The juicio de residencia in the Indies
Every royal officer in the Spanish Indies, from a village corregidor to the viceroy of Peru, had to stand a public audit when his term ended, and could not be appointed to anything else without the certificate of it. One law of 1556 orders that the edicts opening a residencia be published so as to come to the notice of the Indians, so that they may demand justice for their grievances in full liberty. Two naval officers reporting in secret in the 1740s describe how the audit was bought.
Why this wins its question: In English the residencia is normally a single sentence — officials faced a review at the end of their terms — with no text behind it and no answer to the obvious question of whether it worked. This object gives the título itself, read page by page from the 1791 impression: the six-month clock on a viceroy's audit, the automatic residencia of every outgoing corregidor, the audits aimed at the visitadores de Indios and the labour distributors of the obrajes, the requirement that no one be appointed anywhere without the certificate of his last residencia, and the 1556 order that the edicts reach the Indians so they can complain in full liberty. Beside it, from the crown's own secret report of the 1740s, the going price of an acquittal and what was done to the Indians who tried to use the opening. The law and its defeat on one page, each quoted from the sheets.
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 law used here is the fourth impression of the Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias, Madrid, Viuda de Joaquín Ibarra, 1791, tomo segundo, whose índice of Libros IIII to VIII lists "residencias, y Jueces que las han de tomar" at folio 176. The título opens on that page, headed "TITULO QUINCE. DE LAS RESIDENCIAS, Y JUECES QUE LAS HAN de tomar", and runs to folio 189, every page of it carrying the running head "Libro V. Titulo XV" or "De las residencias".
The first law of the título is about the viceroys, and it exists because no fixed term had been set for auditing them. Given by Charles II and the queen governor at Madrid on 28 December 1667, it assigns the judges "seis meses de término, que corran desde el dia que se publicaren los edictos", forbids the judge to extend it for any cause, tells him not to occupy more time than he needs, and gives the public demands lodged inside that term a further six months from presentation to definitive sentence. The office at the head of the American government was therefore inside the system rather than above it.
The audit was routine and automatic at the bottom of the hierarchy as well. By a law of Philip II given at El Escorial on 28 June 1568, whenever corregidores or alcaldes mayores were to be provided by viceroys, presidents or oidores governing in a vacancy, they were to order that residencia be taken of their predecessors for the whole time that had been in their charge. Residencias of offices provided on consulta of the Council of the Indies were taken by the commission and judge named by its president and returned to the Council; those of offices provided by viceroys and presidents governors, by commission of whoever had provided them.
Two of the laws point the audit directly at the treatment of indigenous people. Law xij, of Charles V and the empress governor at Madrid on 12 July 1530, orders viceroys and presidents governors to have residencia taken of those who have been visitadores de Indios, on the use of their commissions "y si han guardado las instrucciones, y ordenanzas hechas para el buen tratamiento de los Indios", the excesses found to be punished as justice requires. Law xiij, of Philip III at San Lorenzo on 5 September 1620, extends it to the judges who distributed Indian labour to the textile workshops of New Spain.
The workshop law states its purpose in the plainest terms the code uses: "Para que se dé satisfaccion á los Indios de las vexaciones, y agravios que reciben de algunos Jueces, y repartidores de obrages, es nuestra voluntad que se les tome residencia por Juez de toda confianza, que proceda breve, y sumariamente en desagravio de los Indios, con la ménos costa, que sea posible." The remedy is summary procedure at low cost, and the complainants named are the Indians.
One short law of 1556 is the reason this institution belongs in a history of rights rather than of bureaucracy. Law xxviij, given by Philip II and the princess governor at Valladolid on 9 October 1556, is rubricked "Que la publicacion de residencias sea de forma, que venga á noticia de los Indios", and reads: "Quando se pusieren edictos, publicaren, y pregonaren las residencias, sea de forma que venga á noticia de los Indios, para que puedan pedir justicia de sus agravios con entera libertad." The opening of the audit had to be advertised to the governed, and the governed expressly included the conquered.
The procedure was designed to be reachable by the people who had the complaints. Law xxvij, of the same date at Valladolid on 29 December 1556, commands that the residenciados give their residencia in the city, town or principal place of the province where they exercised their offices, and that they not be compelled to give it elsewhere; law xxviiij, of Lisbon 31 August 1582, fixes the term at sixty days from the publication of the edicts, with a further sixty for any public demands presented inside it.
The code also records the perverse incentive its own timing created, and tries to close it. Law xviiij notes that some governors, corregidores and other ministers of justice "no usan sus oficios como deben, y hacen muchos excesos, en confianza de que no se les ha de tomar residencia hasta que acaben de servirlos", and orders viceroys and presidents to send first notice of the motives, causes and aggrieved persons whenever the matter is grave enough that residencia should be taken at once, adding that notable inconveniences follow from the delay.
Sentences were meant to bite immediately at the level where most officers sat. Law xxxx, of Philip II on 2 November 1573, declares that definitive sentences pronounced in residencias over bribes, baraterías "ó cosas mal llevadas" against governors and their officials are to be executed at once on the persons and goods of the guilty where the condemnation does not exceed twenty thousand maravedís, notwithstanding any appeal interposed, and only deposited above that sum.
The audit was tied to the appointment system, which is what gave it whatever force it had. The cross-references printed at the close of the título send the reader to the rule "Que ninguno sea proveido sin testimonio de la residencia antecedente, y esto se declare en los pareceres, ley 6. tit. 2. lib. 3", and to a companion rule that from the sentences the Council pronounced in a juicio de residencia there is no suplicación except in cases of deprivation of office or corporal penalty, the further recourse being barred without exception in a visita.
What the audit was worth in practice was answered, in secret, by two of the crown's own officers. The report Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa presented to Ferdinand VI, first printed at London in 1826, says that the price of each residencia was public knowledge in Peru: "todos saben allá que la residencia de tal corregimiento vale tanto, y la del otro tanto, y asi de todas". The judge was maintained at the residenciado's cost for three months though the audit lasted no more than forty days, and the sum was fixed in proportion to the value of the corregimiento, or "mas propiamente el indulto que da el Corregidor á su juez para que le absuelva de todos los cargos".
The same pages describe the machinery of the whitewash. The judge took his information about the outgoing corregidor from the corregidor's own friends and relations, who deposed that he had governed well, done nobody any wrong and treated the Indians well; three or four more were found to depose lightly against him so that so much rectitude would not look strange, and where he was concluded to have done wrong he was fined in things as slight as the offence, the file closing with the corregidor "tan justificado como lo estaba antes de empezar su gobierno". At Valdivia, they write, the governors kept "quatro talegas de mil pesos debaxo del catre donde dormian", the same four thousand pesos being handed on to each successor as the standing price of his predecessor's residencia.
Their account of what happened to Indians who did use the opening is the counterpoint to the law of 1556, and it is recorded here as its own claim rather than left out. When Indians came forward to depose against a corregidor, they were talked out of it, warned that lawsuits would bring bad consequences on them, or given a small sum to drop the complaint; those who refused the money and insisted on justice were severely reprimanded by the judge and given to understand that they were being treated with excessive equity in not being punished for the offences the corregidor had proved against them, "de suerte que lo mismo es para los Indios, que sus Corregidores sean residenciados ó que no".
The two sources have opposite weaknesses and are used here for opposite things. The Recopilación is a statement of what the law required, printed by the Council of the Indies, and is no evidence at all of compliance; the Noticias secretas is a confidential memorandum by two naval officers arguing for reform in the viceroyalty of Peru in the 1740s, printed in London in 1826 by an editor with his own polemical purpose, and it generalises from that one region and period. Neither source gives, and this object does not publish, any figure for how many officers were convicted, deprived or fined in a residencia.