Ordenanzas de Alfaro (1612) — the abolition of personal service in Paraguay, Tucuman and the Rio de la Plata
The ordinances a crown judge sent from Charcas laid on the southern provinces in 1612, ending the personal service of Indians and cutting the encomienda back to the tribute owed to the crown. Read from two historians who agree on the year and on what was abolished, and from the argument against it that one of them prints at length: the reform, wrote a naturalist of the Enlightenment, was politically absurd and stopped the conquest dead.
Why this wins its question: The English-language web knows the encomienda and knows the New Laws of 1542, and stops there; the 1612 ordinances that ended personal service in Paraguay, Tucuman and the Rio de la Plata are usually a clause in an article about the Jesuit missions. This object gives them their own entry with the machinery and the fight around it: what was abolished, what the encomienda was cut back to, who threatened the governor and with which instrument, who kept the statutes in force afterwards - and then prints the strongest case against the reform, made by Felix de Azara and quoted at length by the historian who disagrees with him, so that the reader gets the accusation that abolition stopped the conquest dead in the accuser's own terms. It also says plainly that the ordinances themselves were not read, which is the one thing no summary of them online admits.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
Francisco de Alfaro was an oidor of the Audiencia de Charcas sent as visitador into the southern provinces, and the ordinances that carry his name are dated 1612 by both historians read here. Funes places them in the command of Diego Marin de Negron, the government of Hernandarias having ended in 1609; du Graty, writing in 1862 and not following Funes, dates them to the same year and to the same governor.
What they did, in Funes's summary, was to abolish the personal service of the Indians and to reduce the encomienda to the usufruct of the tribute due to the crown. The first measure Azara records, quoted by Funes from the second volume of his travels, was an order that nobody in future might go to the houses of Indians on the pretext of reducing them, and that encomiendas not be granted in the old form, which is to say with personal service attached.
Both witnesses describe what was abolished in the same terms, and neither is quoting the other. Funes calls the service abolished one that "no distaba mucho de una verdadera esclavitud" - not far from a true slavery. Du Graty writes that the ordinances abolished "la especie de esclavitud en que se les habia mantenido desde la conquista", the kind of slavery the Indians had been held in since the conquest. That two nineteenth-century compilers of different nations reach for the same word is evidence about what the institution was, not only about what they thought of it.
The case against the reform is on the record because Funes prints it. Felix de Azara, the naval officer and naturalist who spent two decades in the region, called the measure politically absurd and could not see what it could have been founded on. His argument was economic: after it, nothing moved private Spaniards to take the fatigue of going among great risks to look for Indians merely to enjoy their labour for two generations under the title of encomienda; there were in the country neither salaried troops nor money; the governors were left with no means of extending the conquests or of reducing the Indians, and all operations suddenly ceased. Meanwhile the Portuguese, who allowed the Indians they took to be sold in perpetuity as slaves, searched out the smallest corners of the country, usurped territory, increased their population and found their mines.
Funes answers on the ground the brief here cares about. He does not deny that expansion stopped; he denies that this settles anything. Personal service, he writes, is incompatible with civil liberty, of which nobody had the right to strip the Indians and of which they were jealous; political nations recognise their own liberty as their first statute; among peoples reduced to servitude there is none that does not long for the moment that ends it. He records that Azara himself thought personal service and liberty reconcilable, and cites Azara's own account of the encomiendas established by Irala, which were to belong to a first and second holder for life and then be abolished, leaving the Indians in the enjoyment of full liberty absolutely as the Spaniards were, paying only a certain tribute to the public treasury.
Enforcement was fought. Everything was set in motion, Funes writes, to frustrate a reform that would take the weak out of the claws of the powerful. The governor Ribera was threatened with everything a spirit of vengeance could make fatal to him in his juicio de residencia, so that he would oppose statutes destructive of many rich fortunes; he refused, judged the demand unjust, and gave the visitador every support in his power.
The ordinances survived the removal of their protector. Ribera was taken out of the government in 1611, before the ordinances were dated; his successor Luis de Quinones Osorio, who had spent ten years as a royal official at Potosi, let almost the whole province murmur and watched over the punctual observance of the statutes of Alfaro. Du Graty adds, from the other side of the river, that when Negron died in 1615 the interim governor Francisco Gonzalez de Santa-Cruz cooperated actively in executing Alfaro's measures.
The motive is left open rather than settled. Azara reports the suspicion current at the time that Alfaro favoured the ideas of the Jesuits and that they dictated his conduct. Funes repeats the suspicion without endorsing it. A reform that benefited the mission Indians and was pressed by an order with its own interest in them is not thereby a fraud, but the reader is entitled to the accusation, and it is here because the source prints it.
What is not here matters as much. Neither source prints the ordinances. No article of them is quoted in this object because none was read: the text was not reachable from this container, and everything above is the report of two later historians, one of them a partisan of the revolution writing in Buenos Aires in 1816 and the other a European compiler of 1862. Their independent agreement on the year and on what was abolished is worth more than either alone; it is not the same as having the document, and this object should be replaced by one that has it.
The same volume records what the law was aimed at, on the pages just before. A lieutenant of Villa Rica, tempted by the harvest of converts gathered into more than forty churches, reduced them to captivity; the missionaries who had stood surety for those Indians protested in the name of the liberty of the rights of nature and of the faint favour of the laws, and the reward of their zeal was exile. The abuse that the ordinances of 1612 addressed was being committed by the crown's own local officers against people the crown had already declared free.