The Colonial History of Paraguay

The Revolt of the Comuneros, 1721-1735

Adalberto Lopez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351484862
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The Paraguayan revolt of 1721-1735 was the first of sev-eral events that presaged the Hispanic American Inde-pendence movements of the early nineteenth century. Exist-ing works on the revolt, though, are either too short, superficial, or inaccurate. The Colonial History of Paraguay is an original contribution to the scholarship on this crucial period in Paraguay's history. More than a detailed account of the revolt, the work provides an overview of Paraguay in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, combining politics, eco-nomics, and social analysis into an integrated whole. It is the first modern study of a little-known yet significant portion of Hispanic-American history.

Part 1 The Settlers

1 A Tradition of Autonomy

There was great suffering in Buenos Aires that winter of 1536. The Indian tribes of the grassy plains that stretched beyond the new settlement had declared war on the white intruders, and thousands of their warriors now lay siege to the town. Inside, a few friars and a handful of Spanish women prayed to the heavens for succor while an army of fifteen hundred proud Spaniards complained and waited and starved. Their supplies were gone and neither rats, mice nor snakes were sufficient to still their hunger. Three Spaniards killed a horse and ate it, and, when their crime was discovered, they were tried and hanged. The night after the execution, three other Spaniards stole out to the gallows, hacked off the thighs and other pieces of flesh from the three hanging corpses, and ate them in the silence of their tent. Don Pedro de Mendoza, scion of one of the most powerful and illustrious noble families of Spain, was in command; and he too suffered. Like his mistress María Dávila, who had accompanied him from Spain and shared his bed during those tragic days, he was ill with syphilis. Although the situation was not of his making, he was widely hated by those whom he had brought to this living hell. One morning the lieutenant whom he had graciously allowed to use his bed was found knifed to death.¹

Buenos Aires was but a few months old at that time. Located at the entrance of the great Río de la Plata, it had been founded as the future port city of a region whose interior was believed to be immensely rich in gold and silver. The river had been discovered two decades earlier by the Spanish navigator Juan Díaz de Solís and explored in 1527 by Sebastian Cabot, who sailed northwards into the Paraná and Paraguay rivers.² By the time Cabot returned to Spain, the belief was spreading that the lands to the west of the rivers he explored hid a kingdom rich in precious metals. The persistence of this belief and growing Portuguese interest in the Río de la Plata region brought about the great expedition of Pedro de Mendoza.³

Mendoza agreed to finance the expedition out of his pocket. In return for his investment he received the titles of adelantado, governor, captain-general, and justicia mayor of a territory that stretched from the border of the Portuguese colony of Brazil in the east to the eastern lowlands of the Andes in the west, and from the equator in the north to the Straits of Magellan in the south. In this huge territory Mendoza was to be commander-in-chief of all military forces, chief justice, and chief administrator, with the power to distribute lands, found towns, and coin money if necessary.⁴

Mendoza’s expedition, consisting of eleven large ships with over 1,500 people aboard, sailed into the Río de la Plata in early 1536. On the southern bank of the river, near the sea, the adelantado founded the city of Nuestra Señora de Buenos Aires. The neighboring Indian tribes were friendly at first and even shared with the white intruders some of their meager rations. As the weeks passed, however, they became tired of the arrogance and increasing demands of the Spaniards and retreated into the plains near the town. By May, rations in Buenos Aires were running short and Mendoza was sending expeditions into the interior to take by force what the Indians would no longer give freely. Clashes between whites and Indians became more and more frequent. By the middle of June the Indians had decided to rid themselves of the Spaniards and thousands of their warriors lay siege to Buenos Aires. By the end of the month the hunger and the dying had begun. Within weeks close to a thousand persons died of starvation and disease in the settlement. It was not till the end of August that the Indians gave up the siege and disappeared into the plains. Once again the Spaniards were able to forage the countryside for game and edible roots.⁵

Mendoza was too ill with syphilis to undertake the exploration of the Paraná and Paraguay rivers or the search for the gold and silver that all believed was to be found between the Paraquay and the Andes. He entrusted that task to the second-in-command of the expedition, Juan de Ayolas, who left Buenos Aires in October 1536 with 170 men. Ayolas’.chief lieutenant was a thirty-one year old Basque named Domingo de Irala who, in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, was to be the leading personality in Paraguay.⁶

In January 1537, having received no news from Ayolas about his whereabouts, Mendoza sent another of his lieutenants, Juan Salazar de Espinosa, in search of his second-in-command. Ill, tired, and disappointed, the adelantado waited for more than three months without news from either Ayolas or Salazar. In April he finally decided to give up the enterprise in which he had invested so much of his fortune, his time, and his health. In an official document he named Ayolas his successor as commander of all the men in the province of the Río de la Plata and appointed Francisco Ruíz Galán to take charge of Buenos Aires until Ayolas should return.⁷ On April 22, still accompanied by his faithful mistress María Dávila, Mendoza boarded the ship Magdalna and sailed from Buenos Aires. He was terribly ill, unable to move his hands and feet, and was not to make it back to Spain alive. “When he was come nearly halfway,” wrote the German chronicler Ulrich Schmidt, “the hand of the Almighty so smote him that he died miserably. May God be merciful to him.”⁸

During the months that Mendoza had waited in Buenos Aires, Ayolas and his expedition had sailed northwards following Cabot’s route into the river Paraguay. The sails were up and the crews at the oars, but the going was slow. It was the rainy season and the rivers were high. Wide even during the dry summer months, the waters of the winding Paraná and Paraguay had now risen over their banks and flooded the verdant countryside for miles around. The currents were strong and the navigating dangerous, for numerous islands and large rocks dotted both rivers under whose muddy waters lay unseen sandbanks. Worried, Ayolas and his men made their way through the maze of shifting channels as they kept an eye out for shallows and avoided the huge trunks of dead trees which the waters of the two mighty rivers carried from as far away as their sources in the interior of Brazil. Under the cloudy skies, few birds were to be seen.⁹

By the end of January, Ayolas had sailed far north along the Paraguay. On February 2, he founded the port of Candelaria and, accompanied by 130 men, set out on his march into the interior in search of precious metals. Behind, at Candelaria, he left his three small ships and thirty-three men under the command of Irala whom he officially named his lieutenant and successor in command and who was to wait there for his return.¹⁰

When Irala began his long wait for Ayolas at Candelaria, Salazar was sailing up the Paraná and into the Paraguay with a force of seventy men. In April he sailed into the Bay of Caracará on the eastern bank of of the Paraguay, where he was met with gestures of peace and friendship by the Indians of the region. These Indians who sheltered and fed Salazar and his troops were members of the Guaraní linguistic group, which occupied a large area extending from the Atlantic coast of Brazil westward to the Paraguay river. They were a handsome people who ordinarily went about naked, were polygamous, were proud of the eloquence of their language, and lived in small villages dispersed among the lovely forests and valleys of the region. They were agriculturalists who grew a variety of crops, among which manioc and maize were the most important.¹¹

Salazar liked the area around the Bay of Caracará and, just before he set out to continue his search for Ayolas, he promised the Guaraní chiefs of the region that he would return there to found a settlement. On June 23, 1537, the same day that the syphilitic Mendoza was dying in mid-ocean, Salazar and Irala came upon each other near Candelaria. Together they went into the interior in search of Ayolas but found no trace of him. They returned to Candelaria, and, while Irala remained there to continue his vigil for his commander, Salazar and his men sailed down river to keep the promise he had made to the Indians of the Bay of Caracará. There, on August 15, 1537, he officially founded the settlement of Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, future capital of Paraguay and center of the great comunero revolt.¹²

Salazar made a good choice in the location of the new settlement. The banks of the bay were high enough to protect the area against flooding in the rainy season, the local Indians were friendly, and the land was fertile and pleasant to the eye. The bay was surrounded by low hills gently sloping to meet the waters of the river. Beyond, to the east, stretched an undulating low plateau crisscrossed with rivers, dotted with lakes, and adorned with park-like forests and small stands of scrub palm growing out of an often startling red soil. The hills of the plateau were green and low; the valleys fertile and covered with grass; the climate mild and the rainfall moderate. The French naturalist Bonpland was to call this region the “garden of South America;” the American geographer Preston James would later describe it as “a natural paradise.”¹³

Across the river from the new settlement and beyond the lush vegetation that adorned its western bank, stretched the Gran Chaco, an alluvial plain rising gradually from east to west, broken here and there by small rises and low hills. There was little vegetation, mostly thickets and thorny scrub trees. It was an inhospitable region, dry and hot; a lonely region, “a plain with the soul of a mountain, motionless and hard as a rock.”¹⁴ But men lived there, nomadic tribes of hardy warriors, sure of their ways and jealous of their independence. Neither Salazar nor the other Spaniards busy on the Bay of Caracará could imagine then the suffering and hardships these nomadic tribes would bring upon them and their descendants.

Salazar remained in Asunción a few weeks supervising the construction of buildings in the settlement, consolidating the growing alliance with the Guaranís, and arranging for the planting of crops. In early September he left the town and sailed downstream to Buenos Aires to report to Mendoza what he had done and to let him know that not all Indians were bad Indians. He was disappointed when he learned of the departure of the adelantado and irritated by the pretentions of Galán who, in the absence of Ayolas, thought of himself as the commander of the Spaniards in Candelaria, Asunción, and Buenos Aires. By early February 1538 Salazar was back in Asunción. There he was joined by Irala who had grown tired of waiting for Ayolas and was in need of supplies. Several weeks later Irala returned to Candelaria to wait once again for Ayolas’ return or for news of his whereabouts.¹⁵

In the meantime trouble was brewing in Buenos Aires. Galán, who considered himself the undisputed commander of the place, did not see eye to eye with the treasury officials Felipe Cáceres and García Venegas, both of whom had come to the Río de la Plata with Mendoza to look after the king’s interests and who considered themselves of enough consequence to be consulted by Galán in the affairs of government. For months the quarrel went on, each side inventing or discovering issues with which to discredit the other. The quarrel was still on in November when two ships arrived from Spain with 160 men, plenty of supplies, and instructions from the king.

The newcomers were commanded by Alonso Cabrera, a treasury official as proud and as arrogant as his colleagues Cáceres and Venegas. Among the documents he brought with him was a royal cédula signed at Valladolid by Charles V on September 12, 1537. Charles had learned of Mendoza’s death but did not know whether or not the adelantado had named a successor. If, stated the cédula, a successor had been named and was still alive he was to be the legitimate governor of the province of the Río de la Plata. If, on the other hand, Mendoza’s successor was dead or a successor had not been named at all by the adelantado, the survivors of the expedition were to gather peacefully and freely elect, in the name of the king, a governor for the province.¹⁶

The cédula of 1537, which one historian has called the Magna Carta of colonial Paraguay, is unique in the history of the Spanish American colonies. No other part of Spain’s empire in America received the privilege of popular elections. It is strange that a monarch who was so busy centralizing power in Spain and destroying the autonomy that the municipalities and other institutions had enjoyed in medieval times should grant such a privilege to the conquerors of a region still believed to be rich in precious metals. Also strange is the fact that the cédula did not place a limit on the number of times governors could be elected. During the next two centuries the people of Paraguay were to make use of the cédula not only to elect new governors when the post was vacant but, to the chagrin of the Spanish Crown, also to dipose unpopular ones.¹⁷

In May 1539 Galán and the treasury officials traveled to Asunción to find out whether Ayolas had returned from his trip to the interior and if not, to consult with Irala and the other commanders in the north. When they arrived in the settlement they found Irala there repairing his ships, gathering supplies, and enjoying the embraces of Indian girls. He was popular among his men and soon was able to gain the support of the treasury officials, whom he was careful to treat with deference. In July, a majority of the Spaniards in Asunción decided that until Ayolas’s return, Irala and not Galán was to be in command. Perhaps afraid for his own safety, Galán accepted the decision and quietly left Asunción never again to play a role in the affairs of the province.¹⁸

Three months after the departure of Galán, Irala sailed from Asunción and returned to Candelaria to learn from the neighboring Indians that Ayolas and his men had been wiped out by hostile Indian tribes in the interior. With Ayolas dead, Irala was now the undisputed commander of all the Spaniards still in the Río de la Plata. He evacuated Candelaria, returned to Asunción, and, after consulting with the treasury officials, issued orders that Buenos Aires was also to be evacuated and that all Spaniards were to concentrate in Asunción. Centuries later admirers and detractors of Irala were to debate the motivations for this decision. Historians who saw Irala as an ambitious schemer argued that his decision to make Asunción rather than Buenos Aires the main center of Spanish activity in the province of the Río de la Plata was motivated by a desire to increase the distance between himself and his monarch and to forestall any opposition to his rule that might develop among those still in Buenos Aires. Irala’s defenders, however, accepted the reasons Irala himself gave for his decision: that Asunción was closer to the gold and silver that he hoped to find in the interior, that the local Indians were friendly, and that Buenos Aires was on the verge of collapse.¹⁹

Irala sailed to Buenos Aires and in June supervised its evacuation. In September he was back in Asunción, now the only settlement of the some 400 Spaniards still in the province of the Río de la Plata. Ten days after his return, after consulting with the treasury officials, Irala took the momentous step of establishing the cabildo, or town council, of Asunción, which was to develop into one of the most independent political institutions in Paraguay and was to remain so till its abolition by the dictator Francia in December 1814. Charles V, who had no love for municipal institutions, had given Mendoza the task of founding towns but not the power to establish town councils. Irala’s action, then, was manifestly illegal. Whether he realized that or not would have probably made little difference to him anyway. The treasury officials had approved the move, Asunción was in need of municipal government, and, in any event, Charles was far away and too busy with the affairs of Europe.

The act of September 16, 1541 established a cabildo of five regidores or councilmen, two alcaldes, and an alguacil mayor or chief constable whose job was to preserve the peace and arrest violators of the law. From the begining of its existence, the cabildo of Asunción had its escribano whose main task was to keep the minutes of the sessions of the council, and a pregonero or town crier. In years to come other officers were added to the cabildo: the fiel ejecutor who was charged with the general enforcement of municipal ordinances dealing with trade and business in the city; the alférez real or royal stand...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• PART 1 THE SETTLERS
• PART 2 THE JESUITS
• PART 3 THE REVOLT
• Epilogue
• Abbreviations
• Index