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 Lima. He was met there, 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 Spaniards journey and co-ordinate the meeting. The amount of gold and silver they brought could have 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: Onee 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 also received lands in Mala and Chilca.
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. 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 this had little relation to reality, and encomenderos often 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. The rights were to be held in perpetuity by the grant-holder and his descendants.
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. Whilst in practice Pizarro and his followers on their arrival were uncontrolled, and largely uncontrollable, their invasion had been approved by royal warrant and they were operating “under license”.
One the riches of Peru became apparent, the forces of the Crown sought to enforce the terms of that license.
The invaders had first of all 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 more latecomers. These people, who were mostly hired mercenaries, treated their encomiendas like invading armies, looting, murdering, raping and enslaving.
The Yauyos and other areas were becoming heavily depopulated as a result of the Spanish presence. There were lives lost in the continual attempts at resistance to the invaders, and armies were levied to increase the fighting forces of Pizarro and Amagro. From 1537 to 1541 these two of the original men of Estremadoyro waged their own private war for control of 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.
The reducciones in turn were organised into districts for adminstration and taxation known as repartimentos, which replaced the encomienda system. Under repartimentos, 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 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 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”.
Whilst today Yauyos refers to the highland region, Davila´s map of the territory shows it running down to the coast. The coast road, the town of Mala and the town of Calango are marked on the map as are bridges or river crossings at Calango and the stairway to Paria Caca, the ancient pathway which rises above the lake past rock paintings in a grotto below the icy peaks.
The road from Mala goes via Calango to Omas and San Pedro de Pilas whilst a road from Callao and Lima (ciudad de Los Reyes, City of the Kings) goes past Zizicaya, crossing the Rio Pachacamac or Rio Lurin, and up the stairway, usually known today in Quechua as Laderas Llantayoc.
On the river Mala above Calango there is also another river crossing at St Pedro de Biscas, where now there is Viscas.
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 being collection of taxes and exploiting their tribute labour. Two hundred towns and villages before the coming of the Spanish were coalesced into 38 Spanish-style towns.
The seventeenth century haciendas represented a change from the encomienda system. 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, who fought for their freedom when the Chileans invaded, twenty years after slavery was declared illegal in Peru.
In 1862 Peruvian ships seeking more slaves sailed 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 Mala, The first hacienda to be established was called The Lord of the Stair, “El Señor de la Escala”, and its first 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 at that time such as the Hacienda “El Salitre”.
In the 1960s and 1970s, a process of land reform was initiated by the military g0vernment 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.
3.-o. Sobre la Hacienda LaRinconada de Mala, se tiene noticias desde los años 1634, al reconocerse el“Mayorazgo de Lumbreras” el 30 de Octubre del año indicado. Fue, a partir del SigloXIX y parte delSigloXX, propiedad de la familia Asín. L “tSan José”
The Inca king, and his eldest son and expected heir, both died of an unknown disease in 1528. Smallpox may have been introduced to the country around 1524.
This was just when Pizarro and his gang of heavily armed raiders first landed in Northern Peru, scouting the territory, and seizing natives before returning to Panama to prepare an invasion force.
When they came back in 1532, with 168 men and 62 horses, they discovered the land was devastated by disease and in a state of open warfare between two Inca princes whose father had split the growing empire between them.
What is well documented is a smallpox epidemic in the Spanish colonies of Hispaniola (Haiti) six years earlier. According to 19th century Spanish historian Ovieto who lived many years in Haiti, “there occurred [in 1518] an epidemic of smallpox so virulent that it left Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Jamaica and Cuba desolated of indians.” The island of Hispaniola was managed for the Spanish king by a religious order, the Hieronymite Fathers, who wrote to Spain in January 1519 to say that 30% of the indians had died (a few Spanish had been slightly afflicted though none had died) and the disease had spread to Puerto Rico.
In the central Andes, this first smallpox epidemic is thought to have killed 40% of the population. An outbreak of measles later took 30% of those who were left. At the end of the century, from 1585 to 1591, the two diseases ravaged again taking from 30% to 60% of the population. Over 90% of the population was killed by diseases to which they had little resistance, in 70 years.
The deaths continue today whenever people who have been living in isolation in the Amazon meet invaders – loggers, gold miners, missionaries or tourists.
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 – the systematic disrespect, denigration and destruction of the native beliefs and values, which continues today and is approaching 500 years of what, in a competitive field, is one of the world’s great barbarities.