Native Insurgencies and the Genocidal Impulse in the Americas

1. Introduction

1 Introduction In the predawn hours of August 10, 1680, the Pueblo Indians of presentday New Mexico rose up in a well-planned and highly coordinated effort to eliminate the Spanish presence in the Río Grande basin. Those Hispanics and their allies in the northern region who managed to ®ee the native fury and take refuge in Santa Fe would soon ¤nd themselves besieged in the main government building by an Indian force that vastly outnumbered them. Three days later, and increasingly weak from thirst, the Spaniards made a bold sally, killing many rebels and causing others to ®ee just as more insurgents were arriving to take their place. Recognizing that the tide of rebellion would soon surge again and overwhelm them, the Hispanics determined to make their way south. Shadowed and harassed by the Indians on their journey, they joined up with another band of refugees who had ®ed from the southern Río Abajo district. Together this group, numbering 1,946 people, was succored by a wagon train making its triennial journey north from Mexico City, and ultimately found sanctuary near El Paso. For the next twelve years the native peoples of the region north of the Río Grande would rule themselves, largely free of Spanish in®uence and intrusion. One hundred years later, on August 6, 1780, Indians of the town of Macha, Upper Peru, now Bolivia, beheaded their curaca, or village chief, thereby igniting the Great Rebellion of Peru and Upper Peru. The insurgency would quickly spread and become the largest threat to Spanish rule in South or Central America prior to the Wars of Independence. Over the next sixteen months, bands of native insurgents would overrun many of the towns in the region, killing almost all non-Indians they encountered. Thousands of Spaniards, Creoles (those born in the New World of Spanish descent), and mestizos (those of mixed Spanish and Indian origin) and their allies were slaughtered in churches, homes, haciendas, or agricultural estates and on the roads as they sought refuge in larger towns. In Peru,having taken most of the rural towns,the Quechua leader Túpac Amaru led a brief and unsuccessful siege of Cuzco. In Upper Peru, after the death of the original leader, Tomás Catari, his cousins Dámaso and Nicolás Catari brie®y besieged La Plata (present-day Sucre, Bolivia), having already dominated the surrounding area. La Paz, however, was to suffer a nine-month siege led by the mercurial Túpac Catari. More than 10,000 Hispanics and their allies died there, many of starvation when they had run out of dogs, cats, and leather to eat. Where native unity was not illusory, it was transitory, and Spanish offers of pardon only served to further divide them. This, as well as supe- rior Spanish use of arms and native allies, enabled them to repress the uprising by January 1782. By then 100,000 people had lost their lives in this attempt to reestablish native rule in the Andes.1 Sixty-¤ve years later in Yucatán, Mexico, on July 30, 1847, the Indian Cecilio Chi launched an attack on the town of Tepich, killing more than 100 Hispanics there in reprisal for an earlier Hispanic attack on the same town. In the Caste War of Yucatán that followed, Chi went on to attack settlements and haciendas in Yucatán in his relentless effort to eliminate those of Spanish descent and af¤nity from the region. The rebellion, in which Jacinto Pat and Bonifacio Novelo also ¤gured as prominent leaders, devastated the peninsula and swelled Mérida and Campeche with thousands of panic-stricken refugees. Seeing little exit except the sea, and assisted by donations of money, arms, and munitions from abroad, the Creoles and their allies rallied in June 1848, their counterattack aided by the advent of the planting season,which depleted the rebel ranks.Now on the defensive and increasingly desperate due to mounting defeats, the rebels®ed deep into the jungle and found inspiration in a putatively speaking cross that promised protection and salvation from their enemies. The town of Chan Santa Cruz sprang up around this oracle, inspiring widespread Indian devotion . Over time the focus of the rebels became less centered on the elimination of those of Spanish descent from the region and more on the defense of what became a de facto Indian state centered in what is now the Mexican state of Quintana Roo. Despite having their capital...