The guerra defensiva of Chile (1612-1625)
For thirteen years the Spanish crown tried to end the Arauco war by giving it up: a fixed frontier, no offensive campaigns, missionaries instead of soldiers, and a Jesuit granted authority equal to the governor's over pacification. A despatch of April 1625 ended it and restored the enslavement of captives of both sexes. What the other side wanted in the meantime survives in print, down to the size of the branding iron.
Why this wins its question: The Arauco war reaches English readers as Ercilla's epic and as a byword for a frontier Spain never subdued; that the crown spent thirteen years trying to end it by renouncing offensive war, and that a Jesuit was given authority equal to the governor's over pacification, is largely absent, and where the defensive war is mentioned it is a label with a date range. This object gives the documents on both sides at claim level: the description of personal service as servitude harder than that of Africans imposed on people free in law; the Jesuit general ordering the college of Santiago to free and back-pay the Indians "de que usabamos en los servicios domesticos"; the despatch of April 1625 that restored offensive war and made slaves of prisoners of both sexes; and the same Jesuit historian's accounting that thirteen years produced no profit at a cost of seven millions. Against it stands the 1614 memorial of a soldier of that war, which is where the counterpoint is not imported but printed: a branding iron the size of a real de a ocho on the right calf, a quarter of the assessed price for allied Indians because they would only spend the rest on wine, and the calculation that prohibiting personal service in Peru would oblige encomenderos there to buy Chilean slaves willingly.
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 policy had a named author with unusual standing. Olivares opens the chapter on its collapse by recording that the Jesuits Luis de Valdivia and Diego de Torres proceeded on the understanding that Felipe III had unburdened his royal conscience onto theirs, and that the king had conferred on father Valdivia, in the particular matter of the conversion and pacification of the Indians, authority equal to the governor's. A missionary was placed level with the military command of a war zone.
The grievance the policy was built to remove was personal service, and the same source describes it without euphemism. Encomenderos, with their eye on temporal gain, attended less or not at all to the authority and justice of the royal laws; not content with the moderate tribute the king granted them, they went on to serve themselves of the Indians, of their wives and of their children, without paying them any agreed wage, giving them only a poor set of clothes and food, all of it assessed at the master's discretion, "no de otra suerte que se hace con los esclavos" - in no other manner than is done with slaves.
The legal contradiction is stated as a contradiction: these encomienda Indians, although in law they are free no less than Spaniards, are in fact in a servitude much harder than that of Africans, because they are treated as one's own for service and as another's for contempt. The formula names the gap between the law of the Indies and its practice from inside a Spanish account.
The same passage draws the causal conclusion the defensive war rested on: personal service is originally the cause of the pacification of the Indians being set back and of the propagation of the faith being obstructed, and from it have come the obstinate enmity with the Spaniards, the suspect peace whenever peace has been treated, and wars as stubborn as they are bloody. The argument for stopping the war is that the war is being caused by the labour regime.
The account also records that the crown had legislated repeatedly and been disobeyed. Charles V and Felipe II issued various and pressing diplomas to maintain the Indians in their natural liberty; governors sometimes would not execute them, attending to their private advantage with every affect of justice and piety set aside, and at other times could not, being unequal to the gravity of the evil; until Felipe III, following in his predecessors' steps, issued the cedula with greater stringency and heavier penalties against transgressors. Legislation is presented as real and as routinely defeated on the ground.
The Society of Jesus is recorded applying the rule to itself, and the sentence that does it is self-implicating. Claudio Aquaviva, general of the order, having learned that some leading residents had donated to the college of Santiago de Chile some Indians "de que usabamos en los servicios domesticos" - whom we used in domestic service - ordered that if, the matter being maturely examined by the wisest and most upright fathers, no certainty were found in the justification of that service, they should be set at liberty and paid what should be reckoned for their work, valued as that of free people who had served under contract. The order that frees them is also the admission that the college held them.
The end of the policy is dated and its terms are specific. The viceroy marques de Guadalcazar and private persons of first note wrote to Spain that offensive war was indispensable; the king ordered juntas of theologians and war counsellors, whose final resolution was that offensive war could and should be made on the Indians of Chile; and His Majesty so commanded in a despatch dated April 1625, disposing that offensive war be waged as it had been practised before its prohibition, and that prisoners of one and the other sex be given as slaves. The defensive war ended after thirteen years, which places its beginning in 1612.
The verdict this source passes on the policy is unfavourable, and it matters that the man passing it is a Jesuit writing about a Jesuit: speaking ingenuously, no profit had been experienced from the thirteen years, because expenses of seven millions had been caused in payments to soldiers who did nothing and in the construction of forts and watchtowers. The chapter heading under which the policy comes apart calls it a system disturbed "por falsos pretestos", so the same author holds both that it produced nothing and that it was wrecked by bad faith.
What the party arguing against the defensive war wanted is not a matter of inference, because one of them printed it in detail. Alonso Gonzalez de Najera, who states he served eight years in that conquest, wrote in 1614 a memorial for resuming offensive war and taking slaves, and it sets out the administrative machinery. Its chapter IV, headed "Primer camino para sacar los esclavos de Chile", proposes that all ships of His Majesty and of private persons going from the ports of Chile to Peru carry, on the king's account, the quantity of slaves ordered from among those newly taken in war and bought by the deputies, to be sold there at imposed prices which in that land will be much more than double what they cost.
The same memorial contains an article headed "Que se han de herrar los esclavos", and its reasoning is practical. As the deputies buy the slaves they are to have them branded at once in their presence with fire, the men on the right calf, because it is a fleshy part and one the Indians do not cover with hose or boot since they always go bare-legged; an Indian who deliberately covers the place of the brand is to suffer lashes or the cutting of his hair, "que para ellos es gran afrenta"; and the iron is to be easily recognised and at least the size of a real de a ocho.
The memorial also prices the collaboration of allied Indians and explains the price by contempt. The deputies are to pay the indios amigos, for each slave, a quarter of its assessed value, handed over in clothing from the munition store; a quarter, the author explains, because for Indians it is much more than for Spaniards to be paid in full, with which they will be very content and it suffices them, since they would want the rest only to spend on wine - and payment in clothing is specified so that they should not drink it all and should get some benefit towards bettering their dress.
One sentence of the memorial ties the reform and the slave trade together, and it is the reason this document belongs beside the policy rather than opposite it. Selling Chilean captives in Peru will come at a very opportune time, the author writes, by reason of the parts where personal service has been prohibited in Peru, whose absence "obligara a los encomenderos de aquella tierra, a que compren de buena gana muchos de los esclavos dichos", and merchants will even come to Chile to buy them by sea and land. The abolition of one form of compelled labour is being counted on, by its opponents, to create the market for another.
That sentence should not be stretched further than it goes. Najera writes of personal service having been prohibited in Peru, not in Chile, and he is forecasting a market rather than reporting one; the prohibition he names and the Chilean measures associated with Valdivia are not shown by these pages to be the same act. The connection drawn in the previous claim is his, and it is recorded here as his argument.
What this object rests on and what it does not. It rests on two digitised printings read as page scans: an eighteenth-century Jesuit narrative history printed in 1863, and the 1866 printing of a 1614 memorial. No royal cedula of 1608, 1612 or 1625 was opened in its own text, so every date and disposition here is reported at the strength of a historian summarising documents, and the object is tiered secondary for that reason even though one of its two sources is a participant's memorial. The killing of the missionaries at Elicura, usually given as the episode that broke the policy, is named in the volume's other page sequence but was not read and is not claimed here. Both witnesses are partisan in opposite directions, which is why nothing above sits at 0.9.