For much of the past five hundred years in Peru, church and state have worked together to destroy the culture and beliefs of the native people.
This was not always the case. Despite the grotesque acts of the conquest and the ensuing civil war, people like Antonio de la Calancha were tolerant and curious. But that changed, some seventy years after the invasion. The change of direction came with Francisco de Avila and the commencement of the Extirpacion.
Francisco was born in Cusco in 1573, and found abandoned in a doorway. Whatever his original parentage may have been, he was classified as mestizo, mixed race. As a consequence, he could aspire to education and career opportunities which were not acessible to the indios.
He managed to travel to Lima and study at the University of San Marcos. He was ordained in 1596 and became Curate of San Damian in Huarochiri. He was an ambitious man. He was named Vicar in 1598, was Licenciado in 1600 and received a Doctorate in 1603.
Francisco de Avila had already been accused of theft and sexual abuse by the people of his parish in Huarochiri, when, according to his own account, he decided to campaign against their way of life. He was travelling to a local festival when he met with an convert to the invader’s faith. Cristobal Choqueccaca told him that the people were on their way to worship Paria Caca. Francisco was “inspired” that day, he writes later in his memoirs, to dedicate his life to the fight against idolatry. It was a miracle, he declares. The date was August 1608.
A short time later he went to Lima and paraded “…a great muchedumbre of idols, the dried corpses of those they worshipped, mummified faces and hands which had been preserved from father to son for more than eight hundred years. All this made more than six loads of two quintales [six llamas carrying 90 kg each]…“
He aimed to convince the new Archbishop of Lima, Bartolome Lobo Guerrero,that he should have licence to persecute all forms of Andean religious belief. He won the Archbishop’s support and was given assistants to visit more villages. Within two months he returned to Lima to perform his December Auto da Fe, where a public burning of confiscated objects, including more mummified bodies of the people`s ancestors, was followed by the public confession of Huarochiri villager Hernando Paucar and his sentencing to two hundred lashes and exile to Chile.
As a result of this triumph, the Virrey and the Archbishop agreed to create a team of “visitadors”, or inspectors, who could enter any village together with powers to investigate, judge, condemn and punish the people there.
We know in detail how these “Visits” were planned and carried out because they are recorded in the writings of Pablo Jose Arriaga, who left us a manual for the guidance of the Extirpadors.
Under Chapter titles such as “What a Visitor Should do upon Reaching a Town”, “How a Visit Should be Begun” and “How a Sorcerer Should be Examined”, he gives step by step advice on how to win the confidence of the community, or intimidate them.
The “visitadors” would enter and read out an edict and give the villagers two days to bring out their idols, denounce their witches or priests, and their pagan practices, or suffer the consequences.
The edict included a list of 23 questions, from
“1. Do you know any people, men or women, who have adored shrines, mountains or springs, with a view to obtaining health, life and wellbeing?”
Through to
“23. Do you know any people who, when they harvest the maize, set aside some of the cobs …. for a traditional ceremony where they burn them and offer them to the shrines?”
The first day consists of parades around town, holding masses, singing, teaching, giving out pieces of bread, and visiting the sick, explaining that the Visitors have come not to punish but to teach.
On the second day, there is a lecture against drunkenness and idolatry, and it is explained that those who come forward to denounce their fellows will be pardoned, whilst those who do not will be punished. The people are again encouraged to bring out their sacred objects “without fear”.
“The important thing is thus to acquire an entering wedge by hearing about some one huaca in a town, or about the sorcerer who guards it.” writes Pablo Jose Arriaga. “The Indians freely offer information about neighbouring towns and will then give themselves away easily.”
This was followed by a list of fifteen activities which were forbidden, to be read out to the public meeting, together with the punishments that would be carried out on anyone who was found to have broken these religious laws.
“The priest holding the benefice of a town will take particular pains to prevent the celebrations that the Indians observe at seed time, when they indulge in drinking and singing, which continue to be a great offense to the Lord Our God, etc. He will make every effort to see to it that when they send out the aforesaid invitations, the celebrants are given something to eat but prevented from drinking excessively as has been done up to now. Item. From now on in no case nor for any reason will the Indians of this town, whether men or women, play drums, dance, or sing and dance at a marriage or town festival, singing in their mother tongue as they have done up to now.”
“From now on Indian sorcerers and ministers of idolatry must not cure the sick in any way, because experience has shown that when they effect cures they cause those who are sick to become idolaters and to confess their sins to them in the pagan manner.”
“Extreme rigor and every means of punishment should be used in addition to preaching and teaching, prohibiting them from assembling publicly or secretly to get drunk during their festivals, or during the Christmas and Easter seasons, or during the festivals of the advocation of the town, and every Indian who does so should be punished severely and upon the caciques should be executed the penalties laid down in the aforesaid decrees for the improvement of their ways.”
“The priest of this town will strictly enforce the decrees against drunkenness and chicha made of jora… for this is the most efficacious means of destroying idolatry….”
After the success of these visits throughout the region of Huar0chiri, they continued to Yauyos and then to Xauxa, to Andajes and to Chinchaycochas. A prison was set up on the outskirts of Lima to house the pagan priests, but as there were so many it could only hold “…one from each village for the warning of others.”
In 1616 Avila was appointed to “Visit” Huanuco, Huamachucho and Conchuc0s, whilst Diego Ramirez moved on to Huaylas. Arriaga himself accompanied Doctor Hernando de Avendaño to the Chancay region, making a record of the team’s achievements there, in their circuit to 31 towns to the north of Lima. He joyfully relates some of the triumphs of these Visits.
“…in the Province of Checras [in Chancay], were discovered many great idolatries and huacas, amongst them one so famous amongst the indians, and revered by towns far away, which was the body of an ancient chief called Libracacancharco, which was found on a rough mountain a league from the village of San Chrisobal de Rapaz, in a cave under a pavilion, with a diadem of gold on his head, and dressed with seven very fine garments, which the Indians said had been sent as presents from the ancient Inca kings. This body…and another of a general of his called Chichu Michuy which was in a different place, and also very revered, were taken to Lima…and the bodies were burnt with many other holy things, to the horror of the indians…”
But individual victories against the Devil such as this, do not convey the full scale of the repression that was taking place. Arriaga again lays it out for us in detail.
“From February 1617 to July of 1618, there are 5694 persons who have been confessed, 679 ministers of idolatry, …, 703 principal Huacas, which have been taken from them, and 3488 Conopas, 45 Mamazaras, and many other Conopas, 189 Huancas (these are different from the Huacas) seven hundred and seventeen 717 Malchis, and the Sorcerers who were punished, in the plains sixty-three, the cradles, which were burned, 357 , and 477 bodies stolen from the Church, and not counted, many bodies Chacpas, nor Chuchos, who also revere , and that they keep them in their homes, nor the Pacts, nor Axomamas, nor Micsazara, nor Huantayzara, nor Huayriguazara, nor other things, in which they have a thousand superstitions, that all have been burned.
To see this in context, Chancay had a population of 13,000 in the census of 1575, of which just 2626 were tax payers, that is householders or working men. The quality of life for the indians under Spanish rule was such that the number of workers across Peru of did not begin to rise until the nineteenth century.
On the contrary, the population, which was already a fraction of its level before the first arrival of the Spanish with their diseases and their immorality, continued to fall. For Chancay, successive censuses in 1591 showed a slight increase in taxpayers to 2682, but they were then reduced by 30% to 1838 in 1601, and again by 12% to 1648 by 1627.
So in this population of, perhaps, 1740 taxpayers and 8600 people in 1617, it would seem that more than half confessed to be pagans, there was a pagan priest for every twelve people, that is one for every shrine. There was one shrine or holy site for every three households. In addition, there were one or two conopas or small offering objects destroyed for each household, and a revered ancestor of every third family was burnt. Every family and house was affected throughout the region.
The Visits were not isolated events. They continued at regular intervals for the next fifty years. In Chancay, according to records maintained to the present day in the Archbishopric of Lima, and also in the Bishopric of Huacho, there were further visits in various districts in 1622, 1644, 1646, 1647, 1650, 1653, 1662, 1663, 1665, 1668, 1675, 1676 and 1677.
The Visitors saw themselves as saving the Peruvian people from themselves.
“To understand what a miserable state these people are in, and the extreme need they have of help, there is no better testimony that to see a day of the Exhibitions, when all their objects of idolatry are brought together…the dried bodies, and remains of their ancestors … the clothes they wear for the festivals, the feathers with which they dress themselves, the pots, jugs and bowls … to make beer,… the ordinary trumpets of copper, and sometimes of silver, big horns, and other instruments brought to the fiestas, tamborines, well made…for the dances, and …deer antlers, skins of foxes and of sierra pumas and many more things that have to be seen to be believed.”
Converting the people to their religion was the justification for the Spanish of their presence in the New World. After military conquest, after stealing all the gold and silver they could find, and after their own internal ten year war for the greatest share of the spoils, they set out to dominate and eliminate the indigenous culture, particularly religious belief. Native rituals that were proscribed included dancing, singing, drinking, and rites for the newborn and the dead. And eventually the native language.
In February 2018 over 150 mummy bundles or fardos were found at Pachacamac – not burials, but bundles that had been burnt before they were buried.. The archaeologists were able to find amongst the ashes ceramics, textiles and other objects as well as human remains.
At first it was thought they were the remains of some previously unknown ritual practice. But the number and position of the burnt mummy bundles suggested they were a late introduction to the site. This led to a surprising conclusion – they could be the remains of one of the Autos da Fe, Processions of the Faith, where the mummified ancestors, musical instruments, and other cultural objects seized by the Visitors in the Extirpacion of the Idolatries were publicly paraded in Lima and then burnt.
They could in fact be what is left of the hundreds of mummy bundles (fardos) and offerings that Father Francisco de Avila paraded and burnt in the 1608 ceremony held in the Main Square of Lima, the Show that won him the Extirpacion contract and exemplified the role of Church and colonists in Peru for the next 500 years.
Mansio Serra de Leguizamon came with the Pizarro brothers to invade Peru and was the last of the Spanish conquistadors to die at the age of seventy-eight. This is what he wrote in his will.
“I wish Your Majesty to understand the motive that moves me to make this statement is the peace of my conscience and because of the guilt I share. For we have destroyed by our evil behaviour such a government as was enjoyed by these natives. They were so free of crime and greed, both men and women, that they could leave gold or silver worth a hundred thousand pesos in their open house.”
“So that when they discovered that we were thieves and men who sought to force their wives and daughters to commit sin with them, they despised us. But now things have come to such a pass in offence of God, owing to the bad example we have set them in all things, that these natives from doing no evil have turned into people who can do no good.”
“I beg God to pardon me, for I am moved to say this, seeing that I am the last to die of the Conquistadors.”