Zipaquirá, Capitulations of
Zipaquirá, Capitulations of
The high-water mark of the Comunero Revolt of New Granada was the gathering in May 1781 of a Comunero army, traditionally said to number 20,000 at Zipaquirá, about 30 miles from Bogotá. The authorities remaining in the capital, in the absence of the viceroy, who was at Cartagena, commissioned Archbishop Antonio Caballero y Góngora to negotiate, hoping above all that the revolutionary army could be prevented from entering the city. With regular forces concentrated on the coast, the archbishop felt compelled to grant most of the Comuneros' demands, including repeal of the new taxes that had triggered the uprising and reduction of others. Among the political concessions was the granting of preference to creoles over peninsular Spaniards in appointments to public office. These "capitulations" were ratified on 8 June by the junta superior de tribunales in Bogotá, whereupon the Comunero forces began to disperse. However, once the viceroy heard of the agreement, he formally repudiated it.
See alsoComunero Revolt (New Granada) .
BIBLIOGRAPHY
John Leddy Phelan, The People and the King: The Comunero Revolution in Colombia, 1781 (1978), chaps. 12-14.
Mario Aguilera Peña, Los comuneros: Guerra social y lucha anticolonial (1985).
Additional Bibliography
Aguilera Peña, Mario. La rebelión de los comuneros. Bogotá: Editorial Panamericana, 1998.
Arciniegas, Germán. Los comuneros. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 2002.
Caballero, Enrique and Alfredo Iriarte. Incensio y pólvora: comuneros y precursores. Bogotá: Amazonas Editores, 1993.