by Marie Arana
The conquistadors and slavers learned quickly that blacks were more suited to field work, to laboring in the sugar, indigo, cacao, and coffee plantations; barrel-chested Andeans had a distinct advantage mining at high altitudes, where oxygen was scarce and the cold winds, perpetual. So it was that the demands of faraway masters came to shape the social landscape. Much as the Incas had displaced entire populations to meet the military and engineering needs of the Tahuantinsuyu, Spain now imposed its metal and commercial ambitions on the hemisphere. The goal was to make the conquered peoples extract as much mineral wealth as they could. Native Americans were forced into reductions, separated from their families, herded and sent to labor wherever the colonists decreed. But, in a way, the slave, too, would have a firm hold on his master: by the middle of the sixteenth century, the Spanish economy was almost entirely dependent on Mexican and Peruvian ore and on the labor of American Indians. A spirited flow of New World bullion had bankrolled King Carlos’s wars, created a buoyant trade from Panama to Peking, and transformed Spain into a money forge that would drive Europe into the modern age.
Latin American indigenous cultures, which had lived in splendid isolation for centuries, now became radical agents of change for regions they never knew existed. As the Indians quickly learned, they themselves were totally expendable; it was the earth on which they stood that had become the desirable commodity. For five centuries to come, its veins would be bled, its viscera extracted, refined, and sent elsewhere. At first, the conqueror’s obsession was gold, the elusive chimera of El Dorado—a stubborn belief in the myth that a trove of it awaited them somewhere in the middle of the continent. But soon enough it became clear that the most prodigal asset in the Indies was its silver, and it lay deep underground. Nowhere was this more evident than in Potosí, where the craze for white ore became frantic.
Legend has it that Diego Huallpa, an indigenous miner traveling from the Spanish quarry at Porco on a bitter cold night in January 1545, built a fire on Potosí’s rust red flank to warm himself. By morning, a puddle of molten silver had gathered around the fire’s smoldering ashes.Thrilled by this fortuitous find, Huallpa managed to scratch out a considerable pile of ore over the course of the next few weeks, but he soon realized that he needed help to amass and transport his cache. A fellow laborer who assisted him on the assumption that he would share in the profits eventually squabbled with Huallpa over the size of his share and, to settle scores, revealed the serendipitous discovery to a Spanish overseer. The large-scale excavation of Potosí began shortly thereafter.
A mere dozen years after Pizarro stepped foot on Peruvian soil, the conquistadors had a fully developed system in place for extracting metals and forcing the indigenous population into the mines to do it. Gold had been scarce, but silver was plentiful. So much so, that failing to find iron, they were forced to shoe their horses with the precious white substance. One conquistador whose jaw was blown off during a battle with the Incas had his chin reconstructed entirely in the metal. In the Mexican silver mines of Zacatecas and Taxco, production was so great by the 1540s that Spain soon commanded the bullion market in Europe. But the miners of the Inca, unlike those of the Mexica, had centuries of experience with mining and amalgamation. As a result, a silver bonanza sprang up in Potosí.
Immigrants flocked to the Andean highlands from every corner of Europe, hoping to strike it rich or at least profit from the increasingly wealthy magnates who gathered on that dusty, rockbound terrain. Miners and overseers were soon joined by merchants and mayordomos, tailors and lace makers, cabinetmakers and glassblowers, singers and dancers, countesses and whores. By 1574, a steady influx of Indian captives and African slaves was generating the great majority of the world’s silver, much of it gouged from the precipitous red flanks of Potosí’s Cerro Rico, all of it melted down and transformed into Spanish reales. Mule trains and caravans of llamas scrolled across the altiplano, over the vaulting mountain peaks, making the five-week trek to the Pacific port of Callao. Creaky, rat-infested ships then ferried the precious cargo to the western coast of Panama, where the silver was either transported up the coast to Acapulco and Veracruz or across the jungle to the Caribbean coast. At Cartagena, it was loaded onto galleons and sent across the Atlantic to Seville, which, in a profligate burst of spending, hurried the hard-won bullion through banks in London or Amsterdam to merchants in Poland, Constantinople, and Russia.
As Latin American silver shot through the marketplaces of Europe, the settlements in Mexico and Peru mushroomed into great Spanish viceroyalties. To keep a strong grip on them, conquistadors stripped locals of all power, constructed churches atop their temples, palaces atop their places of government, and redirected their labor to the mines. Cortés’s and Pizarro’s conquests were soon producing 99 percent of all the silver in the hemisphere. In the course of the next two centuries, Potosí alone would ship forty thousand tons of the white ore to Europe. Latin America as a whole would fuel Europe’s banks with 136,000 metric tons of silver, a full 80 percent of the world’s output. The hauls were so large, so valuable—a single galleon might carry two million pesos—that massive convoys of more than sixty ships became necessary to protect them from pirates on the high seas. The danger was constant, the piracy lucrative, and a brisk commerce was soon created by English and Dutch privateers whose governments encouraged the rapine. Most infamous among pirates, perhaps, was the English adventurer Francis Drake, who sailed the Caribbean, trading African slaves for tobacco, sugar, and cotton, but turned his sights farther south as the frenzy for silver grew. He raided the mule trains as they crossed overland from Potosí. He attacked the port of Cartagena as cargo was loaded into the ships, making off with vast payloads of bullion. So coveted was silver in Europe that Queen Elizabeth I rewarded Drake’s robberies with a knighthood.
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It was this itinerant silver, product of Native American and, later, African hands, that became the vanguard of global capitalism and eventually swept northern Europe into the industrial age. But it may also have been the first major instance of racial exploitation for global profit. The dark races produced the currency; the whites reaped the returns. An intense theological debate soon arose in Europe about the legitimacy of the Spanish conquest, the treatment of native peoples, and the essential nature of the indigenous races. Were they human, after all? Or were they—as Europe had decided long before—like black Africans, insensate beasts of burden? But for all the moral intensity of the debate, it turned out to be all talk. The rank exploitation continued. Eventually Seville passed injunctions to mitigate the abuse, but conquistadors simply looked the other way and carried on with the cruelty, leading the very Italian Pope Paul IV to say in a fit of pique that Spaniards were “heretics, schismatics, accursed of God, the Offspring of Jews and Marranos, the very scum of the earth.” It was a calumny the English and Dutch were only too happy to promulgate.
By 1570, as England grappled with questions of religious tolerance, and Queen Elizabeth turned a cautious eye to foreign commerce, Spain was already carrying on a highly profitable trade with China—all of it based on New World silver. As much as two million to three million pesos were making their way, legally and illegally, to Manila and Peking every six months from Acapulco. Three decades later, that figure multiplied six times. Striking a productive vein in Potosí could fuel an exuberant economic boom across the Pacific, and Asian cities began to flourish as a result, profiting from the traffic. One traveler reported that the international markets in Southeast Asia were so spirited that more than eighty languages were being spoken in the port of Malacca. Fleets that shipped silver to the Orient would sail back freighted with silks, porcelain, sandalwood, and ivory, so that the palatial houses of Mexican and Peruvian silver magnates were—quite absurdly for that era—bursting with Chinese and Japanese art. Even the wounded sailors, convalescing in ramshackle hospitals, were eating off Ming porcelain plates.
By 1600, Potosí held a population that rivaled London’s and Tokyo’s. It wa
s more congested than the bustling port of Venice, easily the largest urban concentration in the Western Hemisphere. But the Imperial City, as King Carlos called it, was also known for its drunkenness, flamboyance, and wanton degeneracy. A mere eleven years after Diego Huallpa’s campfire discovery, Potosí celebrated the coronation of King Carlos’s successor—King Philip II—with a wild, decadent party that lasted twenty-eight days and cost eight million pesos. By the middle of the seventeenth century, when the Massachusetts Bay Colony was still a fledgling settlement struggling to maintain its tenuous hold on America, Potosí had produced such a vast abundance of silver that its name had entered the literary canon: Cervantes, in his immortal classic Don Quixote, coined the phrase “Vale un Potosí!” Rich as Potosí. There was nothing grander, more exuberant, more filled with promise than that ruddy brown hump of South American ground.
Greed followed on greed. To capitalize on his success and grow the profits, King Philip needed miners—legions of them. In 1569 he sent Viceroy Francisco de Toledo to install a more efficient system of forced labor in Peru. Toledo ended up using the system of reductions, which Spain had established in the Caribbean—to drive whole populations of the indigenous to places where hard labor was needed. The initial argument was that, in order to Christianize heathens, the Spaniards needed to disrupt local traditions, destroy the prevailing culture, and break down all tribal ties, but the reality was that reductions were a convenient way to herd the indigenous into work gangs and force them to pay tributes. In order to marshal the massive silver production that Spain now demanded, Toledo revived the ancient mita (mitmaq) system, which the Incas had used to coerce the conquered to work their fields, build their roads, and fight their wars.
Toledo’s mita in Potosí became the largest, most crushing system of labor exploitation in the Spanish colonies. All indigenous males between eighteen and fifty years of age who inhabited the two-hundred-square-mile expanse from Peru to Argentina were wrenched from their homes, marched in chains across the altiplano, and made to toil in the mines of Potosí. Some fled this fate, but most hardly resisted, accustomed as they were to the massive migrations—and punishing taxes—the Incas had imposed for generations. For all the familiarity of these practices, however, mining had never been so ruthless under the Incas. It had been rotational; the mita had been intermittent; there was a certain lenience in play. All the same, just as the Indians came to understand the overweening avarice of their conquerors, the Spaniards were understanding a crucial acquiescence in the Indians. Throughout the Americas, with very few exceptions, it was merely a matter of killing the indigenous leaders, purging the nobility, and then extending the oppression that was already in place. Forcibly, swiftly, the conquistadors collapsed an intricate hierarchy into one powerless underclass. For the Spanish, the new social order represented a formidable victory; for the indigenous, a catastrophe. A genocide. As one Inca nobleman lamented to his captor:
Your excellence, I am the captain of these people . . . and yet I have received many insults since Christians entered these lands. Before, we were lords, now we are slaves. Not only do Christians want us to serve you as we were once served—as gentlemen and officers—but now we have been degraded to one humble class. You want all of us to bear your cargoes, be your bricklayers, build your houses, be your laborers, sow your fields. Think if it’s truly just to do us this grievous wrong.
Eventually that same system would force natives to work the deadly mercury mines to harvest the quicksilver necessary for amalgamation. The indigenous were not only compelled to pound rock for twelve months in the dank crawl spaces of Potosí, they were dragooned for two more months to toil in the dread Santa Barbara mercury mines of Huancavelíca, more than one thousand miles away, in what is now Peru. Most became bound to those mines for life, as were their wives and descendants. Trapped in the frigid black of a mercury shaft, a miner was likely to lose his teeth, go blind, and suffer an early, excruciating death. As his corpse decomposed, puddles of mercury would be found in his grave. With women and children stirring mercury with their feet, entire populations risked eradication. It became clear that to be consigned to these places was to be sent to slaughter. Legions of Indians disappeared into the mountains, preferring starvation or death by freezing to the scourge of the mercury mines. Mothers broke their children’s bones to render them unfit to mine. As strict as they were, the Incas had never subjected their peons to such terrors. A priest who visited Santa Barbara in the 1630s described the mines as “living images of death, black shades of eternal hell.” Two centuries later, the conditions were hardly better. A British soldier passing through observed that to be made to mine was a virtual death sentence. Many a man of the cloth would claim that the overlords, too, inhabited a parallel inferno: the corruption, cupidity, venality, and drunkenness of Potosí’s silver moguls had made affluence a hell of a different kind.
By 1700, the bubble had burst. Potosí went dry. The rich abandoned the withered teat of Cerro Rico for more promising lodes—a gold rush in Brazil, a silver boom in Mexico—and the city slumped into a pitiful shadow of itself. By 1825, when Simón Bolívar’s armies finally liberated those lands, it was clear Potosí had been deep into free fall. Like the fabled empire of King Ozymandias, it slid into prolonged dilapidation, all the more poignant for the city’s coat of arms, which crowed over that arid ruin: “I am rich Potosí. Envy of all kings.” Potosí was but one in a long series of booms and busts that the region’s mining would experience in centuries to come. Spain had been first to extract America’s mineral riches and appropriate them for a global market, but other foreigners would follow, and precious metals would continue to slip through Latin America’s fingers before heading for distant shores.
In the end, Spain was little transformed by the torrent of silver that coursed into its ports on its way elsewhere. Kings directed their fifths to finance their holy wars against a growing wave of European Protestantism. They used them to indulge sybaritic habits, enrich their friends, reward the nobility. The flow was out rather than in, as Latin America’s hard-won silver paid for the court’s every whim. Silver enabled the Hapsburgs to engage in wars that gripped Europe for the greater part of a century; it imported luxuries that only princes might use; it brought on an inflation so massive that it eventually bankrupted Spain. No industrial advances came of that silver windfall; no bridges, no roads, no factories; no true betterment of life for the ordinary Spaniard. As one seventeenth-century economist lamented at the height of the metal influx, “Out of its great wealth, the republic of Spain has extracted utter poverty.” The “easy money” had been for the happy few.
Those who truly profited in the end were the English and Dutch, who broadcast an unremittingly negative view of Spain, rode the crest of Spanish America’s economic stimulus, and went on to produce steam engines, textile mills, ironworks, shipbuilding yards, steel foundries, and powerful, international banks. In 1785 a newly independent United States of America signaled its economic ambitions by fixing its dollar firmly to the value of the Spanish peso. By the early 1800s, it, too, had joined the era of mechanization. But Spain remained stubbornly agricultural, never joining the industrial age it had labored so mightily to facilitate. In the end, its romance with New World silver actually may have promoted its irrevocable decline rather than consolidated its power. King Carlos I’s grandiose motto, “Plus Ultra”—“Ever Beyond”—took on new meaning as the empire’s riches spilled out and away, ultimately impoverishing the country for the foreseeable future, building fortunes in territories beyond Spain’s control.
VETA MADRE, MOTHER LODE
1800–1824
One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.
—George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Latin America’s conviction that it needed to break free from the monarchy that had shackled it for three hundred years didn’t come until the 1800s, but the logic of liberatio
n had been spelled out a half century before by French Enlightenment thinker Montesquieu. “The Indies and Spain may be two powers under the same ruler,” he wrote in 1748, “but the Indies are the principal, while Spain is no more than an accessory. To bind a principal to an accessory is a pointless political exercise. The Indies will always be the more compelling power.” It was becoming clear to all but the Spanish factotums: Latin American labor had been the animating spirit of the age—the dynamo, the genie—making faraway kings rich, transforming all Europe into an economic engine. The principal was the people, the muscle, the backs, the work. The Americas needed Spain no more.
No one appreciated this more keenly than the Creoles—los criollos: the white, American-born rich who managed the mines, ran the haciendas, and produced the wealth, yet had no real power or voice in their own government. For centuries, colonial rule had been kept strictly in the hands of Spain’s emissaries, merchants, or midlevel functionaries with little to recommend them beyond the fact that they had been born on Spanish soil. Bright, educated Creoles with deep roots in the Americas had to submit to an ever-revolving door of these lesser masters. Only the Spanish-born were allowed to govern, trade, own stores, or sell goods. No American was permitted to sell for his own profit on the streets, much less plant grapes, establish vineyards, make spirits, grow tobacco or olive trees. Spain fiercely suppressed all American entrepreneurship. It brooked no competition and forced brutal regulations on American initiatives, for it was earning the equivalent of billions of dollars a year by obliging its colonies to buy even the most basic goods from Spain.