Confronted Rituals: Spanish Colonial and Angolan "Maroon" Executions in Cartagena de Indias (1634)

In mid-August, 1633, in the Spanish colonial province of Cartagena de Indias, Francisco Criollo led several of his soldiers in an armed raid on Alférez Diego Márquez’s pig farm.¹ Francisco Criollo was the captain of the Palenque de Limón, a clandestine community of people of African descent, who had escaped slavery to live with relative autonomy in the forest about fifty miles from the provincial capital.² On the slave owner’s pig farm, the palenque soldiers kidnapped a white overseer named Domingo Pérez, his young son Juanillo, an Indian woman named Clara and a young Indian also named Juan and took them back to the palenque. Limón resident Juan de la Mar recounts what happened next:

In the afternoon of the said day, the said Queen Leonor ordered that they [Domingo Pérez and Juanillo] be taken out of the said hut. And they took them to the said palenque’s banana grove and there the said Queen Leonor laid them on the ground on their side. And she herself beheaded them with a hatchet and drank their blood, together with other black women named Susaña, Inés, Maquesu, and with other black men. And Felipe, who belongs to Captain Banquesel and the men belonging to Juan Ramos named Male[mbas] also drank. . . . And after the said black woman Leonor had wounded the said Spaniard and Indian with the referred hatchet, a black man belonging to the potter who lives next to [the Hospital of] Espíritu Santo ³ and the said black man named Francisco Malemba finished cutting off their heads and opening their chests. And the black men belonging to the said Juan Ramos helped them. And this declarant and other black men wanted to bury them. And all the black Angolas refused to allow it. And they left them in the field and the vultures ate them.⁴

The palenque leaders would repeat this ritual sacrifice four months later, in early December; this time the victims were two Indian men from the town of Chambacú. Shortly thereafter, on December 8, the day of the Immaculate Conception, Spanish troops stormed the palenque, killed a few of the almost two hundred residents and burned the dwellings and fields.⁵ Eventually, the colonial soldiers would capture eighty people. Most were turned over to their owners for subsequent exile. However, Spanish officials singled out thirteen of the black leaders for execution. The scribe Miguel Fernández de Ortega records the final two executions as follows:

In the city of Cartagena de las Indias, on June 19, 1634, I, the scribe in attendance, certify that Miguel de Arellano and Vicente Rodríguez de Acosta, lieutenants of the principal bailiff of the city, by virtue of the above order, removed Lázaro Angola, slave of Captain Alonso Martín Hidalgo, and Sebastián Angola, also known as Cachorro, slave of Duarte de León Márquez from the city’s jail. And, as required by justice, they were carried through the public streets of this city, with a crier who declared their crimes, until they reached the Plaza de la Yerba, where there was a gallows made. And on it they were hanged by the neck until they died naturally, in execution of the sentence against them pronounced in this cause. Witnesses [were] the said bailiffs, Juan García Juárez and other persons. And the next day they were quartered and placed beside the roads. Miguel Fernández de Ortega, scribe.

(T, 933–35)

Their heads were to be displayed in a cage at the Puerta de la Media Luna on the Camino Real at the entrance to the city, and their quartered bodies placed at the entrances to Cartagena and in the district of María, near the Palenque de Limón (T, 270, 282, 289, 922, 927).

There is a gruesome symmetry of violence between the palenque and Cartagena rituals. In both executions, those who wield power arrange themselves around the bodies of their enemy victims, and enact a spectacle that reaches beyond those...