New strategies for colonisation

The failure of the expeditions of 1638–40 to bring about the pacification and settlement of the Chocó frontier led to a reassessment, in Antioquia and Santa Fe, of the methods employed to colonise this frontier region. There was, however, no agreement on the lessons to be learned from the disasters of those years. The audiencia of Santa Fe, always deeply suspicious of the methods and motives of the adelantado Vélez, argued that the real reason for the failure to advance colonisation lay in a system that gave wealthy individuals the freedom to act in a manner that furthered their personal interests rather than those of the Crown, and concluded that capitulaciones should no longer be relied on for the purpose of colonising frontier regions. Don Juan Vélez, his lieutenant Gregorio Céspedes, and the alguacil mayor Fernando de Toro Zapata interpreted the failure to advance colonisation in an entirely different way. Apportioning no blame to the manner in which the campaigns were conducted, they focused instead on the difficulties involved in subjugating Indians who lived dispersed along the rivers that intersected this extensive and largely unknown terrain. Only a war of conquest, undertaken by far larger forces than any hitherto employed for this purpose, could secure victory over the peoples of the Chocó. For Gregorio Céspedes, two armed Spanish companies of 100 men apiece, dispatched from the directions of Cartagena and Antioquia, would be required to achieve their conquest. Fernando de Toro Zapata considered that at least twice that number would be needed: four expeditions of 100 men apiece, he argued, should penetrate the region from the directions of Cartagena, Panama, Popayán and Antioquia.

For more than two decades, however, the Crown made no attempt to develop a new strategy for subduing the indigenous population of the Chocó, perhaps because it was unwilling to commit to the proposed expeditions of conquest and wary of supporting new capitulaciones like that of Vélez de Guevara, which its own officials in Santa Fe opposed. This is not to say, of course, that all communication between Indians and Spaniards ceased following the departure of the adelantado, for successive governors in Popayán and Antioquia soon resumed efforts to pacify the indigenous population of this extremely important frontier region.