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hile serious problems remained for the long term, by 1569, when Francisco Toledo y Figueroa became viceroy, the colonial system had begun to settle into a pattern that provided some measure of sta-bility. The indigenous population, whose numbers went into a drastic decline soon after the conquest, was manipulated and exploited for the benefit of the Spanish colonists in Peru and of the Spanish Crown. The backbone of the colonial economy came to be the mining of silver after the discovery of one of the world’s richest silver sites at Potosí, but agri-culture and to a lesser degree manufacturing were also important eco-nomic endeavors.

The Viceroy and the Reducciones

The first attempts by the Spanish Crown to govern Peru through a viceroy had failed to bring stability and order to the colony. Núñez Vela was killed by rebels before he could claim his office, and the second viceroy, the elderly Antonio de Mendoza (who had been viceroy of Mexico for 15 years), died after a year in office. The third viceroy, Andrés Hurtado de Mendoza, marqués de Cañete, was replaced after only two years, a period during which he attempted to quell unrest among the settlers with large-scale executions and deportations. His successor, Diego López de Zúñiga, conde de Nieva, was perhaps the most unfortunate choice of all. He had a taste for ostentation and dissi-pation, and he was found one night lying mortally wounded in the gut-ter outside the home of his mistress, presumably the victim of an outraged husband.

However, the selection of Francisco de Toledo y Figueroa as fifth viceroy of Peru proved to be fortuitous and ended the string of fail-ures. Toledo was born in Oropesa, Spain, in 1515. At age 19 he became one of the soldier-monks of the Order of Alcántara and fought

in the religious wars in Europe. He was closely attached to Charles V, and he transferred his service to Philip II when the new king ascended to the throne. Like his royal master, Toledo was intensely religious, but he was also an able administrator.

When he came to the Peruvian viceroyalty in 1569, Toledo faced great challenges. The state coffers were empty because few revenues had been collected since 1552, pirates were approaching the extended coasts of the viceroyalty, and two indigenous groups were in revolt—

the Araucanians to the south and the Incas in Vilcabamba.

Perhaps most ominous were the accounts he heard from everywhere in the viceroyalty of a rapidly decreasing indigenous population. It was clear that demographic disaster had hit the native population, although modern scholars widely disagree as to its dimensions. Estimates of the preconquest population of the Andes region range widely from 3 mil-lion to 30 milmil-lion people (or more). Estimating a population of around 9 million people in 1520, Noble D. Cook, a U.S. historian and demog-rapher, states in Demographic Collapse: Indian Peru, 1520–1620 (1981) that the population in the viceroyalty had plummeted to 1.3 million natives a half century later and decayed still further to 600,000 by 1630. Peru’s indigenous population reached its lowest after the 1718–20 epidemics. Such astronomical death tolls were the result of the devastation and disruption caused by military defeat, complicated by its psychological effects and accelerated by the spread of European diseases to which the Indians had no immunity. Epidemics continued well into the 19th century. In Peru it was not until 1800 that the pop-ulation showed signs of an upward curve, reaching a total of approxi-mately 700,000 people at the turn of the century.

Viceroy Toledo disembarked at Paita on the northern Peruvian coast in September 1569 and decided to continue his trip to Lima by land.

This trip was symbolic of his grand reform plan to personally visit all of his new dominion. Others before him had undertaken a similar task of evaluating the human and natural resources of the colony, but their energy and will had failed. Toledo enlisted the help of 60 specially appointed visitadores (inspectors) to travel and study the 14 provinces into which the Viceroyalty of Peru was initially divided (Lima, Trujillo, Guayaquil and Puerto Viejo, Zamora, Loja and León, Quito and Cuenca, Chachapoyas and Moyobamba, Huánuco, Huamanga and Cuzco, Arequipa, Chucuito, La Paz, La Plata, and Potosí). Among these visitadores were some of the most brilliant thinkers of their time, mostly priests and lawyers, including Juan de Matienzo, Cristóbal de Molina, Damián de la Bandera, and Cristóbal de Albornoz. The main

A BRIEF HISTORY OF PERU

goals of these visits were to regulate the tribute amounts Indians were to pay, to manage the encomenderos and others who had mistreated or abused Indians, and to assess the demographic disaster as tribute exac-tions had to be lowered according to the reduced number of Indians in each settlement.

A major result of the study was a new policy to relocate and concen-trate the dispersed Indian population into pueblos (villages), where they could be better controlled, counted, exploited for labor, and cared for.

These new villages were called reducciones. The idea was not new. A royal official named Lope García de Castro had previously proposed the relocation of Indians in connection with the establishment of the cor-regimientos. In the province of Huarochiri, for example, more than 100 small settlements had been converted to 17 reducciones, each holding between 1,000 and 1,700 people.

The establishment of reducciones often meant that different ethnic groups had to adapt their lifestyles and their lives together in the same village under an increasingly strong colonial state presence. The reduc-ciones, for example, partially dismantled the dispersed settlement pat-tern of the Incas that was meant to ensure a varied diet with produce from different ecological niches for local communities. As such, reduc-ciones increased the risks of a bad harvest and disrupted peasant self-sufficiency and long-established customs.

Reducciones were administered by local agents called corregidores, and each reducción within a corregimiento had a curaca or cacique (native chief) as representative and leader. These agents became the hinges of a dual society with Spaniards on one side and Indians on the other, or, as the sections were called then, the república de españoles and the república de indios.

The relocation of the indigenous populations was key to organizing tribute collection and, perhaps more important, to exploiting Indian labor through the mita. Mit’a was originally a labor draft system used in the Chimor kingdom and by the Inca. The Spaniards, however, reintro-duced the Europeanized, state-organized mita especially for the newly discovered silver mines in Potosí (in present-day Bolivia).

A total of 13 provinces in the vicinity of the mines were subjected to mita obligations. Every year in these provinces one-seventh of the adult males subject to paying tribute had to labor in the mines (between the ages of 18–50). Indians dreaded labor in the unsafe and unhealthy mines and often escaped the reducciones to return to their former homes. As more and more peasants fled to their earlier communities and some disappeared outright, never to be accounted for again, the

COLONIAL PERU

mita provinces soon lost most of their population. Empty mita provinces were then repopulated by the forced resettlement of another indigenous population. These incoming Indians often did not own land but worked for other peasant families. With no land, their tribute pay-ments were lower. Having no access to land also meant, at least in prin-ciple, that they could not be recruited for mita obligations.

Indian resistance and high mobility led to labor shortage in the mines, a continued problem for mine owners and the colonial state alike. Mechanisms were invented to retain mita laborers or to hire more expensive salaried laborers. To retain laborers, mine owners advanced money to workers, making sure that mitayos would not be able to repay the accumulated debt. As a consequence workers were forced to stay in the mines, and many were never able to return to their homes. For this reason, over the course of time, mitayos brought their families with them to the mines. Children and women ended up working in the mines to supplement the meager income.

The Indian reducciones soon subsidized the extraction of ore. Slowly the composition of the labor force in the mines changed from a pre-dominantly mita labor force to an increasing number of salaried and more specialized workers. Nonetheless, working conditions in the mines did not improve. Hundreds of mitayos died from accidents in the mine tunnels, and silicosis, a lung disease produced by ore dust, greatly lowered life expectancy among mine workers.

The Agrarian Landscape

In spite of the depopulation of vast areas of the Peruvian viceroyalty, much of the local agrarian economy survived the immediate impact of conquest. Moreover, the early encomiendas assigned to Spanish con-quistadores greatly relied on what was already in place, especially the indigenous ways of organizing space and exchange. However, there were also some salient changes. The redistributive role played by the Inca state disappeared. Cuzco was replaced by Lima and Potosí; miti-maes (indigenous groups displaced for labor) returned to their com-munities of origin; and labor-intensive farming tracts were abandoned, thus reducing the total of usable agrarian land. The land formerly assigned to the Inca or the Sun now reverted to the Spanish Crown. The Spanish Crown in turn, reallocated those portions of land either to a new encomendero or, eventually, to any Spaniard capable of paying for it. In addition to laboring their own fields, Indians now had to work on the land of the encomendero instead of the land of the Inca or the Sun.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF PERU

COLONIAL PERU

The allocation of land to private Spanish owners through a mechanism called the composición de tierras initiated the development of the haciendas (farming estates) and some haciendas also developed out of the encomienda system.

An Indian’s official tribute obligations as imposed by the colonial government involved the delivery of a large share of local produce and

In document El cambio en las universidades a partir del uso de las tecnologías de la información y la comunicación (página 86-89)