This chapter provides a survey of relations between indigenous peoples and the successor states to the Spanish empire in lowland regions of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Geographically the survey covers an enormous arc of territory from the Guiana Shield – lower Orinoco Basin of Venezuela and British Guiana – through the llanos of Venezuela and Colombia, and across the headwater regions of the Amazon River’s main tributaries in Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia (see Map 24.1). Within this vast region there were, and still are, pockets of remotely situated territory where indigenous peoples live in relative isolation from the independent nation-states that emerged during the nineteenth century. However, it is essential from the outset to assert that indigenous peoples throughout the llanos and headwater forest areas of the Amazon Basin had all adapted, either directly or through the mediation of other indigenous peoples, to long processes of conquest, missionization, and other forms of colonial domination prior to the rise of independent nation-states.

The historical point of departure for this study is the period of waning colonial power during the late eighteenth century. After the expulsion of Jesuit missions in 1767, the Spanish intensified their efforts to develop economically prosperous mission settlements in Guiana, the llanos, and riverine forest areas bordering Portuguese Brazil. In areas such as the llanos and the lower Orinoco Basin, Franciscan missionaries were relatively successful at reviving the Jesuits’ system of production based upon tributary payments by indigenous laborers and the continuation of indigenous subsistence agriculture on communal resguardo lands. However, the Franciscans were far less successful at developing stable, much less growing, mission settlements in riverine forest areas where indigenous populations offered stronger resistance or where Portuguese merchants had established long-term trading relations with indigenous peoples. This contrast between stronger mission settlements in northern areas of agricultural frontier expansion and much weaker ones in forested areas to the south foreshadowed major historical differences in the ways that indigenous peoples became enmeshed in the rise of independent nationstates in the nineteenth century.

REGIONAL DIFFERENCES

Indigenous peoples’ experiences of the rise of independent nation-states were almost diametrically opposed between the riverine forests in southern lowlands and the llanos and Guiana Shield region to the north. The distinction between northern and southern areas became dramatically apparent from the outset of the wars of independence.

INTRODUCTION

The nineteenth century marks a critical turning point in the long, violent history of colonial encounters among economic élites, political authorities, and native Andean peasantries. Between the late eighteenth century and the early twentieth century, fledgling Andean republics emerged from the chaos of the independence era. Slowly, haltingly they began to dismantle the political and administrative apparatus of colonial rule. By 1825 they had broken the colonial bond, but the greatest challenges of nation building still lay ahead.

Deeply divided by ethnic, cultural, and class differences, yet born of Enlightenment principles of liberty, equality, and citizenship, the new republics of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia were shaped by conflicts and contradictions inherent in postcolonial projects of modernity. For much of the nineteenth century, the defining political issue in these Andean republics was whether, and how, the republics should redefine and restructure the colonial relationship based on principles of caste and corporatism and codified in Hapsburg law as “dual republics.” Indeed the very notions of república, nation, and race were semantic battlefields on which fractured élites and subject populations contentiously worked out meanings and legitimacies of political authority. They debated Indian rights following the collapse of the Catholic monarchy and the crisis of Bolivarian liberalism in the 1810s and 1820s. The postindependence years brought an avalanche of peasant claims and protests over the ambiguous and shifting terms of Indian integration into the new nations as war-weary republics withdrew ambitious liberal agendas thrust upon them by the liberators and instead looked for ways to restore a precarious pax republicana. But in the political-ideological void opened by independence, state power tended in turn to fragment and devolve to provincial élites and local authorities; liberal land reforms languished; tribute was restored; and Andean regional and export markets remained sluggish. This transitory political reprieve opened new spaces for Andean peoples to negotiate political pacts, recover lost lands, restore ethnic authorities, rearrange translocal networks of patronage, kinship, barter, and trade, and engage in ritual religious activities away from the watchful eye of modern nation builders. But if the postindependence decades of liberal retreat and agrarian decompression relaxed certain pressures on Andean lands, livelihoods, and corporate identities for several decades, they only heightened the political violence intrinsic to modern state making and incipient capitalist development in the Andes in the second half of the nineteenth century.

THE dominant theme in the history of thirteenth-century Europe is arguably that of expansion: the expansion of Latin Christendom, to encompass Orthodox, Muslim and pagan lands previously on its outer fringes; the expansion of the economy, as western merchants (Italian, German, Catalan) penetrated deeper into the Mediterranean, the Baltic and the European land mass; the expansion too of population, to which a halt was called only around 1300; the expansion also of government, as rulers in western Europe consolidated their hold over their territories, and as the papacy made consistent claims to its own authority even over secular rulers. By the end of the thirteenth century the political and demographic expansion of powerful European kingdoms could be felt, too, on the edges of the British Isles, as the English king posed an ever sharper threat to the autonomy of the Welsh princes and the Scottish kings. To see the thirteenth century in this light is not simply to see it from a western, Latin, perspective. It will be obvious already that a major feature of the period is the encroachment of the Latin west upon the Greek and Slavonic east, as upon the Muslim world: this was the era of major crusades, under royal and princely direction, against Egypt, Tunis, Muslim Spain and indeed pagan Prussia and Livonia, but it was also the period in which a diverted crusade, aiming originally at the mouth of the Nile, found itself able to overwhelm Constantinople, fragmenting the already fragile Byzantine empire and imposing (not very successfully) the authority of the bishop of Rome over the Orthodox Church in Greece. Nowhere in Europe, nor indeed in the Mediterranean, were the Latins totally invisible. Even if it were not the case that the history of medieval Europe can only be written after paying attention to the east of Europe (including Byzantium), and the Islamic lands bordering on Europe, it is hard to see how a volume on the thirteenth century could lack detailed attention to areas far from the Ile-de-France, and issues remote from the conflict of popes and emperors, the theme that has dominated many surveys of this period.