13. The Spanish Antithesis

-Montaigne, Essays, Bk. III, ch. vi While the two sons of Huayna Capac, Huascar and Atahualpa, were fighting against each other, Pizarro landed near Tumbez and, at the head of a handful of men, began the assault on the plateau. It was the formidable clash of two different civilizations: the in dividualistic Europeans, brutal and greedy, but full of initiative and a marvelous daring; and the Indians, whose spirit had been broken by the socialist regime. Fortune smiled upon boldness, and the empire fell; but the impact was to be as fatal for the victors as for the vanquished, for the Spaniards were to take back with them, along with the gold of America, the seeds of decay. The his toric events are well known, and it is not our part to recount them anew; but it seems that the Spanish conquerors have often been misjudged. 209 210 A Socialist Empire: The Incas of Peru It would be foolish to try to compare states as dissimilar as Peru and Spain, one with its statisticians and bureaucrats, the other with its Inquisitors, its knights, and its beggars; the one all order and obedience, the other aflame with ardor and zeal. At the heart of the Peruvian empire was a small nucleus of clever men in whom all the vital existence of the country was concentrated. Spain, on the con trary, was swarming with individuals in ceaseless conflict with one another. Teeming with life, Spain gave birth to the human type that united in itself and carried to their extreme limits the good and evil qualities of the race: the conquistador. Impelled more by passion than by reflective will, more responsive to the spirit of camaraderie than to a sense of justice, mystical and sensual, am bitious and wily, valiant and resolute, the conquistador is the most perfect representative of that casticismo (i.e., pride of birth) in which is concentrated the valor and the virtue of all Castile.! He looks on life as a lottery, does not look before he leaps, and risks his very existence on the throw of the dice. Conquest fires his imagina tion by its quixotic element, nor is this, as might be imagined, the enthusiasm of youth: Francisco Pizarro was about fifty-eight years old at the time of the discovery of Peru, and his brother Fernando was nearly sixty. A nation already in step with the modem world, like France or England at the time of the Renais sance, would never have been able to produce such men, so im measurably self-confident and sure of their destiny, so "in love with glory," as, for instance, the Castilian whose story Enrique Larreta has told in his celebrated novel, La gloria de Don Ramiro. Who ever knows the passes of the Cordillera can understand the state of mind of the little band of men, numbering less than two hundred, who dared to commit themselves to the perils of a country inimical and unknown.

It is a mistake to regard the conquerors simply as bandits in search of gold and amusement. No doubt there were in Pizarro's company many ruffians and criminals, as a single detail suffices to prove: after the capture of the Inca at Cajamarca, several soldiers suggested to their leader that the hands of the Indian prisoners be cut off. But alongside such brutes as these we find Francisco de Jerez, Miguel de Estete, Bartolome Ruiz, Pedro Sancho, Cristobal The Spanish Antithesis 211 de Molina, Juan de Betanzos, and many others, who knew how to observe and report and who were something other than "ignorant adventurers." 2 It cannot be denied that the Spaniards were guilty of all kinds of cruelties. The testament of S. de Leguizamo and the N oticias secretasof Juan and Ulloa constitute overwhelming indictments. 3 The crimes of the Spaniards were innumerable, from the murder of Atahualpa to the rape of the Virgins of the Sun, the demolition of the palaces, and the looting of the warehouses. Real wealth was stupidly destroyed, and no one was the richer for it. To get cinna mon, the whole tree was cut down, and the vicuna was killed to secure its woo1.4 "The Spaniards did more harm in four years," says Ondegardo, "than the Incas had done in four hundred." "They sacked the country," adds Santillan. 5 Of course, the conquerors had to surmount unprecedented ob stacles, to struggle not only against Nature and the natives, but even against the intrigues and rivalries of their jealous compatriots.

It was only at the third attempt, and after all sorts of tragic vicissi tudes, that Pizarro reached Tumbez. Most of the conquerors had to endure great suffering: for example, Pascual de Andagoya on the coast of Colombia;6 Alvarado in traversing the equatorial forests from Bahia de Caraquez to Riobamba;7 Gonzalo Pizarro in the virgin forests of eastern Ecuador; and Almagro in the Atacama desert of Chile. 8 Such men as these, as hard on themselves as they were on others, would flinch at nothing; and when they found themselves at last in the presence of the riches they had dreamed of, they were seized by a veritable intoxication and lost all restraint. Indeed, Juan Nuix thought it remarkable that, in view of the temptations that beset the conquerors, the irregularities were not worse than they were.9 The result, however, was disastrous. Knowing nothing of the Inca system, the Spaniards unwittingly perverted it.10 Civil wars,l1 epidemics, excessive forced labor, work in the mines, all brought about a rapid decline in the population. Nothing makes more de pressing reading than the chapters in Cieza de Leon's Cronica in which he describes the abandonment of formerly rich and well populated valleys.12 Very grave consequences followed. The bur212 A Socialist Empire: The Incas of Peru dens laid upon the Indians became all the heavier as the number of those on whom they fell decreased. "Ten Indians," wrote San tillan, "are sometimes taxed today as one hundred used to be." 13 All the natives from sixteen to sixty were declared subject to taxa tion, although before the conquest only those between twenty-five and fifty years of age had been so classified.14 Yet the total amount of taxes due did not find its way into the coffers of the Crown be cause the tax gatherers did not take the trouble to collect in ordinate commissions. 15 Moreover, the native chiefs, no longer sub ject to the Inca's control, became too numerous,16 and, following the example of the Spaniards, acquired a taste for luxuries and the desire for pleasure· and themselves began to tyrannize over the Indians. "Today, every cacique makes himself an Inca in his prov ince," says Santillan. 17 It needed official orders from the King to fix the total sum of the taxes due to the caciques from their sub jects.1S The Spaniards are not alone in having made mistakes and com mitted crimes in their colonies. The English in North America were even more cruel, for they exterminated the Indians. It re mains no less true, however, that the coming of the Spaniards may in some respects be compared to an invasion by barbarians. Yet in justice to them it should not be forgotten-as it often is-that this period of disturbance was of short duration and that it was fol lowed by an era of peaceful organization.

2. Colonial Organization It is better to bring an undertaking to a halt than to cause the slightest injury to the Indians. -Recopilacion de leyes de los reinos de las Indias, Bk. IV, Title xxvi, Law 4 For a long time historians sought to do justice to the Spaniards and to protest against the exaggerations of three writers who, at the end of the eighteenth century, warped the judgment of their contemporaries: Abbe Raynal (1770); Adam Smith, the celebrated author of The Wealth of Nations (1776);19and William Robertson The Spanish Antithesis 213 (1777). But nobody listened to these advocates of a more just ap proach; and it is only in recent times that Juan Nuix's Reflexiones imparcialessobre la humanidad de los espafiolesen las Indias) writ ten originally in Italian and translated into Spanish, and the chap ter from Colmeiro's book to which we have also referred 20 have become known. In our own day a few voices have finally succeeded in making themselves heard: Marius Andre in France,21 R. Alta mira in Spain,22 C. Pereyra in Mexico,23 and Lewis Hanke in the United States24 have endeavored to correct the hasty verdicts that the most distinguished authors have believed themselves obliged to pronounce upon the Spanish achievement in America.

A reaction is developing against the accumulated errors of the textbooks. It is no longer permissible today to ignore what the conquerors gave to the conquered: European methods of agriculture,25 useful animals,26 and scientific knowledge. Above all, it is not possible to disregard the efforts made by the King, the higher officials, and the clergy to improve the lot of the Indians. It is seldom that the destinies of a people have been directed by greater administrators than the presiding judge De la Gasca or the viceroy Francisco de Toledo. And how can we not admire that poor and honest licenti ate, Juan de Ovando, President of the Council of the Indies, who elaborated that "monument of justice, humanity, and wisdom" which is called "the Laws of the Indies"? 27 In every province there was an official of the Crown to perform the functions of "protector of the Indians"; and the slave trade was no other than a humani tarian measure intended to relieve the natives of the most labori ous tasks.28 What is especially remarkable in the Spanish colonial organiza tion ~ that in many respects it was inspired by the old Peruvian syste~. All of Ondegardo's work is an eloquent plea in favor of a return to preColumbian institutions; and Matienzo, although con stantly talking of the tyranny of the Incas, patterns the articles of the laws he proposes on the customs that were in existence before the conquest. 29 If the viceroy Francisco de Toledo deserved to be called a "second Pachacutec," 30 it was because he did over again the 'work of that monarch. He reassembled the scattered tribes, 214 A Socialist Empire: The Incas of Peru appointed officials, determined tax assessments, and regulated the postal service and the tambos.

Unfortunately, all this regimentation came too late. The white men could not conform to the ancient discipline. The rules were imperfectly enforced or even circumvented; and the system as a whole took on the aspect of a caricature, rather than a copy, of the ancient model. Pereyra, speaking of the laws of the Indies, declares that "this fund of benevolence lacked only the one law that would have enforced the others." 31 The one element of the ancient organization that, above all else, survived the conquest was precisely what was not the work of the Incas, namely, the agrarian community. The conquest had de stroyed the rational plan, the superstructure built up by the law maker of Cuzco, and only the ancestral foundation remained. The "Spanish peace" prevailed in America. The viceroy Fran cisco de Toledo refused to undertake new expeditions, urging that it was better to preserve his domains and make them prosperous than to conquer new territory that could not be exploited because of the shortage of men. 32 Colonists were settled on the land; towns prospered; the Spaniards became farmers, cattle breeders, builders, scholars, and not merely those seekers after gold so often described in legend and poetry. Here again the state took protective action by prohibiting the emigration of undesirables-vagabonds, criminals, Jews, and Moors-to America.

As the colonial regime was not one of systematic oppression, the War of Independence was not a movement of popular revolt by the Indians. A tendency to adopt toward all revolutions an almost reverential and mystical attitude has had the effect of falsifying history. It was the large property owners, big business, and the clergy that led the struggle, all of them desiring autonomy above everything else; and it was a "great aristocrat," Bolivar, who tri umphed. 33 The Spanish Antithesis 215 3. A Nation of Grown-up Children 34 Christopher Columbus, unhappy admiral, Pray to God for the world you discovered. -Ruben Daria, .Ii Colon What has become today of the descendants of the worshippers of the Sun? Incomplete statistics do not permit an exact answer. We have seen that the population of the territory once subject to the Inca was probably about the same around 1914 as at the time of the coming of Pizarro. But of this population how many were Indians, how many mestizos, how many whites? Even when the census differentiates the races, the figures remain suspect, for often in South America any Indian who wears European dress and speaks Spanish is classified by the government as white. s5 It seems, on the whole, that the whites in the Andean states are in a minority, not only as compared with the red men, but also as com pared with the people of mixed blood. According to the census of 1896, the pure-blooded Indians formed 57.5% of the population of Peru, and the census of 1914 in Bolivia put the proportion there at 50.9%. According to Wolf, only one pure-blooded white per hundred inhabitants is to be counted in the rural districts of Ecuador, and the pure-blooded Indians make up 50% of the population of that coun try.36 Garcia Calderon says that of the total population of Peru and Ecuador only 6% are white as against 70% of pure Indian stock.37 Means gives the figures as: pure Indian, 50%; people of mixed blood, 30% to 35%; whites, 15% to 20%, of which number 5% are pure white. 3s In 1924, V. Sapper estimated that more than 6,000,000 pure blooded Indians were living in the Andean countries. s9 All these figures are only approximations. In a general way, it may be said that the whites occupy most of the important positions in the South Amer ican republics, that the people of mixed blood constitute the majority of the middle class, and that the Indians make up the mass of the population.

Intelligent and imitative, the whites and the mestizos draw in spiration from democratic ideas that are incompatible with their 216 A Socialist Empire: The Incas of Peru degree of civilization and often insist upon maintaining institu tions of a European type that are not suited to them. Hence, revo lutions repeatedly hamper economic development, and the people live through continual alternations of dictatorship and anarchy. Calm is restored only when power falls into the hands of one of those energetic leaders who are called caudillos) such as Porfirio Diaz, Guzman Blanco, Garcia Moreno, Dr. Francia, General Roca. Then the country can enter upon the path of progress; but soon the outraged liberals raise a clamor, the caudillo is swept out by an uprising, and disorder begins again. This, at least, has been the pattern for some time. In recent years conditions have improved greatly, and a state of equilibrium seems to have been attained in a number of countries.

As for the condition of the great mass of the people, it remains what it has always been. The last descendants of the Incas, of the ancient elite exterminated by Atahualpa and by the Spaniards, have passed into oblivion. 40 The Indians are more backward now than at the time of the Spanish conquest, according to Tschudi. 41 They remain submissive, distrustful, and superstitious. Intellectual torpor constitutes their most marked characteristic and manifests itself in weakness of will, a taste for alcohol, unhygienic living, lack of proper nourishment as well as the most superficial knowl edge of cooking, and an insufficiency of housing and clothing. 42 Most of them continue to live in windowless huts of loose stones or mud, sleep with their clothes on, eat squatting on the ground, and have recourse to bowls, urns, cups, and spoons as household uten sils. They are not attracted by large cities, and, except at Lima, they do not form an urban proletariat, as so many of the poor and miserable do in European countries. 43 They tend their flocks of llamas as their grandfathers did, piping on their flutes the songs of olden days. Their language is that of their ancient masters, the Quechuas; their ways are those of their ancestors; their common law continues to exist side by side with the written law; their very Christianity is only paganisnl disguised. Our civilization has passed over them as the wind passes over the Cordillera. This is what they are today; this is what they were when they ran in throngs along the roads to acclaim the Child of the Sun.

The Spanish Antithesis 217 The Indian family has remained an economic institution, based upon utility and sensuality, not upon sentiment. Dismal and dirty, it presents little that is attractive. Marriage is simply a mating ar ranged by parents and priest to initiate a life in common. The wife is thus obliged to show herself capable of doing her part, that is, of preparing the food, spinning and weaving cloth for garments, helping in the work of the fields, and taking care of the animals; and this is why the custom of a trial period is current on the plateau today. Cohabitation makes it possible to ascertain and assure the future wife's ability to live up to the demands of her task. Virginity in a woman, far from being valued, is looked upon with disfavor. 44 As for the children, they must often do without the most ele mentary provisions of hygiene, and the infant mortality rate has become shockingly high. 45 The agrarian communities that we have studied here are a double-edged weapon. They protect the Indian, but by the same token they keep him in a position of inferiority in relation to the white man. He is a child, it is said; and the patronato indigeno has been established (Decree of May 29, 1922) on this account. The effect is to keep the Indian eternally in the status of a minor. He keeps his "collective consciousness," which in former days, to the great astonishment of the Spaniards, led him to engage in lawsuits between groups instead of between individuals. 46 He is not be coming accustomed to freedom. He remains sierooJ colonoJ peon J yanacona.

The remedy is twofold. A long-range program is needed on the psychological level, to be carried out by means of appropriate edu cation. The governments are working on this, and the Indians are by no means averse to it. But there are still too few teachers. 47 For the immediate present, and at the economic level, care must be taken that the community is not transformed into an autarky as a result of the modesty of its needs and the natural indolence of the people concerned. Certain specialists in this field recommend co operative associations for production, for the native is a skillful 218 A Socialist Empire: The Incas of Peru artisan and has raw materials-clay, wool, cabuya, totora, paja toquilla (a kind of straw), and hides-at his disposa1.48 We do not have to enter more deeply here into the present-day problem of the Indian, but it is evident that the future of the nations along the Pacific coast of South America depends in large measure upon the solution found for it. Europeans are prone to imagine that the Indians are no longer anything but a memory, that they exist only in the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, in the poetry of Longfellow, and on the reservations where the people of the United States have corralled them like animals in a menagerie.

And yet it is these red men who hold in their hands the future of the Pacific states. To be sure, the number of pure-blooded Indians must have diminished by almost half since the Spanish conquest, if we are to believe von Sapper, but the flow of white immigration is meager in these countries, which remain separated from the rest of the world "by the same natural barriers as in the time of the Incas," 49 and in the course of more recent years the native popula tion seems to have increased rapidly. In many regions the Indians and the descendants of the Span iards have no contact at all with one another. They present the "unique spectacle of two races living side by side for three cen turies without mingling." 50 In the colonial period the laws of the Indies, to which we have referred, in seeking to protect the natives by special provisions, contributed to keeping them segregated from the invaders. 51 This isolation has persisted. In our own day the red men resist the whites with an incredible force of inertia. Even where there has been some intermingling, it remains to be seen which of the two races will prevail. Are we to believe with Payne and with Mendieta y Nunez that mixed elements gradually revert to the Indian type,52 or with von Sapper that the red race will, in two or three centuries, have entirely disappeared as a result of miscegenation, which, in spite of everything, cannot fail to take place in the long run? 53 However this may be, the status of the indigenous peoples of the Andean countries is the most serious problem that the various governments concerned have to meet at the present time, and from time to time native uprisings serve to The Spanish Antithesis 219 remind the descendants of the conquerors that not all the chil dren of the vanquished have forgotten their ancient glories. 54 At the end of the War of Independence, at the Congress of Tucuman, a certain number of delegates demanded the restora tion of the empire of the Incas~ with CU2CO as its capital. It was a handsome tribute paid to the past; but, if the Indian seems to have changed very little, the white man and the mestizo have brought too many new elements into existing society to permit the ancient Peruvian organization to be revived in its pristine form. The astounding history of the Incas can have no sequel now.