The People and the King: The Comunero Revolution in Colombia, 1781

Introduction

Introduction This study grew out of my previous book. In The Kingdom of Quito in the Seventeenth Century, I attempted to explore the inner workings of the colonial bureaucracy and to examine those conditions which enabled the administration to conciliate tensions and conflicts. This book looks at the other side of the coin. Under what conditions did the bureaucratic system of conciliation break down, so that various groups felt it necessary to resort to arms to achieve their political ends? Such an occasion occurred in Colombia, then called the New Kingdom of Granada, in 1781. Some twenty thousand badly armed but rabidly irate sons and daughters of that poor but proud land marched to the village of Zipaquira, a day's distance from Bogota, to demand that the ministers of King Charles III of Spain repudiate a whole series of abrasively introduced fiscal and administrative changes. The capital was virtually defenseless. The portly, astute archbishop of Santa Fe de Bogota, Antonio Caballero y Gongora, in the name of the authorities signed the capitulations of Zipaquira in which the program of Charles III was abrogated. This event, which has gone down in history as the Comunero Revolution, has been interpreted by some modern historians as the precursor of political independence, by others as a frustrated social revolution from below betrayed by those above. It was neither, as this book seeks to demonstrate, by focusing principally on how the men and women of 1781 perceived their protest. Rather than interpreting the Comuneros in terms of subsequent events, I have concentrated on the inner meaning of two key phrases: the word Comunero, by which the protesters identified themselves, and the slogan that the crowds shouted in all the squares of that mountain kingdom: " iViva el rey y muera el mal gobierno!" "Long live the king and death to bad government." The implicit political ideology of this movement cannot be found in the doctrines of the French and English philosophers who did so much to inspire the contemporary North American revolution of independence. Those ideas were unknown in New Granada in 1781. The intellectual nourishment of the generation of 1781 came from the doctrines of the classic Spanish theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the most outstanding of whom was the Jesuit Francisco Suarez. To the citizens of New Granada their kingdom constituted a corpus mysticum politicum, with its own traditions and procedures designed to achieve the common good of the whole community . That common good, according to the men of 1781, was being flagrantly xvii Introduction This study grew out of my previous book. In The Kingdom of Quito in the Seventeenth Century, I attempted to explore the inner workings of the colonial bureaucracy and to examine those conditions which enabled the administration to conciliate tensions and conflicts. This book looks at the other side of the coin. Under what conditions did the bureaucratic system of conciliation break down, so that various groups felt it necessary to resort to arms to achieve their political ends? Such an occasion occurred in Colombia, then called the New Kingdom of Granada, in 1781. Some twenty thousand badly armed but rabidly irate sons and daughters of that poor but proud land marched to the village of Zipaquira, a day's distance from Bogota, to demand that the ministers of King Charles III of Spain repudiate a whole series of abrasively introduced fiscal and administrative changes. The capital was virtually defenseless. The portly, astute archbishop of Santa Fe de Bogota, Antonio Caballero y Gongora, in the name of the authorities signed the capitulations of Zipaquira in which the program of Charles III was abrogated. This event, which has gone down in history as the Comunero Revolution, has been interpreted by some modern historians as the precursor of political independence, by others as a frustrated social revolution from below betrayed by those above. It was neither, as this book seeks to demonstrate, by focusing principally on how the men and women of 1781 perceived their protest. Rather than interpreting the Comuneros in terms of subsequent events, I have concentrated on the inner meaning of two key phrases: the word Comunero, by which the protesters identified themselves, and the slogan that the crowds shouted in all the squares of that mountain kingdom: .. iViva el rey y muera el mal gobierno!" "Long live the king and death to bad government." The implicit political ideology of this movement cannot be found in the doctrines of the French and English philosophers who...