The Colonial Period

CONQUEST AND SETTLEMENT

The first substantial Spanish incursion into the lands now called Bolivia took place in 1535, the year Diego de Almagro led his great expedition south from Peru toward Chile. On its way, the expedition passed over the high Bolivian plateau now known as the altiplano.

A little south of Cuzco, Almagro moved from Quechua-dominated territory into Aymara lands. Over the previous several centuries, the Aymara speakers had organized themselves into more than a dozen substantial polities. Prominent among these were the Colla, around the northern and western shores of Lake Titicaca, and the Lupaqa, great raisers of llamas on the southwest fringes of the lake. Two hundred and fifty miles southeast of Titicaca were the less rich and powerful Charca, whose name became attached to the Spanish highland region that developed around and south of the lake and embraced most of the Aymara peoples. The province of Charcas was the direct ancestor of modern Bolivia. (The highland region was also known up to about 1700 as the Provincias de Arriba, or "Upper Provinces," and after that as Alto Perú, or "Upper Peru.")

The Aymara polities had been incorporated into the Inca Empire about 1460, becoming the province named Collasuyo. But loss of independence brought surprisingly little change in politics, economy, and society. Extraction of tribute and the implantation of Quechua-speaking colonies (mitmaq)—for example, in the valleys of Cochabamba—were the main exceptions.

Permanent Spanish occupation of Aymara lands did not begin until 1538, and was facilitated by native conflicts. In that year, the Lupaqa, probably prompted by the anti-Spanish rebel leader Manco Inca, attacked the Colla. The Colla had been stubbornly pro-Spanish since the Inca war of succession, in which they had supported Huascar in his struggle against his brother Atahualpa. (Huascar had been assassinated by Atahualpa; the newly arrived Spaniards then propitiously executed the latter.) At the Lupaqa attack, the Colla called for Spanish help. The ranking Spanish leader in Cuzco, Hernando Pizarro, decided to oblige. A quick Spanish victory at the Desaguadero River, at the southern tip of Titacaca, opened the way into the remaining Aymara lands. Many Aymara yielded peacefully, but not all. In the eastern Andean ranges (now known as the Cordillera Real), the Chicha polity, encouraged by Manco's agents, led other Aymara in opposition. Late in 1538, a fierce battle ensued in the Cocha-bamba Valley, in which the Spanish, now under Gonzalo Pizarro, and a number of Incas loyal to them prevailed, though barely. By 19 March 1539, Gonzalo Pizarro was back in Cuzco, bringing with him Aymara leaders who had surrendered.

At about the same time, the Spaniards accomplished two other objectives in Aymara territory that had enduring effects. The first, the work of Pedro Anzures de Campo Redondo, a subordinate of the Pizarros, was the foundation, possibly in mid-1538, of Villa de Plata in a temperate valley 140 miles south of Cochabamba. This town, which soon became the city of La Plata (renamed Sucre in 1839), was the political and administrative capital of the colonial province of Charcas from 1559 until independence and then, to 1898, of the sovereign state of Bolivia. Its name, "Silver," reputedly commemorates a 1538 event of still greater moment for Bolivian history: the Spanish location, 70 miles southwest of the town's site, of the silver deposits of Porco, worked by the Incas and doubtless by the Aymara and others before them. The Pizarros immediately seized a major interest in Porco. Henceforth, "Charcas" became synonymous with silver.

That association was vastly strengthened in 1545 with the discovery of the Cerro Rico (Rich Hill) at Potosí, between Porco and La Plata. The mines of Rich Hill and of the area around Potosí yielded about half the silver produced by Spanish America from 1550 to 1650 and continued yielding abundantly until the 1890s. Potosí itself soon attracted tens of thousands of inhabitants, becoming before 1600, despite its altitude of over 13,000 feet, one of the three largest cities of Spanish America—matched only by Lima and Mexico City in size and wealth. Its growth conjured into existence, or at least stimulated the rise of, many smaller towns in the Bolivian highlands. One such town was La Paz, founded in 1548 some 40 miles southeast of the lower end of Titicaca. The aim here was to safeguard from native attack the increasingly important road linking Spanish Peru with Potosí, Porco, and La Plata. In due course La Paz became a large trading and agricultural center in its own right, the main Spanish city in northern Charcas, and, from the 1890s on, the de facto capital of Bolivia.

Among the areas that sold goods to Potosí were the eastern interior lowlands. Here, in conquest and settlement, there was a great contrast with the highlands, since the impetus had come from the southeast in a series of expeditions across the Gran Chaco from Paraguay between 1537 and 1547. The result, in 1561, was the foundation of the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, 160 miles northeast of La Plata, by ñuflo de Chávez. The city lay at the foot of the Andes' easternmost salient into the interior and was from the start the key Spanish center in lowland Charcas. It has grown in recent decades to rival La Paz in wealth and political influence.

While the native people of the plains posed little threat to Spanish settlement, those of the montaña region, the wide foothill zone east and southeast of La Plata, were a different matter. The Spaniards called them, generically, Chiriquanos. This expansive and bellicose culture, reportedly of Guaraní origin, proved as resistant to Spanish incursions as it had been to the Incas'. The threat it posed to the main Spanish centers in Charcas was contained by the founding of defensive frontier towns such as Tarija (1574) and Tomina (1575). But from mountain retreats the Chiriguanos continued to threaten until the end of the colonial period.

EARLY COLONIAL GOVERNMENT AND ECONOMY

The Chiriguanos were, however, only a small worm in the opulent apple of Charcas. Once the richness of Potosí became apparent, Spaniards flooded in, closely pursued by the Spanish state in the form of the Audiencia of Charcas. This blend of high court and governing council was formally created in 1558–1559, with its seat in La Plata. There it remained, the main administrative body of Charcas, until independence. Its jurisdiction embraced what is now Bolivia and large parts of present-day Chile, Peru, Paraguay, and Argentina. Within this vast territory arose several regional governorships, each to some degree independent of the audiencia. The only substantial one falling inside what is now Bolivia was that of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, created in the 1590s.

State influence in Charcas grew by another quantum leap in the 1570s with the arrival of Don Francisco de Toledo, fifth viceroy of Peru. Toledo is renowned for the five-year Visita General (general inspection) he made of the central part of his vice-royalty; half of the time (late 1572-mid-1575) was spent in Charcas. There, as in Peru itself, he directed the relocation (reducción) of native people to new communities, fewer and larger than their traditional ones. The aim here was multiple: to separate the people from their familiar surroundings, so that they could be more easily Hispanicized (in, for example, religion and civil government); to simplify organization of their labor; and to facilitate tribute collection. Many of the displaced people abandoned the new towns, but Toledo certainly achieved permanent disruption of old patterns. He reassessed tributes and generally redefined them as cash rather than kind for convenience of collection. This change forced Andeans to participate in the money economy of the Spanish world by selling either their goods or their labor for cash. Toledo also extended the reach of the state by introducing corregidores (district officers) to administer indigenous affairs in rural areas. He organized the founding of Cochabamba in 1570 or 1571, partly as a barrier against the Chiriguanos. The city then grew rapidly as the focus of a large and fertile farming region closely tied to the Potosí market.

It was in Potosí that Toledo wrought his best-remembered reforms. First he organized the notorious Mita, the system of forced labor that brought to Potosí each year, at least initially, more than 13,000 native men to work in mines and refineries. Forced labor had been sent to Potosí before Toledo's time; but he systematized and enlarged the practice (see also slavery). Many mita workers, with their families, stayed in Potosí after their year of service was over, adding to its population. Others left but did not return home. For various reasons they preferred to join the swelling number of displaced people that was one notable outcome of Spanish colonial practices throughout the central Andes in the sixteenth century.

Toledo's other major effort at Potosí was to promote the refining of ores by amalgamation with mercury. The technique, developed in Mexico about 1555, had been slow to reach the Andes, though it was poised for advance there when Toledo decided to push it forward. He first stimulated mercury production at Huancavelica, southeast of Lima. Then he encouraged experts to demonstrate the method in Potosí. The outcome of this innovation, allied with cheap and plentiful mita labor, was a phenomenal boom that reached its peak in 1592. But the gain was at great cost to the native people. Not only were they uprooted and forced into dangerous work at low pay but they were driven from the central role they had played in silver production. Expensive refining mills were needed to make amalgamation profitable, and such investment was beyond the Indians' capacity.

By 1600, the best ores at Potosí had been mined, though vast quantities of lesser material remained. This depletion led to a search for new silver deposits all over highland Charcas. The richest discovery was at a site on the altiplano 120 miles southeast of La Paz. The ores proved so good and plentiful that in 1607 a new town, Oruro, was created nearby. Production there never equaled Potosí at its peak, but it remained important. Other and lesser deposits were briefly exploited around Potosí throughout the seventeenth century. Their effect was only briefly to interrupt the downward trend of the district's output. By the early 1700s, production had returned to the levels of the 1560s (pre-mita and pre-amalgamation). It stayed there until the 1740s, when a 1736 reduction from a fifth to a tenth in the royalty taken by the Crown on silver production and a later increase in the labor impositions on the mita workers spurned a modest recovery, which lasted the rest of the century.

Whatever the fluctuations in silver output, the mining towns (above all Potosí) needed food and multitudinous other goods. This led, from about 1550 on, to the articulation of a vast economic zone to supply their requirements. The valleys around Cochabamba, and Mizque to the southeast of it, were early and lasting examples of these backward linkages from mining. Their livelihood depended on sales of maize, wheat, sugar, and livestock in Potosí. The Yungas (steep valleys) east of La Paz on the inland Andean slopes became a prime source of coca for the mines; though coca also came to Potosí from far more distant areas near Cuzco. On the lands around Lake Titicaca the ancient tradition of llama breeding continued, now directed particularly to the freighting of ores and the raw materials of silver production. What is now northwest Argentina grew in settlement before 1600 in response to the demand for its products—cotton cloth, mules, sugar, wine—in the mining zone. Possibly half or more of the silver drawn from the mines went to buying supplies through a far-flung network of interregional trade.

EARLY COLONIAL SOCIETY

Most of the supplies that went to mining towns were produced on land owned by colonists, not communal holdings. By the 1560s, chacras (small farms) had appeared, for example, in the deep valleys around Potosí. And over the next century haciendas (larger estates) developed in the more fertile regions of Charcas, especially in the eastern middle-altitude valleys. Some of the lands taken for chacras and haciendas had fallen free because of native population losses, caused by newly introduced diseases and the general disruption of the Conquest and its aftermath of settlement. The population decline in some parts of highland Charcas between the 1570s and the 1680s reached almost 60 percent and had probably been severe before 1570 as well.

Some of the record loss, it is true, was the result of movement of people rather than of deaths or lack of births. Migrants (mitayos) were hard, sometimes even impossible, to count. Many left their original villages to escape tribute and mita, going to cities and towns (such as Potosí), to estates and farms owned by colonists, or to other native communities (where they would be classed as Forasteros, or outsiders, and as such, under Spanish law, exempted from forced labor and tribute). Migrants provided much of the labor needed by Spanish landowners and by miners outside Potosí, since hardly any mitayos were sent to the district mines.

Native community life survived despite all the pressures applied to it, as a visitor to highland Bolivia can see today. Nine-tenths of Charcas's people remained rural, and nearly all of them were peasants who spoke only their indigenous language. Viceroy Toledo had ordered that the reducciones into which he tried to congregate these people in the 1570s should have a Spanish style of town government, with aldermen, magistrates, constables, and the like. But these positions generally went to the same sort of men who had held authority before the Conquest: the responsible and conservative elders of the communities. Similarly, the curacas (regional nobles) of pre-Spanish times continued to exist and to exercise authority. They generally had power over several villages, with rights to use community labor and lands. From the start they were crucial to Spanish control of native society, acting as links between colonial officials and local village leaders. Their position was often hard. They might be obliged, for example, to produce a constant yield of tribute or draft laborers from a shrinking population; they would have to make up any shortfall themselves. Under such pressures, curacas might maltreat their own people or partially His-panicize themselves by engaging in profit-oriented trade or market agriculture to gain the cash they needed to meet Spanish demands. Thus, in the long term, old social and political relationships tended to change and weaken. But native institutions were resilient; and, suitably adapted to new demands, a distinct Andean culture was still in place when the colonial era ended.

Long before then, however, Charcas had taken on a clear identity of its own in several respects besides the native. The wealth and urban growth associated with mining gave it high status in Spanish America. In 1609, for instance, the see of La Plata was raised to an archbishopric, becoming junior in South America only to Lima. (No other archdiocese was created anywhere else in the Indies before 1700). Four years before, bishoprics had been created in La Paz and Santa Cruz de la Sierra, which now became suffragan, along with Tucumán and Asunción, to La Plata. In 1624 the city of La Plata added to its cathedral and audiencia the University of San Francisco Xavier, where Jesuits trained priests and, after 1681, lawyers, for much of southern South America.

Despite the decline of mining, there was much building and decoration of churches in Charcas in the seventeenth century. A growing number of Amerindian and mestizo craftsmen participated in this work, and distinctive styles took shape. For instance, in 1592 a sculptor named Tito Yupanqui made the famous image of the Virgin that has remained the object of such devotion at Copaca-bana, at the southern end of Titicaca. By 1700, clear schools of native and mestizo painting were emerging in La Plata, Potosí, and the La Paz-Titicana region (the Colla school). The painters' subjects were mainly devotional.

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Broadly speaking, the eighteenth century in Upper Peru saw the reversal of trends established after 1600. Silver production at Potosí stopped falling about 1725 and began to rise again at mid-century. (Oruro's low point had in fact come in 1660–1680; after that its output gently rose for a century.) Native population stabilized, probably after a devastating epidemic of influenza or pneumonic plague that spread from Buenos Aires up into the central Andes in 1719–1720. Generally, thereafter, rural peasant populations grew, though the population of the Spanish-dominated towns languished for much of the century, reflecting the weakness of mining and hence of the demand for supplies in the mining centers. The exception was La Paz, which, thanks to its governmental and marketing role amid a relatively dense native population, continued to grow, though slowly. By 1750 it was, with 40,000 people, the largest town in Upper Peru.

Among the most notable reversals in the eighteenth century was the reimposition of state power. Charcas, like most of Spanish America, had since about 1600, been under ever less effective Spanish control. Like most of the empire, it felt a revived presence of the state once the Bourbons came to power in 1700. The first serious sign came in the late 1720s with the revisita (recount) of the population ordered by the viceroy, the marqués de Castelfuerte (1724–1736). Castelfuerte's aim was, first, to find out how much of the central Andean population had died in the epidemic of 1719–1720, and, second, with this new count, to improve the collection of Indian tribute, which, he rightly thought, had become slack and corrupt.

The full weight of reform did not fall on Upper Peru until much later in the century. The greatest change of all came in 1776, when the province was shifted from the Viceroyalty of Peru into the newly formed Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata. Now its exports and imports passed largely through Buenos Aires, and internal trade patterns also changed, reorienting southward. In 1784 the centralizing system of local government by intendants was installed, replacing the rule by corregidores put in place by Toledo. Now Upper Peru was divided into four intendancies: La Paz, Cochabamba, Potosí, and Chuquisaca (La Plata). The Spanish government also tried to stimulate mining by, for example, taking over the mining bank, the Banco De San Carlos, in Potosí, improving the supply of mercury, and sending in foreign experts to demonstrate (unsuccessfully, in the event) new refining methods.

A rash of revolts throughout the central Andes was one outcome of this growing state presence after 1700. In Upper Peru the first outbreak occurred at Cochabamba in November 1730, when mestizos, who were exempt from tribute, took exception to Castelfuerte's attempt to increase tribute income by reclassifying them as Indians. The mestizos were encouraged by creoles (American-born white settlers), who had their own grievances against Spaniards. The anti-Spanish alliance of different classes and ethnic groups was even more striking in the Oruro plot of 1739, a creole and mestizo reaction to increasing taxation. The leader, Juan Vélez de Córdoba, claimed descent from the Incas. The plotters' manifesto promised a restoration of the Inca monarchy, with equality for creoles, mestizos, and Indians, and abolition of tributes, mita (draft) labor, and reparto (the forced sale) of goods to Indians by corregidores. The Oruro plot, like the earlier disturbance at Cochabamba, was easily put down. But the Oruro manifesto, a true rebel program, may have been an inspiration for the far more widespread rebellion led by Túpac Amaru in Peru in 1780–1781.

That great and menacing movement—a reaction in the short term to a recent increase in sales tax, the creation of internal customshouses that imposed taxes and restrictions on interregional trade, and the abuses of reparto, which had been legalized in 1756—was centered just south of Cuzco. This rebellion was followed by a derivative revolt in Upper Peru, led by a native trader named Julián Apasa, who took the pseudonym Túpac Catari. Apasa laid siege to La Paz in 1781 before he was captured by Spanish forces late in that year. In the same year a creole movement, with strong links to Túpac Amaru and allied with local Indians and mestizos, took Oruro out of Spanish control. This insurrection, too, was put down by the end of 1781.

INDEPENDENCE

The risings of 1781 in Upper Peru, like that of Túpac Amaru farther north, were not bids for independence. However, they did demonstrate the strong aversion to the state's increasing exactions that became the fundamental motive for the pursuit of independence three and four decades later. Bolivia's advance to independence was set in motion, like the other Spanish American movements, by Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808. The Bourbon monarchy was unseated; political disarray descended on Spain and the empire. In the confusion, a group of radical creoles in La Paz, led by Pedro Domingo Murillo, decided to make a bid for autonomy. In July 1809, the group declared itself to be a governing junta ruling in the name of Ferdinand VII. The movement never had time to prove the authenticity of this allegiance; it was suppressed by the end of January 1810 by troops sent in from Peru. Still, this had been the first declaration of independence in Spanish America, and Bolivians remember Murillo proudly.

After this defeat, events proceeded much more slowly. Bolivia was the last Spanish mainland territory to become independent. The problem was twofold. First, the proximity of Peru, which was the Spanish stronghold in South America, made for easy suppression of dissidence in Upper Peru, as the Murillo episode had shown. Second, the government of the Río de la Plata (the incipient Argentina), where home rule was permanently achieved in 1810, had long sought to bring Upper Peru under its control. Buenos Aires therefore sent no fewer than four expeditionary forces into Upper Peru between 1810 and 1817. Although these found many local allies against Spanish forces from Peru, the Upper Peruvians had little enthusiasm for rule from Buenos Aires, so no lasting anti-Spanish alliance developed. The result was much fighting in and over Upper Peru for several years, and much loss of life and property, without conclusive change. Matters were not advanced by the activities of several dozen caudillos (pro-independence local leaders) who between 1810 and 1816 fought guerrilla style outside the towns.

After 1816, destruction and exhaustion greatly hindered further internal bids for freedom; and Buenos Aires finally realized that Chile would be a better assault route on Peru. Resistance to Spain therefore dwindled in the province until 1823, when a mestizo from near La Paz, Andrés de Santa Cruz, once a royalist officer and now an independence leader under Antonio José de Sucre, Bolívar's chief lieutenant, inflicted defeats on the Spanish at Zepita and elsewhere in the north. The Spanish were able to dislodge Santa Cruz, but by this time Bolívar's Venezuelan and Colombian forces were assembling in Peru, and the writing was on the wall. In 1824 Bolívar and Sucre defeated the Spanish twice in Peru, at Junín and at Ayacucho. After these victories there remained only a shadow of royalist resistance in Upper Peru. Royalist troops in fact deserted to Sucre as he entered the region in January 1825. Thus freedom came quietly and anticlimactically to the country that in August 1825 would call itself Bolivia after the man responsible for its final liberation.

See alsoAlmagro, Diego de .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arthur F. Zimmerman, Francisco de Toledo, Fifth Victory of Peru, 1569–1581 (1938, repr. 1968).

Charles Arnade, The Emergence of the Republic of Bolivia (1957).

Eduardo Arze Quiroga, Historia de Bolivia. Fases del proceso hispanoamericano: Orígenes de la sociedad boliviana en el siglo XVI (1969).

John Hemming, The Conquest of the Incas (1970).

Josep M. Barnadas, Charcas: Orígenes históricos de una sociedad colonial, 1535–1565 (1973).

Bartolomé Arzáns De Orsúa y Vela, Tales of Potosí, edited by R. C. Padden (1975).

Orlando Capriles Villazón, Historia de la minería boliviana (1977).

Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz, Indios y tributos en el Alto Perú (1978).

Herbert S. Klein, Bolivia: The Evolution of a Multi-Ethnic Society (1982).

Scarlett O'Phelan Godoy, Rebellions and Revolts in Eighteenth-Century Peru and Upper Peru (1985).

Thérèse Boyusse Cassagne, La identidad aymara: Aproxi-mación histórica (siglo XV, XVI) (1987).

Olivia Harris, Brooke Larson, and Enrique Tandeter, comp., La Participación indígena en los mercados surandinos: Estrategías y reproducción social, siglos XVI a XX (1987).

Brooke Larson, Colonialism and Agrarian Transformation in Bolivia: Cochabamba, 1150–1900 (1988).

Roger N. Rasnake, Domination and Cultural Resistance: Authority and Power Among an Andean People (1988).

Additional Bibliography

Escobari de Querejazu, Laura. Caciques, yanaconas y extrav-agantes: la sociedad colonial en Charcas s. XVI-XVIII. La Paz: Embajada de España en Bolivia: Plural Editores, 2001.

Gutiérrez Brockington, Lolita. Blacks, Indians, and Spaniards in the Eastern Andes: Reclaiming the Forgotten in Colonial Mizque, 1550–1782. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006.

Mangan, Jane E. Trading Roles: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Urban Economy in Colonial Potosí. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.

Serulnikov, Sergio. Subverting Colonial Authority: Challenges to Spanish Rule in Eighteenth-Century Southern Andes. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.

Zulawski, Ann. They Eat from their Labor: Work and Social Change in Colonial Bolivia. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995.

                                        Peter Bakewell