hiding—whereupon the invaders hastened northeastward to Tunja, to overcome the Zaque. That, too, was quickly accomplished, and in Tunja the Spaniards seized a vast amount of gold as well. They were particularly delighted with those sheets of gold that the Muiscas would hang from the eaves of their main buildings; as one chronicler put it, the sound of these sheets as they rustled in the breeze was "a delicious tinkling" to the Spaniards.2 Jiménez de Quesada and his men had been less handsomely rewarded in their initial conquest of Tisquesusa's realm; so they went next to track down the fugitive Zipa, defeated him once more, and this time killed him in combat—inadvertently, because the Spaniards had hoped to take him alive and torture him until he told them where he had presumably hidden the rest of his treasure.
Tisquesusa's successor, the next Zipa, then turned around and made an alliance with the Spaniards, to ward off an attack from the Muiscas' undesirable neighbors to the west, the Panches of the Magdalena Valley. Although he successfully held off the Panches, he ultimately died under torture administered to him by his new allies in the vain hope that he would tell them where Tisquesusa had buried the treasure. Nevertheless, within the space of a few months, the conquerors did collect a really impressive amount of gold from all over the Muisca country. They had established control over a densely settled, fertile area that offered salt and potatoes, corn and emeralds, as well as gold artifacts. And they had done all this with just the members of Jiménez de Quesada's original army. They never received reinforcements from home base—in sharp contrast to the additional armies of soldiers and adventurers that kept meeting up with Hernán Cortés in the conquest of Mexico or Francisco Pizarro in the conquest of Peru. They were completely isolated from other Spaniards for almost three years, and they probably would not have survived to tell of their accomplishments if they had met up with anything like the Aztec war machine. The Muiscas, however, while not lacking in bravery, appear
to have had no special military vocation; and they suffered from the same psychological and technological disadvantages as other Amerindian peoples when faced with the strange appearance and superior weaponry of the Europeans.
In addition to fighting battles, Jiménez de Quesada founded Bogotá as a Spanish city in 1538 and made it the capital of the newly conquered territory, which he named New Granada after his birthplace in Spain. In due course the name would be applied to all of the present Colombia. The city itself was formally named Santa Fe and continued to be known as such until the end of the colonial period (although for convenience it will be better to call it from the start by the name of Bogotá, a Spanish corruption of a nearby Muisca place-name, which the city assumed at the time of independence and retained until in 1991, for reasons not quite clear, it was officially rechristened Santa Fe de Bogotá). But while Jiménez de Quesada was thus attempting to organize his conquest, he was unexpectedly forced to deal with two other streams of explorers, who by odd coincidence arrived on the scene just weeks after the Spanish city was founded. One of these was the expedition commanded by Federmann, coming from Venezuela. The other was a wave coming up from Peru, under one of Pizarro's lieutenants, Sebastián de Belalcázar, who had recently taken Quito—the northernmost city of the Inca empire. Then, seeing new lands to conquer still farther north, Belalcázar set out to conquer them. He had already hit upon what was to become the chief gold-mining area of the Spanish empire, in the Pacific slopes of the Colombian Andes and adjoining lowlands. He founded several cities—most notably, Popayán and Cali in 1536. These two cities became the principal urban centers of southern Colombia from, respectively, the conquest until the middle of the last century and the mid-nineteenth century until the present. He also, in due course, turned eastward, toward the Muisca country—only to encounter the men of Jiménez de Quesada and Federmann, who had arrived before him.
The normal pattern in the Spanish Conquest, when bands of conquistadores converged on the same territory from different directions, would have been for all three groups—the men of Jiménez de Quesada, Belalcázar, and Federmann—to get together in a rip-roaring civil war to determine who should inherit the spoils of the conquered. Remarkably, in New Granada nothing of the sort happened. Instead, in a summit meeting held in early 1539, the three leaders agreed to submit
their claims to the government in Spain and to abide by its decision. In the end the Spanish crown quite characteristically refused to give New Granada to any of the three but instead delivered it to a fourth party, the son of the late governor of Santa Marta, who quickly proved to be grasping and abusive. Jiménez de Quesada received numerous honors and lesser rewards, including authorization to conquer huge tracts of land on the llanos , or plains stretching east and southeast of the Cordillera Oriental. He had hopes of discovering wealthy empires there, but he did not; without gold and with few Indians who could be made to work, the region remained largely worthless from the Spanish standpoint. Belalcázar was at least confirmed by the king as governor of Popayán. And Federmann (or, more precisely, his employers, the Welser banking firm) was left with just Venezuela, where the Germans proved to be capable explorers and Indian fighters but did little to develop the colony and were eventually relieved of their concession by the Spanish government.
Colonial New Granada: Society and InstitutionsAfter years of experimentation with proprietary and other forms of colonial administration, in the second half of the sixteenth century Spain finally established the definitive form of government for New Granada. As in the Spanish empire as a whole, the structure—in principle—was highly centralized. The area was governed by the king and his advisers back in Spain, the most important group of advisers being the Council of the Indies—whose members served as administrative board, fount of legislation, and appeals court all at the same time. At the American end the highest authorities were the Spanish viceroys, each of whom had at his side an Audiencia with functions roughly comparable (on a lesser scale) to those of the Council of the Indies in Spain. For most of the colonial period, present-day Colombia formed part of the Viceroyalty of Peru, but the viceroy at Lima could never expect to wield much real authority over lands so far removed from the Peruvian capital. Hence, a captain-general of New Granada was appointed in 1564. With the aid of his own Audiencia, this officer was to administer all of Venezuela except the Caracas area and all of Colombia except the southwest corner. This portion of Colombia, which included Cali and Popayán, came under the authority of the
president of Quito (i.e., Ecuador), who had much the same duties as a captain-general, except in military matters. He, too, had his own Audiencia, as did the president of Panama.
The territorial arrangements just outlined remained basically the same until the eighteenth century, when Spain undertook extensive reforms of colonial administration. In 1717 the Captaincy-General of New Granada was raised to the status of a viceroyalty in its own right, and the ties with Peru were cut. Six years later the previous arrangements were put back in place, because the cost of maintaining a viceregal court at Bogotá seemed greater than the benefits. But in 1739 the Viceroyalty of New Granada was reestablished for good—largely as a response to heightened colonial rivalry in the Caribbean, which made it desirable to have an official of viceregal rank on the spot in northern South America. The two presidencies of Quito and Panama were attached to the Viceroyalty of New Granada rather than, as before, to that of Peru, although shortly afterward Panama lost its status as a separate presidency. In 1777, finally, Venezuela was made a captaincy-general, having its capital at Caracas and taking in essentially all the territory that comprises Venezuela today. It still formed part of the Viceroyalty of New Granada, but the authorities in Bogotá had little more power over the captain-general and Audiencia now set up in Caracas than the viceroy of Peru had formerly exercised over Bogotá. This lineup of major territorial divisions would exist at the time of independence and would serve as a basis for drawing the eventual boundaries of the new nations.
Below the level of viceroyalties, captaincies-general, and presidencies were smaller territorial divisions that can be generically termed provinces, each with its appointed governor (though this title could also vary). At the very bottom of the political system were the organs of local government, principally the cabildos , or town councils. Cabildo members were undemocratically chosen, most often by some form of co-optation; but at least they were local residents, whether European-born Spaniards or creoles (i.e., native-born whites). The cabildo was thus the one institution of colonial government that did have a certain representative character. The system as a whole, furthermore, though often marked by corruption, inefficiency, and abuse, was neither much worse nor much better than most systems of government in the world at that period. Even what might appear flagrant cases of corruption were often instances where the govern-
ing body sensibly ignored a regulation not suited to local conditions or bent the rules (in response to money or influence) in favor of the colonial inhabitants. In that last respect, the "corruptibility" of the system actually made it more representative.
It was gold that had first and most powerfully attracted Spaniards to New Granada, and they found substantial amounts of it. But they were also attracted, as elsewhere in America, to regions that had an Amerindian population sufficiently large and malleable to serve as a labor force, and here again New Granada had much to offer—above all, in the Muisca country and other highland areas of sedentary agriculturalists who were already accustomed to a more than rudimentary form of social and political organization. In such areas the incoming Spaniards established themselves as a dominant upper layer, ruling the conquered peoples through their own local headmen as well as through the new control systems that they themselves instituted. They required labor from the Indians in both mines and fields, though outright enslavement of Indians, widely practiced in the early years in other parts of Spanish America, did not take hold in New Granada. There were less extreme but equally or more effective ways of exploitation. Most important was the system of encomienda , whereby groups of Indians were technically entrusted to a Spaniard so that he could help them learn the ways of civilization (naturally including the Christian religion) and in return for such guidance and protection receive tribute from them. The tribute owed by an Indian to the Spaniard (the encomendero ) could initially be in goods or labor or both. The Spanish government soon made the exaction of tribute in labor illegal, but it continued to be demanded widely in violation of the law. Though eventually the crown ended encomienda itself (at which point all tribute went simply to the treasury), even ex-encomenderos retained some unofficial authority over their former charges.
Indians could also be legally forced, under certain circumstances, to do paid labor in Spanish-owned mines or estates; and the possibilities for illegal exploitation were even more numerous. One factor that limited the amount of exploitation, however, was the drastic decline in numbers of the Indians themselves. As in other parts of America, including the non-Spanish colonies, the conquered Amerindians suffered a demographic catastrophe in the first two centuries following their contact with the Europeans. Their decimation resulted not only from casualties inflicted during the conquest itself and the repression of
postconquest rebellions but also from sheer overwork and mistreatment, the disruption of traditional social relations, and the spread of European diseases such as measles and smallpox. Authorities disagree about the relative importance of the different factors (the new diseases generally being accorded first rank as a cause of death) and about the extent of the decline, which inevitably varied by region. Along the Caribbean coast, one of the regions hardest hit, as much as 95 percent of the population was wiped out in less than a hundred years.3
One reason why the rate of decline is difficult to measure and evaluate is that ethnic miscegenation had turned so many descendants of Chibchas into mestizos, of mixed Spanish and Indian ancestry. By the close of the colonial period, less than a quarter of New Granada's estimated 1,400,000 inhabitants were classified as Indians. The rest were either white or mestizo (more of the latter than the former) or else descended from the slaves brought from Africa to work in the Atlantic and Pacific lowlands (and more often by then of mixed than unmixed African ancestry). The total population may have been still somewhat less than that of the preconquest era. It is hard to say how much less; but demographic catastrophe, at least, had been left behind, and the population overall was growing at around 1.6 percent per year.4
Even those still counted as Indians had been subject to varying degrees of cultural assimilation, a process that was especially rapid in the principal areas of Spanish settlement. Thus, by the end of the seventeenth century, the language of the Muiscas had virtually disappeared, save in the form of place-names and terms for local plants and fauna that were adopted into Spanish. This situation was repeated in less extreme form elsewhere in the interior highlands. It contrasted with the survival, in such colonies as Mexico and Peru or even highland Ecuador, of whole native peoples who continued to set themselves apart—by means of language, dress, and customs—from the population of Spaniards and mestizos. The extensive assimilation of Amerindians was clearly due in part to their relatively modest numbers and middling level of social and material development as compared to the native peoples of those other regions. Whatever the precise reasons, it sharply reduced, and from an early date, one potential obstacle to national integration, although even culturally assimilated Indians remained near the bottom of a society marked by sharp social and other stratification.
New Granada was one of the less dynamic, economically, of Spain's American colonies. At its center lay the old heartland of the Muiscas—the mountain and plateau country stretching northeastward from the area of Bogotá and corresponding roughly to the present-day Colombian departments of Cundinamarca and Boyacá. This central region was devoted primarily to agriculture and livestock for local consumption. There was no significant demand outside the region for its products; and even if there had been, transportation costs to foreign markets or to other parts of the colony would have been prohibitive. At least the region had been heavily enough inhabited in preconquest times to retain a substantial Indian population even after the usual drastic decline in Indian numbers, and much of its production was carried out by the surviving Indian communities, which—just as before the conquest—owned their lands mainly in common. These common lands (or resguardos ) were now protected by the law of the conquerors themselves. Much of the best land, however, had come by one means or another into the hands of the conquistadores and their descendants and was formed into haciendas. As in most of Spanish America, these haciendas used extensive methods of cultivation and livestock raising, with little capital investment. For the most part, hacienda workers were technically free subjects, though they might be Indians who had left their own villages for part-time work with a Spanish landowner because they had to earn money to pay their taxes. As time went on, an increasing number of small, separate private plots (incipient minifundios ) provided a livelihood to the growing mestizo population as well as to poor whites and to a floating element of the Indian masses—i.e., Indians who had become detached from their traditional communities but were not yet reduced to the condition of a landless proletariat.
Assorted small craft industries existed in central New Granada alongside farming and stock raising. Whether practiced by farm families in their spare time or by specialized artisans in the surrounding towns, these, too, were strictly for local consumption. The greatest concentration of artisan shops was naturally to be found in Bogotá itself, which by the eve of independence had grown to a city of about 25,000 people. Simply as the political capital of the colony, it had its inevitable complement of public officials and professional or menial service personnel. But Bogotá's economic role was largely parasitical, and even as a service and marketing center it had to share some of the
limelight with Tunja, whose early settlers grew prosperous through the exploitation of nearby encomienda Indians.
In the southwestern part of New Granada, the province of Popayán encompassed another highland area of relatively dense Indian population. Socially and culturally, Popayán had much in common with the central core of the colony. However, it also contained some gold-mining territory along the Pacific lowlands. A population of African slaves had been brought in to work the mines, which were controlled mainly by absentee owners in the city of Popayán. This small urban center became a rather wealthy place, with an upper class of definite aristocratic pretensions. Popayán had more Spanish titles of nobility among its leading families than did Bogotá, where the only titled nobleman was the Marqués de San Jorge, who had purchased his title (as was the custom) in the eighteenth century but did not keep up the payments and eventually became enmeshed in a protracted lawsuit over his right to keep on using the title.
Popayán and its hinterland had strong ties with what is now Ecuador, dating from the days of the conquest. It was governed from Quito until the final establishment of the Viceroyalty of New Granada, and even after that Quito retained some shreds of jurisdiction. Pasto, in the far South, sent judicial cases on appeal to the Audiencia of Quito and belonged to the ecclesiastical diocese of Quito until the end of the colonial period. In due course the residents of Pasto, and even some people in Popayán, seriously considered becoming part of the Republic of Ecuador rather than of independent New Granada.
The jurisdiction of Popayán extended northward into the fertile section of the Cauca Valley, whose chief city is Cali. Although today this section is one of the fastest-developing parts of the country, in the colonial era it languished in relative unimportance, chiefly for lack of good transportation—being cut off by the steep Cordillera Central from the Magdalena River artery and from Bogotá, while the nearby Pacific coast did not yet have a Panama Canal through which to ship out goods. Transportation was also difficult for the province of Antioquia, in the Northwest, which lay astride the Cordillera Central itself. However, because Antioquia's leading industry was the mining of gold, it could easily withstand any transport costs. The gold was drawn from placer deposits in the Cauca River and its tributaries, as well as from other deposits scattered throughout the province, and it was exploited both by gangs of slaves in the larger mining operations
and by countless individual prospectors. Antioquia consisted mostly of rugged terrain ill suited to the formation of large estates, although some did appear. At the same time, it needed a reliable source of food production to support the mining camps. In part to meet that need, an independent peasant sector composed mainly of poor whites and mestizos came into existence. But the merchants who provided supplies to the mines and handled the export of the ore occupied the dominant position in Antioqueño society.
In the northern part of the colony lay the broad Caribbean coastal plain, whose metropolis was the great port of Cartagena, today the best example of a colonial walled city surviving anywhere in the Americas. Cartagena served as a port of call for convoys passing between Spain and the Isthmus of Panama, from which goods were then transshipped down the west coast of South America; it also handled virtually all the legal import-export trade of New Granada. The exports consisted of almost nothing but gold, for New Granada, though certainly not a one-crop or one-product colony, was without question a one-export colony—thus setting a pattern that would continue in Colombia until quite recent times, with only the substitution of a succession of agricultural commodities for gold as the primary export. This was, indeed, the principal gold-producing colony of the Spanish empire, even if the total yield paled alongside the silver of Mexico and Peru, and even though the mines employed a very small part of the total population.
Besides serving as a gateway to and from the outside world, Cartagena was the chief naval base of the Spanish Main (with Havana, one of the two great centers of Spanish naval power in America) and the principal entry point into Spanish South America for the African slave trade, where newly arrived captives received their first "seasoning" before going on to their ultimate destination. Along with Mexico City and Lima, Cartagena was also one of the three colonial headquarters of the dread Spanish Inquisition, but the local branch was never as busy as the other two centers. Only five (or maybe six) people were burned for heresy at Cartagena in the entire colonial period, as against over a hundred in Mexico and Peru; some 762 were sentenced to lesser penalties.5
Among the other coastal settlements, Santa Marta, from which Jiménez de Quesada had set out for the conquest of the Muiscas, also had a good harbor. But it rapidly lost ground, largely because Car-
tagena was easier to get to from the Magdalena River, the colony's chief artery of internal communication. The ideal might have been a seaport at the very mouth of the river, but the mouth of the Magdalena was difficult to navigate. So a canal was built to connect Cartagena with a small tributary of the river, thus providing direct water transportation all the way from the upper Magdalena Valley to the Caribbean, at Cartagena, and that really precluded a major commercial role for Santa Marta until the nineteenth century. Particularly in the later colonial period, the Caribbean coast acquired additional importance in grazing and agriculture, producing hides, sugar, indigo, and other tropical commodities. But these products never came close to challenging gold as exports for New Granada, and most of the Caribbean lowlands remained very sparsely inhabited.
Although its connection with the rest of New Granada was always somewhat tenuous, the Isthmus of Panama had a number of features in common with the northern coastal region. It played a key role in overseas commerce, while its own internal economy was poorly developed; likewise, there was a noticeable African strain in its general population mixture. It formally became part of New Granada only in the mid-eighteenth century, when it was included in the new viceroyalty. Previously, it had been a dependency of Peru, and Panamanians were not entirely happy with the change. The rule of Lima was at least familiar, and the Peruvian capital was also much easier to get to than Bogotá. All one had to do was climb aboard a coastal vessel and go down the west side of South America to Callao, the port serving Lima. To reach the capital of New Granada, on the other hand, one had to cross the isthmian mountains (if one lived in Panama City on the Pacific side); then take ship to Cartagena, beating against the wind; and from there embark on the excruciatingly uncomfortable month-long trip (usually in a pole boat of some sort) up the Magdalena River to Honda, from which it was still necessary to travel a few more days overland and uphill to Bogotá.
To make things worse, annexation to New Granada was quickly followed by Panama's loss of its status as a separate presidency and, at the same time, by a long era of economic depression, resulting from changes in the Spanish commercial system. The economic importance of Panama, after all, was based on the legal requirement, during most of the colonial period, that all goods to western South America be sent by way of the isthmus, whose people in large part lived from the tran-
sit trade. But in the mid-eighteenth century Spain revamped the imperial commercial regulations in such a way as to discontinue the convoy system between Cádiz and the isthmus and to make it legally possible for ships to sail directly from Spain around Cape Horn to the South American Pacific ports. This change in route was a boon to Chile but a disaster to Panama, which did not truly recover until the California gold rush of the next century.
The last major region of New Granada, the Northeast, consisted of the colonial provinces of Pamplona and Socorro, or modern departments of Norte de Santander and Santander. It was a heterogeneous area, which to one degree or another exhibited almost all the characteristics of the other regions: it had all the races, all the crops, all the types of landholding represented. It also had, in the town of Socorro and surrounding villages, the chief manufacturing center of New Granada. Cotton textiles were the main output, but there was nothing like a factory system. This was instead a cottage industry that featured hand spinning and hand weaving, all done in individual family units, often by the farm families in their spare time or by wives and daughters while the men were in the field. It was organized according to the "putting-out system," whereby a single entrepreneur acquired cotton, handed it out to different households to be made into thread, then parceled out the thread in the same way to be made into cloth. The end product was coarse cotton cloth for use both locally and in neighboring provinces. Employment was given to several thousand people, and while nobody got rich, a lot of people—again mostly poor whites and mestizos—acquired some added measure of economic independence.
Though not a major region of the colony except in size, the eastern llanos were at least more important in the colonial period than at any time before the twentieth century. These were tropical grasslands, flooded in rainy season and parched in dry season and linked to Andean population centers by only the most rudimentary trails. The llanos were home to a limited population of semisettled Indians and to increasing numbers of wild cattle, to say nothing of mosquitoes and other such pests. Various expeditions roamed through them in the age of the conquest, but when no great sources of wealth were found, the Spanish settlers of New Granada showed little interest in them. The task of establishing a colonial presence was therefore left to missionary orders—above all, the Jesuits—who strove to gather the Indians into mission communities so that they could be Christianized and
"civilized." With the help of Indian labor, the Jesuits created not only cattle ranches but plantations of sugar and other commodities. This mission empire passed into the hands of rival religious orders after the Jesuits were expelled from the Spanish empire in 1767. They did not prove equally successful in maintaining it, but the definitive decline of the llanos economy came only in the early nineteenth century, when the war of independence decimated the herds of cattle and republican reform legislation dealt the final blow to the mission system.6
The use of the frontier mission as a colonizing device was one of the ways in which the Roman Catholic church made itself felt in the life of the colony. It also played an important mediating role between the Hispanic state and society and the settled Indian communities of the Andean highlands, which had been mostly Christianized, at least superficially, soon after the conquest. It took less interest in the population of African slaves, although the Catalan missionary Pedro Claver was ultimately canonized for his work among the newly arrived cargoes of Africans in Cartagena. Among the Spanish and mestizo inhabitants, finally, the church not only ministered to religious needs but provided most of the social services (including education) available during the period. In order to fulfill its functions, it maintained a clergy that by the end of the colonial regime numbered about 1,850, including both male and female, regular and secular. For a population of 1,400,000, this meant a ratio of roughly one to every 750 inhabitants—a much denser clergy-population ratio than the Roman Catholic church can show anywhere in Latin America today.7 There was, however, a relative overconcentration of clergy of all kinds in Bogotá, Popayán, and a few other urban centers.
The clergy was not only numerous, by present-day standards; it was relatively wealthy, receiving income from parish fees and from the payment of tithes (required by civil and not just ecclesiastical law) and enjoying the income of extensive property holdings that it had accumulated through gifts and investments. The precise extent of its wealth is impossible to estimate with precision; certainly, it was less than nineteenth-century anticlericals would later claim in justification of their attacks on church property. The church may well have owned close to a quarter of the urban property in Bogotá, but for the colony as a whole something like 5 percent of urban and rural real estate (always excluding the vast expanse of unclaimed public domain) would be a better guess.8 Even so, the church had no serious rival as
the principal owner of both urban and rural property. In addition, much of the land not directly under church control was heavily mortgaged to the church by way of liens that had been accepted either in return for loans (for church institutions were also the chief money-lenders) or in voluntary support of pious works and endowments.
From its missionary role to its share of property ownership, the church in New Granada conformed to a pattern evident throughout Spanish America, although the church's position was stronger in New Granada than it was in some of the other colonies. Because of its gold and its large population of settled Indians to be converted and exploited, New Granada attracted the close attention of ecclesiastical as well as civil authorities from early in the colonial period. In New Granada the church managed to build the solid institutional base that it never really had in colonies such as Venezuela or Cuba, which became truly important only in the late colonial era, when religious zeal was beginning to flag. To be sure, the church was not as strong in the coastal area as in the Andean interior, a contrast that faithfully reflected its greater interest in creoles and Indians than in the African-Americans who formed a larger proportion of the inhabitants of the tropical lowlands. Even in the highlands the church's hold on the minds of at least the upper social strata began to weaken in the late eighteenth century. But this slight relative shift did not greatly affect the picture of a Roman Catholic church whose position rivaled and in some respects even exceeded that of the state.
Though not exactly a cultural and intellectual backwater, colonial New Granada made far fewer noteworthy contributions to the world of arts and letters than did the two main centers of Spanish power in America, Mexico and Peru. One of the more idiosyncratic, but still valuable, chronicles of the Spanish Conquest itself is the Elegías de varones ilustres de Indias , in which the Tunja cleric Juan de Castellanos set out in verse form the great deeds of the first conquerors and explorers. The Carnero de Bogotá of Juan Rodríguez Freile is a lively assortment of early colonial gossip, which can be read even today for pleasure and not simply as a historical document. In literature there is not much else to mention. The colony did not even have a printing press until one finally began to function in Bogotá in 1738. In the field of art, aside from much utilitarian and religious folk art, New Granada produced the painter Gregorio Vázquez Arce de Ceballos, whose canvases on religious themes were highly competent even if they
lacked the spark of genius. He did not succeed in creating a Bogotá "school" comparable to the Cuzco and Quito "schools," and neither did church architecture attain the same heights of splendor as in those (and a good many other) colonial centers. By far the most notable architectural achievement, in fact, was in military construction: the great fort of San Felipe and associated defense works that guarded Cartagena, completed in the early eighteenth century and never taken by storm.
Facilities for formal education were wholly lacking in rural areas, and everywhere the working class had little access to them. Women, even of the upper social strata, were essentially limited to what instruction they could receive at home. On the other hand, higher education was rather well developed, for sons of the colonial elite. Bogotá had two universities, controlled respectively by the Jesuits and the Dominicans and featuring the basic tracks of law and theology. Moreover, in the last half of the eighteenth century, the capital of New Granada became briefly one of the leading centers of intellectual activity in Spanish America, especially in the field of scientific investigation. An interest in the natural sciences formed part of the intellectual ferment that stirred the entire Western world during the Enlightenment, and not even remote New Granada, it appears, could escape the trends of the time.
The immediate spark for achievements in science was the arrival, in 1760, of José Celestino Mutis, a learned Spanish naturalist who came to Bogotá as personal physician to one of the late colonial viceroys, Pedro Messía de la Cerda. Messía eventually left, after he had expelled the Jesuits; but Mutis stayed on and became increasingly fascinated by the colony's enormous wealth of botanical species, a natural consequence of its topographical diversity. (Colombia is exceeded today only by Brazil among nations of the world in the number of distinct species of flora to which it plays host.) Mutis gained some early notoriety by his frank affirmation of the Copernican thesis that the earth revolves around the sun and not vice versa, which was still a little daring in those Andean fastnesses and got him into trouble with the Inquisition. But, having the sympathy of top civil officials, he was never in serious danger of going off to the Inquisition's dungeons at Cartagena. Instead, he went on to found the Expedición Botánica, an ambitious research project designed to record all the botanical species found in South America north of the equator. That aim was
beyond the capacity of anyone to achieve, but with a team of fellow investigators and research assistants, including skilled painters to make drawings of the plants, Mutis did enough to be awarded an honorary membership in the Swedish Academy of Science.
Although Mutis was from the mother country, he drew his collaborators mainly from the creole intelligentsia, and some of them would become leaders of the independence movement early in the next century. That movement would also bring a sudden end to the scientific enlightenment in New Granada, both by dispersing its leading figures (Mutis himself was by then dead) and by opening up a range of new careers for ambitious and intelligent creoles that came to take precedence over scientific pursuits.
Despite its fleeting prominence in science—and its gold—New Granada was not one of the most cherished jewels in Spain's imperial crown. Spanish functionaries were sometimes even unsure where or what it was: the officers of the Cádiz Consulado made reference to the "island" of Santa Marta, as though that oldest of Spanish foundations on the Colombian coast was just another dot somewhere in the middle of the Caribbean.9 New Granada was not remotely comparable to New Spain (i.e., Mexico) as a producer of wealth, and it conspicuously lacked the dynamism of such colonies as the Río de la Plata or Venezuela, which in the late colonial period were experiencing rapid economic growth. The picture that emerges from the records is one of a somnolent and largely subsistence economy, presided over by a small upper class descended from either the conquistadores or later Iberian immigrants and distinguished from the mass of the population less by the comforts of their lifestyle (though they did enjoy more amenities) than by their sense of self-importance.
For the rural and urban working classes, among whom mestizos by the eve of independence were already most numerous, the colony's relative stagnation was not an unmixed evil. Even if the obligation to pay tribute forced New Granada's Indians to hire themselves out to creole landowners at least long enough to earn their yearly quota, they faced nothing like the rigors of the Potosí mita , the forced labor draft whereby Peruvian and Bolivian villagers were herded to work in the recesses of the great "silver mountain" at Potosí. Fortunately for them, New Granada had no Potosí, and exploitation of any kind of labor was kept within limits, both because the potential returns to the exploiter were modest and because there was still no lack of readily ac-
cessible unoccupied land. The gold mines were tended by black slaves, who at least were better off panning gold in New Granada than they would have been cutting cane in Cuba or Brazil. And Bogotá, most isolated of viceregal capitals, was far less of a magnet city—overshadowing lesser cities and draining away their wealth and talents—than, say, Lima or Buenos Aires. Colombia's modern profile as a country of multiple urban centers, each with a vigorous life of its own, goes back to the colonial era. Within those colonial cities and towns, there was already forming a cadre of future leaders—clerks and lawyers, businessmen, absentee landowners, or all those things combined—who would soon set out to form a new nation.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Making of Modern Colombia: A Nation in Spite of Itselfby David Bushnell Copyright © 1993 by David Bushnell. Excerpted by permission.
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