The corregidor de indios: a salaried crown magistrate, and the trade that broke him
The district magistrate the Spanish crown put over indigenous pueblos in place of the encomendero: appointed from Madrid, paid a published salary, required to tour his district and forbidden to trade in it. The 1791 impression of the Recopilación prints the salary of every corregimiento by name. Two naval officers reporting in secret from Peru in the 1740s describe the forced sale of goods that turned the same office into what they call the most horrible tyranny that could be invented.
Why this wins its question: English-language coverage of the corregidor de indios is almost entirely the abuse - the repartimiento de mercancías, named and condemned in a sentence, with the office itself left as a synonym for extortion. The document that designed the office is not quoted, and the result is a story with no mechanism: no reader learns that the crown printed the salary of every corregimiento in the Indies by name, that the magistrate was ordered onto the road with a fifteen-day ceiling per pueblo, that his legal deputies had to be examined law graduates, or that trading in his own district was forbidden to him by four successive monarchs between 1530 and 1619. This object puts the law and its defeat on the same page, each read from the sheets - the schedule and the prohibition from the 1791 impression of the Recopilación, the credit chain from Lima and the two-and-a-half-year debt cycle from the crown's own secret report of the 1740s - and it separates the witnesses instead of blending them, keeping the naval officers' testimony apart from the London editor's footnote of 1826, which is where the famous hundred-thousand-peso figures and the Túpac Amaru connection actually come from.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The office was a royal appointment with a published price. Libro V, título 2 of the Recopilación opens by declaring that the principal "Gobiernos, Corregimientos, y Alcaldías mayores de las Indias" are reserved to the crown's own provision "con los sueldos y salarios que han de percibir en cada un año", and then prints them one by one so that it may be known "con distincion quales y quantos son": the corregimiento of Cuzco at three thousand pesos ensayados, Arequipa and Guamanga at two thousand each, Arica at fifteen hundred ducados, Ica at nine hundred and twenty-eight ducados, the corregimiento of the city of Mexico at five hundred thousand maravedís, Veracruz at a thousand pesos, Tacuba at a hundred and fifty. Whatever else the system was, it was not informal: a reader in Madrid in 1791 could look up what the crown paid the magistrate of Tacuba.
The same título imposes duties that are about presence and competence rather than status. Ley 42, carrying the dates of Philip III at Lerma on 5 June 1610 and at San Lorenzo on 12 June 1613 and of Philip IV at Madrid on 15 April 1640, orders that corregidores de naturales appoint no deputies even under the title of commissioned judges, that where a licence is granted the corregidor nevertheless "ande en la visita de su distrito", and that he stay "no mas de quince dias en cada Pueblo" - a magistrate on the road, not resident in the provincial capital. Ley 39 forbids viceroys and audiencias to let any letrado act as a deputy who has not studied for the time the royal law requires and been examined and approved by the Council, orders those already serving without that qualification to be deposed, and tells the crown attorneys to enforce it.
The conflict of interest was identified in law and legislated against for ninety years without being solved. Ley 47 declares governors, corregidores, alcaldes mayores and their deputies "comprehendidos en la prohibicion y penas impuestas contra los Ministros que tratan, y contratan en las Indias Occidentales" and refers their investigation and punishment to ley 54 and following of título 16, libro 2. The law carries the dates of Charles V at Madrid on 10 July 1530, the same emperor with the Queen of Bohemia as governor at Valladolid on 4 September 1551, Philip II at Pinto on 4 April 1563 and Philip III at Lisbon on 31 August 1619. A prohibition re-enacted across ninety years by three successive reigns is evidence of the crown's intention and evidence, in the same line, that it was not being obeyed.
The mechanism that defeated the office is described from the inside by two officers sent to Peru by the crown. Corregidores arrived without capital, and "no tienen dinero antes de entrar en sus empleos"; they took their stock on credit from Lima merchants who, "conociendo los mercaderes las crecidas ganancias que han de producir á los Corregidores, levantan los precios para aprovecharse tambien ellos de la oportunidad"; then, on entering the district, the corregidor personally carried the goods from pueblo to pueblo with the tribute roll, "va asignando la cantidad y especie que le parece á cada Indio". The debt was the point: the reparto had to be paid within two and a half years, after which a second one began.
The two officers state the judgement in their own words, and they are not hostile witnesses to Spain: a moderate distribution of goods at moderate prices "seria de mucho acierto; pero del modo en que se hace al presente, no le compete otro nombre, sino el de una tiranía la mas horrible que se pudiera inventar". Their own prejudice is on the same page and is worth reading with the accusation - they justify the practice in principle as a way of shaking indigenous people out of what they call an idleness connatural to their character, which is the argument of the system they are about to condemn.
Their explanation of the failure is fiscal, and it indicts the salary schedule of claim 1. Some corregidores drew four to five thousand pesos a year counting the tribute collection, "los mas no llegan á dos mil", and even four thousand would only maintain the man decently; travel between pueblos was paid by the Indians, "los quales le subministran mulas y el viático necesario para los dias que se detienen en cada pueblo". An office with a five-year term, a salary below subsistence for a man of rank, and a debt contracted before arrival is a structure that produces extortion whatever the law says.
The remedy they proposed is as revealing as the diagnosis, because it prices the fix and says who pays. Terms should not end automatically at five years; repartimientos should be extinguished; and no corregidor's salary should fall below two thousand pesos "para que estos tuviesen como mantenerse cómodamente sin necesitar de hostilizar á los Indios, ni de comerciar dentro de sus propias jurisdicciones". The excess was to be met partly out of existing assignments and the remainder "cargar lo demas en el tributo de los mismos Indios" - the protection to be financed by the protected. A corregidor who failed his duties, including failing to shield the Indians from the exactions of the parish priests, was to be deposed and prosecuted at once, his estate sequestered, half of any forfeiture going to the treasury and half "á los hospitales de los Indios".
What the practice grew to, and how it ended, is reported here at one remove and is flagged as such. The escalation figures and the link to the rising of 1780 come from a footnote signed "El Editor" by David Barry, who printed the report in London in 1826: repartos in corregimientos of middling population reaching a hundred thousand pesos a year in goods and often over a hundred and fifty thousand; the corregidores of Chayanta and Tinta making three repartimientos each in 1780; the rising under Túpac Amaru, its suppression, and his execution described in detail. Barry's closing verdict - that the abolition of the system "fue el único beneficio que produjo á los Indios esta rebelion, pues en todo lo demas quedaron aun mas oprimidos que antes" - is the judgement of an interested editor at the close of the wars of independence, not of the naval officers, and is carried at low confidence for that reason.
What this object does not establish. Neither source supports a general claim about how many corregidores traded illegally, in what proportion of districts, or with what variation between New Spain and Peru: the Recopilación gives the rule and the salary, the Noticias secretas gives the practice in the Peruvian Andes in the 1740s as two reformers saw it, and the escalation figures are one editor's footnote written eighty years later. The abolition of the office and the transfer of its functions to intendants and subdelegados after 1782 is treated in this corpus under the Real Ordenanza de Intendentes of 1786, not here.