“These people, the ones who lived in that era, used to spend their lives warring on each other and conquering each other. For their leaders, they recognized only the strong and the rich. We speak of them as the Purum Runa – ‘people of desolation’.”
The Huarochiri Manuscript, Chapter 5.
Shortly after the Spanish invasion Hernando Pizarro, brother of the Castillian leader Francisco Pizarro, came to the religious oracle at Pachacamac in 1533 to destroy the shrine and take the gold and silver. He stayed overnight in Chancay and then probably rested in Limatambo or Armatambo, both towns now demolished by the uncontrolled expansion of urban Lima. He was met at Pachacamac, the chroniclers tell us, by coastal officials from Chincha, Huarco [Cañete], and Mala who brought gifts of gold and silver amounting to 90 thousand pesos, perhaps half a million dollars worth in current terms. At this stage the Spanish had inflicted a defeat on the Inca army and kidnapped Atahualpa, who ruled the northern half of the country, but were still travelling through a country they did not control.
It would seem that the coast was wealthy and politically united, or at least willing to work together. They must also have had good communication and transport systems, along 150 kilometres of coast and ten river valleys, to be kept informed of the Spaniard’s journey and co-ordinate the meeting. The amount of gold and silver they brought amounted to more than twenty fully loaded llamas. This was not a world of peasant farmers.
Mala was referred to, under that name, by several chroniclers including Pedro Cieza de León and Garcilaso de la Vega, as were Chilca, Chincha and Huarco, so they must have been significant centres at the time of the invasion. Pedro Cieza in particular, recounting his travels throughout Peru in the twenty years following the invasion, repeatedly talks of how prosperous and well populated these valleys were before the coming of the Spanish.
The Inca had established a series of way stations, tambos, providing food and forage to travellers and troops. One was located at Mala, two stories high, and close to a suspension bridge over the river. These stations were continued by the Spanish, who put their military officers in charge. In Mala, the Tambo was given to Pedro de Alconchel and his wife Doña María de Aliaga. Pedro, known as the trumpeter, had been a loyal supporter of Francisco Pizarro in the invasion and had also received lands in Mala and Chilca.
The inhabitants of these lands in Mala and Chilca owed him labour and produce, and the territory would belong to his descendants for ever. This illiterate soldier from a tiny Spanish village died extremely wealthy in 1562.
Other lands around Mala were divided up in 1536 as encomiendas amongst Spanish landowners including Guillermo Lumbreras, Pedro Navarro, Juan de Bedoyay and Diego Figueroa. Land near Mala was also given to the indigenous people of San Marcos de la Aguada, under their chief Chapayco.
The encomienda system was actually a labour system – the grantees could demand tribute from the indigenous people occupying the lands. The rights were to be held in perpetuity by the grant-holder and his descendants. In “exchange” for the tribute of the peoples, the encomendero, or landowner, was required to protect and “christianise” them. The people continued to work their lands but gave a proportion of the produce to the encomendero. It was similar to the reconquista system, when the Spanish took back their country from the Moors, and military leaders were given the right to exact tribute in the new frontier lands they had conquered.
Technically an encomienda did not imply ownership of the land. But in practice encomenderos treated the land as private property that could be divided, sold, or mortgaged, in violation of the law. These lands were run, as elsewhere on the coast, as feudal production units.
Peru – The Greater Peru which then comprised Chile, Ecuador, Peru and Colombia – was seized by the conquistadors on behalf of Prince Charles of Spain, the Crown. Lima was founded, in 1535, to provide comfortable living quarters for the Spanish and to control a port to ship back the gold and silver of Peru to Spain. In practice Pizarro and his followers on their arrival were uncontrolled, and largely uncontrollable, so far from their homeland, but their invasion had been approved by royal warrant and they were operating “under license”. Once the riches of Peru became apparent, the forces of the Crown sought to enforce the terms of that license.
The invaders divided the country into territories which were controlled by the members of the original gang – five hundred or so in all, with Pizarro’s 160, Almagro’s reinforcement of 160, and a few hundred more fellow travellers and fortune-hunting latecomers. These people were mostly hired mercenaries, and treated their encomiendas as invading armies tend to do, looting, murdering, raping and enslaving.
The Yauyos and other areas soon became depopulated as a result of the Spanish presence. Lives were lost in the battles against the invaders, and armies were levied to increase the fighting forces of Pizarro and Amagro. From 1537 to 1541 these two men of Estremadoyro waged their own private war to control the riches of Peru.
The Vice Royalty of New Castille was established as a legal entity to govern the new province in 1542. In an attempt by the Spanish Crown to reduce abuses in the colonies, a Viceroy was sent by King Charles to implement the New Laws. Slavery was abolished and the grant of encomiendas as a hereditary right was stopped. Instead, the labour tribute rights would be held for just two generations.
In Peru, the Spanish rejected the law and killed the Viceroy. The King backed down and repealed the New Laws.
Thirty years later, in 1572, another reforming Viceroy, Francisco de Toledo, was sent out from Spain. Toledo set out to maximise the income for Spain from its colonies with a series of economic and administrative reforms. One of these was the imposition of reducciones, the establishment of Spanish-style towns to which the population were forcibly removed from their traditional communities. At this stage, a large proportion of the original native population had been killed or died from disease and maltreatment.
The reducciones in turn were organised into districts for administration and taxation known as repartimientos, which replaced the encomienda system. Under repartimientos, the system of labour rights continued but the rights were assigned not to individuals but to officials representing the Crown, who collected the tribute. An additional labour tax or form of conscripted labour, the mita, was introduced to provide a legal framework for sending workers to the silver mines of Potosi in Bolivia or to the mercury mines in Huancavelica.
Fifty years after the Spanish arrived, in 1586, they appointed the first Corregidor or Controller of the Yauyos area. Don Diego Davila Briceño marked out the territory from Canta in the north to Huancavelica and Nazca in the south, and from Huanca and Xauxa in the east to Huarco, Cañete, Pachacamac and Ychma to the west. This corresponded more or less to the historical territory of the Yauyos, as did the division into two provinces, Hanan Yauyos and Urin Yauyos, reflecting the traditional division of communities into two parts, sometimes called upper and lower, elder and younger brother, or male and female.
In the collection of the Royal Academy of History, in Madrid there is a map of Yauyos region inscribed on the reverse “Degalpsion y Relacion de la provincia de Yauyos all of Anan Yauyos and Lurin Youyos made for Senor Davila Briceno Corregidor de Yauyos Peru”. The Royal Academy, in a neat reflection on the religious power in Spain, has its headquarters in a building that once belonged to the Hieronymite Order, and was confiscated by the state in 1830. The map shows snow-capped mountains at the top, four rivers in blue running down to the sea, a couple of yellow roads and 40 named towns and cities.
The yunga or coast, is marked with a brown line extending parallel to the shoreline but some thirty kilometres inland, at the level of Calango and Coayllo. The left hand page is Lurin Yauyos and the right, Anan Yauyos. The river just to the right of the centre line is Rio Mala. At the top, in the centre, is a twinned peaked mountain labelled “Pariacaca idolo yaro” and winding round the mountain is the “escaleras de pariacaca”. We will see more of the map later when we analyse the images on one of most imposing Chinchero rock panels.
Davila set up the capital of the region in Huarochiri, and from here he carried out the reducciones, closing villages and moving communities in order to enable greater control over the people. Two important aspects were the collection of their taxes and the control of their tribute labour. Two hundred towns and villages before the coming of the Spanish were coalesced into 38 Spanish-style towns.
Some years after Pedro de Alconchel died, the hereditary encomiendas were replaced by haciendas. The first hacienda to be established in Mala was called The Lord of the Stair, “El Señor de la Escala”, and its owner was Dominico Alonso Hernández de la Cueva. The next was la Hacienda Chuquipampa, which would become la Hacienda San José del Monte. Other great properties were established around Mala at that time such as the Hacienda “El Salitre”.
The seventeenth century haciendas represented a significant administrative and political change. These were farm estates, devoted to economic enterprises – ranching, farming, or mining. The owners were often the descendants of encomenderos and the workers were now employed – though imported chinese and African slaves were also used. In the Haciendas of San Luis and in today’s Cañete, Japanese labourers were imported. Their bodies now rest in the Japanese cemetery on the flanks of the Cerro D’ Oro, on the top of which are the ransacked cemeteries, the piles of skulls and bones, that may be the remains of the 20,000 Guarco slaughtered by the Inca.
In Chincha, it was African slaves who worked on the plantation of San Jose, now an elite hotel with guided dungeon tours, and who fought for their freedom when the Chileans invaded, twenty years after slavery was declared illegal in Peru.
In 1862 Peruvian landowners seeking more slaves sent ships to Easter Island, where they killed or captured 1500 men and women, half the island’s population. The islanders were taken to Peru to work as slaves but after international protests, they were freed a year later. Only twelve were left alive, the others having been killed by diseases such as tuberculosis and smallpox. Those few returned to Easter Island but took with them smallpox which led to an epidemic amongst the remaining islanders.
In the 1960s and 1970s, a process of land reform was initiated by the military government of General Juan Velazco. Large land holdings were seized – owners were allowed to keep fifty hectares – and given to newly established cooperatives. In some cases these cooperatives were made up of of the campesinos who had previously worked on the haciendas. In Mala two Farm Production Cooperatives were established, San Pedro de Mala and San José del Monte.
On the north-eastern edge of Mala as the road to Calango leaves the town, by the side of a wide canal, are the remains of a nineteenth century hacienda building. It was damaged by the 2007 earthquake and now stands abandoned. It belonged to the Hacienda La Rinconada, established in 1634.
Most of the farmers in the Mala valley now are the children of those who gained self-empowerment, for the first time in over four hundred years, in those land reforms fifty and sixty years ago.
The Spanish conquest began with a shocking bloodbath where less than 200 Spaniards killed 2000 plus indians, but there followed over forty years of conflict, both between the Spanish and the native peoples, and between different factions of the Spanish themselves. After that armed struggle was over, the next phase began – legal and administrative systems to give rights and power, over land and labour, to a small Spanish oligarchy, and to ensure nothing threatened this historic hierarchy. That struggle is ongoing.
𝓸𝓼 𝓝𝓪𝓭𝓲𝓮𝓼 – 𝓔𝓭𝓾𝓪𝓻𝓭𝓸 𝓖𝓪𝓵𝓮𝓪𝓷𝓸Sueñan las pulgas con comprarse un perroY sueñan los nadies con salir de pobresQue algún mágico día llueva de pronto la buena suerte, que llueva a cántaros la buena suerte;Pero la buena suerte no llueve ayer, ni hoy, ni mañana, ni nunca, ni en lloviznitas cae del cielo la buena suerte, por mucho que los nadies la llamen y aunque les pique la mano izquierda, o se levanten con el pie derecho, o empiecen el año cambiando de escobaLos nadies, los hijos de nadie, los dueños de nadaQue no son, aunque seanQue no hablan idiomas, sino dialectosQue no profesan religiones, sino supersticionesQue no hacen arte, sino artesaníaQue no practican cultura, sino folkloreQue no son seres humanos, sino recursos humanosQue no tiene cara, sino brazosQue no tienen nombre, sino númeroQue no figuran en la historia universal, sino en la crónica roja de la prensa localLos nadies, que cuestan menos que la bala que los mata
The fleas dream that they will find a dog, and the nobodies dream that they will escape poverty
That one magical day of sudden good luck, good lick will flood over them, But the good luck does not come yesterday, or today or tomorrow, it is not falling from the sky, however much the nobodies call, they wave with their left hand or lift themselves up on their right foot, Or begin the year changing the escoba, The nobodies, the children or no-one and the owners of nothing, Who do not exist, although they are everywhere, Who do not speak a language, only dialects, That have no religions, only superstitions, The do not make art, only crafts, That have no culture, just folklore, That are not human beings but human resources, That have no faces, but have arms, That have no names, only numbers, That do not figure in word history, only in the headlines of the yellow press, The nobodies, whose value is less than the bullet that kills them.
“The Nobodies
Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping
poverty: that one magical day good luck will suddenly rain down on
them—will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn’t rain down
yesterday, today, tomorrow, or ever. Good luck doesn’t even fall in a
fine drizzle, no matter how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their
left hand is tickling, or if they begin the new day with their right
foot, or start the new year with a change of brooms.
The nobodies: nobody’s children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the
no ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life,
screwed every which way.
Who are not, but could be.
Who don’t speak languages, but dialects.
Who don’t have religions, but superstitions.
Who don’t create art, but handicrafts.
Who don’t have culture, but folklore.
Who are not human beings, but human resources.
Who do not have faces, but arms.
Who do not have names, but numbers.
Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the police
blotter of the local paper.
The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them.”
― Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent