LITMIR.BIZ

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      Despite his comparative ethnology and defense of the Indian’s humanity, Las Casas still had to devise a reason that would justify the Spanish empire, as he was an advocate of royal authority. He agreed with Vitoria’s argument on the natural right to rule of the Indian monarchs. Idolatry alone did not justify deposing or killing them. He attacked Sepúlveda’s argument on the natural slavery of the Indians by saying that it was blasphemy against God to say that He had created a brutish and inferior “race” (Brading, 1991: 95). Therefore, all wars of conquest against the Indians were unjust. At this point, caught in a dilemma, Las Casas had no choice but to follow Vitoria in defining papal authority as only spiritual, not political – a claim that left the king with no right to a universal empire. The Dominican friar pulled out of his blind spot, not unlike Vitoria, by claiming that very same spiritual authority obliged the pope and the king to see to it that the Indians were Christianized, that is to say, “educated” into being better men. With this argument he restored all political authority to the crown. Indeed, “the only way out,” as he entitled one of his tracts, was peaceful conversion, which to the conquerors and colonists sounded like more of the same. It proved impossible to find a balance between the right to convert the peoples of the world and the right of the pagan rulers to preserve their independence. How to serve God in the midst of thieves? is the question that hounded Las Casas all his life, as he saw the New World fall off a precipice of evil and injustice.

It is in the horns of these irreconcilable claims, these epistemological and ethical dilemmas, that the intellectual and political project of all those who wrote about the Andes after the fall of Cajamarca in 1531 are inscribed. The polemic on the nature of the American Indian that took place, as a result of confusing the Bible with world history, reverberated through the centuries, causing all kinds of distortions and misconceptions, blocking the ability to produce new learning and even a more accurate approach to empirical realities. When Francisco Pizarro (1478–1541) decided to execute Atahualpa and march to Cuzco with his Huanca allies, the priest who accompanied him wrote a report, today considered bogus, to justify the regicide. According to the Spaniards, Atahualpa had committed blasphemy. The scene has the Spanish showing the Inca a book – the Bible – and telling him that that is the word of God, to which the Inca must submit. Atahualpa receives the book from the friar’s hands, puts it to his ear, and upon hearing nothing, shakes it. He still hears nothing. Then, angered, he throws the book on the floor, saying that it cannot be God because it does not speak to him. Tom Cummins (1998) disputes the idea that the Inca would have expected an object to mimic the word because in the Andes, speech and writing were not associated with objects, as they were in Europe. It is clear also from the lack of adequate translators at the time that the Spaniards could not have conveyed the message they claim to have given Atahualpa about “the book–the–Word–divinity.” What the fiction of Father Valderde speaks of is the power claims that the written word and the representative relation with the king of Spain allowed them to make in imperial territories. This is the brash and unreflecting power amalgam of ideas and military strength that Andeans, and even Spaniards, would have to address every time they took up the pen to tell the story of the conquest, reconstruct the history of the Incas, petition for favors or advancement, or contest the practices and justifications for the injuries wrought upon people by the colonial regime. Again, providential history was the umbrella that protected all, from those who praised the conquest and destruction of the Andean way of life, to those who, like Garcilaso de la Vega, Inca wrote to correct the Spanish imperial historians, or Guamán Poma, who hoped to tutor the Spanish king into understanding what good government really would be like.

The conquest of Peru is dominated by a fractious engagement of Spaniards and Andean peoples who saw in the arrival of the Spaniards an opportunity to rebel against Inca rule. Starting with Father Valverde, many Spaniards wrote the memory of their part in the conquest in various forms and addressed different publics. The Crónica del Peru (1553) by Pedro Cieza de Leon (1518–53), a soldier and letrado, is the closest thing to a narrative of the conquest. The second part of the Royal Commentaries (1609) by Garcilaso de Vega, Inca (1539–1616) remains the classical account of the conquest because of its ample view of events, the clear concept of history that articulates it, and the beautiful style in which it is written. The recent Conquest of the Incas (1970) by John Hemming draws fully on the corpus of reports, letters, memorials, crónicas, treatises, and narratives that the conquest of the Andes, the ensuing civil wars, and the campaign for the extirpation of idolatries produced during the sixteenth century. He especially draws on Garcilaso and Cieza. The issues that dominated Las Casas’s writings are replayed in the writing of the Andes: encomienda, just conquest, evangelization, the right to universal empire, providential history, the place of the Indians in the new scheme of things, rights to private property, rights of the Indians to selfrule, and the quality of their culture.

      One way of making sense of the proliferation of writings from Peru is to look at the authors of these texts as part of the ongoing Sepúlveda–Las Casas polemic and separate them by the perspective that they had on the Inca empire. This is more helpful than a generational or referential classification (Porras Barrenechea, 1962). Although the edges of all groupings are always blurred, and cronistas like Juan de Betanzos (–1576) are hard to place neatly on one side or the other, the separation in terms of the particulars of the polemic allows for a better understanding of the discursive forces unleashed into modernity by the conquest as well as the problematics of positionality that accompanied writing in the Andes. In general terms we can speak of two oppositional groups: (1) the Toledo Circle, a number of letrados who pushed forward, with all the resources of the crown, the basic principles of a justificatory imperial history and (2) the various individuals who wrote outside of the circle and who, for reasons of their own, resisted and opposed the ideological thrust of imperial history. The Toledo Circle encompasses the chroniclers, jurists, translators, notaries public, priests, and other letrados and scholars engaged by the viceroy to continue the Spanish imperial school of history and provide the crown with the necessary information and arguments to denigrate and deauthorize Inca rule and culture. In this group one can easily place the letrados hired by the viceroy himself: Juan de Matienzo (1520–79), Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa (1530?–92), Juan Polo de Ondegardo (–1575), and others who, like the Jesuit José de Acosta (1540–1600), had views of their own and were weary of the viceroy but did nevertheless confirm the normative and “superior” sense of European modes of cognition. They produced a harsh interpretation of Inca history, one in which they basically characterized the Incas as vicious rulers to whom Plato’s definition of the tyrant – a man ruled by the desires of the lower organs of the body – applied fully (Castro–Klaren, 2001).

Although very different among themselves and writing at a good distance from one another, the men who contested, in different ways, the discourse of the imperial historians were the mestizo Jesuit Blas Valera (1545–97; Varner; 1968), the Indian Guamán Poma de Ayala and the mestizo humanist Garcilaso de la Vega, Inca, the latter writing from Spain. Cieza de Leon, although holding onto the view of providential history and the superiority of Spanish culture, cannot be aligned with either group as he wrote with great admiration of the Inca empire. Although considered “reliable chroniclers,” their information needs to be corroborated with other sources. Cieza de Leon, for instance, is noted for his more or less objective descriptions of Andean culture and Inca rule. However, in this respect, his work cannot compare with Betanzos, who knew more Quechua and had direct access to the memory of one of the royal panacas (patrilineal descent groups in charge of preserving specific noble Inca houses). Cieza de Leon never failed to subscribe to the notion that Inca religion was inspired by the Devil, a “fact” that he did not try to reconcile with his extensive reports on and admiration for the exemplary laws and wise statecraft with which the Incas governed the immense Historia del Tahuantinsuyo (Pease, 1978).

      Although hired by viceroy Antonio de Mendoza and with probably only an elementary education, Betanzos wrote quite a reliable history of the Incas. He had the great benefit of having learned Quechua in the field. This gave him an unusually great power to understand what was being reported to him and to attempt feats of cultural translation. His marriage to Doña Evangelina, one of Huayna Capac’s granddaughters, gave him unparalleled access to the Cuzco elite whose khipu and oral memory clearly informs

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