CHAPTER II
THE COLONIAL SYSTEM AND TUPAC'S REVOLT
During the two hundred years which followed the Spanish conquest, life on the Bolivian plateau was vegetative and changeless except for the occasional excitement caused by the discovery of a rich new silver mine. The Indians lived in their villages, herding their masters' sheep or cultivating maize and potatoes, paid tribute to the encomenderos or the Crown collector, and submitted with dull patience to all the exactions. They reverenced their caciques, listened submissively to the parish priests, and meekly suffered the tyranny of the corregidors. The language of the conquerors was unintelligible to most of the people. When summoned to work in the mines they went to slow misery and certain death with the stoicism of their race. The South American Indian changes his attributes but slowly, and we find a moral resemblance in tribes differing widely in material culture. The Inca emperor exacted and received the same blind, unquestioning obedience which the Paraguayans gave to Lopez four centuries later, and the rude Guaranies on the banks of the Paraná, who had hardly entered the stone age, were no more readily submissive to the Spaniards than the Quichuas of Bolivia, whose engineering, agriculture, and architecture had reached a high degree of development.
Except the floating population of miners, the Spaniards and their descendants lived in the cities—La Paz, Cochabamba, Oruro, Charcas, Tarija, Santa Cruz. Each city had its plaza, its townhouse, its officials, and its law-courts. Administrative centres for the surrounding districts, their inhabitants were mainly functionaries and hangers-on, who varied the sleepy monotony of their existence by factional quarrels and political intrigues. In these cities the slow process of amalgamating the white and red races began, and the dynamic restlessness of the Caucasian infiltrated by degrees into the static calm of the Indian. The lower classes of the towns became half-breed, while in the country districts pure Indians predominated. Late in the colonial period the Spaniards were still occupying the position of alien taskmasters, and the process of fusing the different races into a homogeneous mass had made little progress after two centuries and a half of contact. In a word, the social and political organisation of Upper Peru was largely a continuation of the Inca system, but that system had been deformed and deprived of its efficiency and was subject to constant arbitrary interference from the Spanish corregidors, while the cities were separately governed by military governors and their own cabildos.
Until the middle of the eighteenth century the authority of the Lima viceroy nominally extended over the whole of Spanish South America. However, boards of high judicial and civil functionaries called audiencias, responsible directly to the Crown, exercised very important and independent judicial and administrative functions, each over a great division of Spanish America. Hardly had the conquest been completed when an audiencia was established at Charcas and that city became the political and ecclesiastical capital not only of all Upper Peru but of the vast regions to the south. The viceroy was too far away to interfere, and in effect a great semi-independent province was created, whose boundaries extended indefinitely south and east from the transverse range which separated the Titicaca basin from the region immediately governed by the viceroy and known as Lower Peru. To the jurisdiction of this province the governors of Tucuman, Paraguay, and Buenos Aires were subject, as well as the missions among the Chiquitos and Mojos on the headwaters of the Paraguay and Madeira.
The Bourbon kings, who succeeded the House of Austria early in the eighteenth century, were forced to abandon the effort to centralise the administration and commerce of the whole continent at Lima. The Atlantic and Caribbean coasts could not be effectively governed from the Pacific and the rising currents of trade and immigration must be allowed more liberty to follow their natural channels. The viceroyalty of Bogotá was created in 1740 including the northern and north-western portions of the continent, and in 1776 the south-eastern parts were erected into the viceroyalty of Buenos Aires. The whole audiencia of Charcas was separated from Lima, and to its territory was added that portion of Chile which lay east of the Andes. Though the Bolivian plateau was the most populous and important division of the new viceroyalty, Buenos Aires, far away on the Atlantic and in a region then considered of little value, was chosen as the capital.
In spite of prohibitive regulations goods had long been smuggled into Buenos Aires and thence carried over the Argentine plains up the comparatively easy passes leading to southern Bolivia, and the selection of the Plate city was a recognition by the Spanish government of the futility of longer trying to divert the trade of the Atlantic slope from its natural channels. But the greater length of the Atlantic route largely overcame the advantage of easier gradients, and social and commercial habits centuries old could not be revolutionised by statute. Most of Bolivia's small intercourse with the outside world continued to be conducted along the old Inca routes to the Pacific, and political union brought about no organic and commercial incorporation with the provinces near the mouth of the Plate.
Before the new viceroyalty was in good running order, a great Indian insurrection broke out which involved a large proportion of the Indians of the plateau. Tupac Amaru, the legitimate heir of the Inca emperors, and a wealthy and influential cacique in one of the valleys between Cuzco and the Bolivian border, had received a good Spanish education and possessed many friends among the whites. But his heart went out to his own people, and he had the courage to protest against the intolerable oppressions of the corregidors. Failing to obtain redress after repeated prayers to the Spanish authorities at least to enforce their own laws honestly, he resolved to appeal to arms, and in 1780 he captured and killed a particularly demoniacal corregidor, his own immediate superior, and summoned the Indians of southern Peru to fight for their rights under his banner. Tupac had secured some firearms and out of the vast multitudes which assembled at his call he equipped three thousand men. The Spaniards advanced from Cuzco with a force of twelve hundred men, but Tupac defeated them and hastened across the range to arouse the population around Titicaca. At every village he addressed the people from the church steps, saying that he was come to abolish abuses and punish the corregidors, and the Indians responded with acclamations for the Inca and redeemer. Meanwhile the Spanish officials were assembling a large force in Cuzco which, strange as it may seem, was mostly composed of Indians. The race possessed little instinctive capacity for organisation, was deficient in initiative, moral courage, and independence, and had not the resolution to refuse to follow the Spanish officers. There were only a few like Tupac who possessed the mental energy and originality to plan and to fight on their own account. Receiving news of the Spanish preparations, the Inca hurried back to his home province and attempted to negotiate. He recounted to the Spanish authorities his own earnest endeavours to obtain a measure of justice for his people, the habitual violation of Spanish law by Spanish officials, and the intolerable oppression of the system of impressment. He proposed a negotiation by which reforms might be attained without further bloodshed. Tupac's fame as an enlightened and unselfish patriot rests securely on the contents of the noble and able despatch which, on this occasion, he sent to the Spanish authorities. But the latter refused all compromise and ordered an advance on Tupac's position. He was surrounded, his army destroyed, and he himself sentenced to be torn in pieces by horses after witnessing with his own eyes the fearful tortures and death of his innocent and harmless wife and children.
The perpetration of such atrocities goaded even the dull and stoical Indians into a fury. They rose everywhere on the plateau and the Spaniards in northern Bolivia fled for refuge to La Paz and Puno. The Spanish army which had overcome Tupac advanced into the Titicaca basin, but was compelled to retreat before overwhelming numbers. Puno was evacuated and in 1781 the Spaniards had lost all foothold in northern Bolivia. But the habit of obedience was too strong; their first fury over, the Indians listened to promises of fair treatment and offers of compromise. Tupac's cousin, who had been made chief of the insurrection after the former's murder, was persuaded to submit on the promise of pardon, only to be arrested, tried, and executed as soon as his followers had laid down their arms. The family of the Inca was extirpated, ninety of its members, including women and children, being sent on foot, loaded with chains, over the hundreds of miles of mountain road to Lima and thence conveyed to Spain, where they rotted away in prison.
Many of the reforms to secure which Tupac had lost his own life and devoted his kin to destruction, were voluntarily put into effect by the Spanish government a few years later. The office of corregidor was abolished, and the district governors were made directly responsible to the governor of the province, who was in turn responsible to the viceroy and audiencia. Courts were established to protect the rights of the Indians and the higher authorities made a sincere effort to secure the enforcement of the laws. However, the reforms did not materially change the condition of the country, and the Indians apparently settled back into the same apathetic obedience to the whites. The anti-Spanish feeling took no active form for the present, but the events had proved that the Indian population had become a field well prepared for the springing up of a crop of bloody insurrections.
