"Silver, Sword, and Stone"

[fiefoe]

Marie Arana's unflinching examination of three prominent strands of South American history: mining, violence, and religion. Listening through the whole thing is so difficult that it is almost like wearing a hairy shirt.

• The first order of business when pre-Columbian powers conquered one another a thousand years ago was to pound the others’ gods to rubble. With the arrival of the conquistadors in the Americas, the triumphant monuments of stone erected by the Aztecs and the Incas to honor their gods were often reduced to mere pedestals for mighty cathedrals. The significance was not lost on the conquered. Rock was piled on rock, palaces were built on top of palaces, a church straddled every important indigenous temple or huaca, and religion became a powerful, concrete reminder of who had won the day.
• But none of these, in my view, has moved populations, marked the landscape, and written history as forcefully as Latin America’s fixations on mining, or its romance with brute force, or religion.
• The storied city of silver is no longer. Gone are the stately palm trees, the silks from Canton, the Neapolitan shoes, the London hats, the perfumes from Araby... It is hard to believe that this was the seat of modern globalization as we know it—the sixteenth-century economic marvel that drove European commerce and prefigured the industrial age. <> But that is precisely what Potosí once was. In the one hundred years between 1600 and 1700, Potosí single-handedly supplied more than one hundred million kilos of the silver that made the Peruvian Viceroyalty one of the most vibrant financial enterprises in the world.
• just then, at that pivotal moment in history, he presided over the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than China’s Ming dynasty, more vast than Ivan the Great’s Russia, larger than the Byzantine, Songhai, Aztec, or Ottoman Empires, the Inca Empire was more sprawling than any European state of its time. Huayna Capac ruled over lands that stretched for more than 2,500 miles, or roughly the distance between Stockholm and Riyadh. The Tahuantinsuyo, as he called it, was a territory as long as North America is wide,
• To be an ordinary mortal in the Inca realm was to inhabit a transitory existence: work was interchangeable, rotational, highly disruptive. As in later totalitarian systems under Joseph Stalin or Mao Tse-tung, whole populations were often uprooted and mobilized, families divided, all for the convenience of the state and its economic necessities. Rebel tribes would be relocated to areas where they could be watched by loyal subjects.
• Mobilizing a massive army of forced laborers, the Incas split rock, raised fortresses, and built storehouses and holy sanctuaries, as well as the magnificent Royal Road, the Capac Ñan, a road system traversing every possible landform and stretching twenty thousand miles from Argentina to Colombia—a span nearly four times as long as China’s Great Wall
• Mayan potentates used shiny metals to signal their growing power. It did not occur to the Mayans, or to any of the early Andean cultures, for that matter—as it had to the Egyptians, Romans, and Germans—to forge something as utilitarian as arms and tools from iron ore. Not until the rule of Huayna Capac had the Incas begun to use bronze in crowbars, knives, and axe heads. And not until the Aztecs began fashioning copper spears in the fifteenth century was metal used for killing. Stone was the preferred bludgeon, obsidian the favored impaler,
• By 1500, however, the amount of gold in Europe had dwindled to a few meager tons. According to one historian, “the total amount of gold in Europe in all forms—coins, hoards, and every manner of adornment and decoration—could have been fashioned into a cube only two meters in each dimension.”
• Vasco Núñez de Balboa, who discovered the Pacific; Hernán Cortés, who conquered the Aztecs; Pedro de Alvarado, who conquered Cuba, aided Cortés in Mexico, and then went on to subjugate much of Central America; Francisco Pizarro, who conquered the Incas; Pedro de Valdivia, who founded what is now Chile; Francisco de Orellana, who explored the Amazon and founded what is now Ecuador; and Hernando de Soto, who explored Indian territory from Florida to Arkansas—all hailed from within fifty miles of one another in the impoverished, drought-ridden, impossibly torrid highlands of western Spain. The links can be surprising:... perhaps the greatest bond among these men was that they were sons of war: their fathers, uncles, cousins had battled the Italians, the French, the Moors,
• One for all, all for one. They formalized their pact according to old medieval tradition: by attending mass in Panama’s modest church, sharing a communion host three ways, and vowing undying loyalty to one another.
• Pizarro decided that Ruiz would return with the others, reunite with Almagro, find another ship, and rejoin the expedition as soon as he could manage. Pizarro would stay where he was. It was a strikingly defiant choice, given that he and the remaining twelve would wait seven more punishing months before they would see relief.
• It stands to reason, then, that Pizarro’s conquest would resemble Cortés’s victory to the letter. What is more difficult to fathom is why two great civilizations separated by so much distance and history succumbed to the same strategies in the same way. <> In truth, for all the seeming similarities, the Mexicas and Incas were as different from each other as Egypt is from Rome. Despite Montezuma’s efforts to tamp down freedoms, his empire had evolved into a largely urban, highly entrepreneurial society. Mesoamerica was a buzzing network of competing enclaves and markets, with a monetary system based on copper and cacao. Huayna Capac’s empire, on the other hand, was rural, nestled in a mountain aerie, highly centralized, and its currency—if you could say it had one—was slave labor.
• For an unprecedented window of a dozen years, from 1518 to 1530, Spain had a distinct advantage. Inca and Aztec rulers were beset by a common dilemma: their territories had grown unwieldy, rebellious, torn asunder by too many loyalties. This social disorder was joined by a silent weapon the conquistadors didn’t even know they had. Smallpox,
• The conquistadors and slavers learned quickly that blacks were more suited to field work, to laboring in the sugar, indigo, cacao, and coffee plantations; barrel-chested Andeans had a distinct advantage mining at high altitudes, where oxygen was scarce and the cold winds, perpetual. So it was that the demands of faraway masters came to shape the social landscape.
• Gold had been scarce, but silver was plentiful. So much so, that failing to find iron, they were forced to shoe their horses with the precious white substance. One conquistador whose jaw was blown off during a battle with the Incas had his chin reconstructed entirely in the metal.
• Fleets that shipped silver to the Orient would sail back freighted with silks, porcelain, sandalwood, and ivory, so that the palatial houses of Mexican and Peruvian silver magnates were—quite absurdly for that era—bursting with Chinese and Japanese art. Even the wounded sailors, convalescing in ramshackle hospitals, were eating off Ming porcelain plates. <> By 1600, Potosí held a population that rivaled London’s and Tokyo’s.
• As one seventeenth-century economist lamented at the height of the metal influx, “Out of its great wealth, the republic of Spain has extracted utter poverty.” The “easy money” had been for the happy few. <> Those who truly profited in the end were the English and Dutch, who broadcast an unremittingly negative view of Spain, rode the crest of Spanish America’s economic stimulus, and went on to produce steam engines, textile mills, ironworks, shipbuilding yards, steel foundries, and powerful, international banks.
• Bright, educated Creoles with deep roots in the Americas had to submit to an ever-revolving door of these lesser masters. Only the Spanish-born were allowed to govern, trade, own stores, or sell goods. No American was permitted to sell for his own profit on the streets, much less plant grapes, establish vineyards, make spirits, grow tobacco or olive trees.
• Other British corporations moved quickly to take over Mexico’s prize silver deposits. Even as the United States massacred its own Indian population at the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890, American enterprises were investing hundreds of millions of dollars in mines where Mexican Indians labored. A rabid racism froze in place throughout the hemisphere, and Latin America dug in for another century of pillage.
• El Tío is god of the mines, lord of the underworld. Horns jut from his head.... Take the Spanish word Tío, for instance. Uncle. Early chronicles tell us that Indians had difficulty pronouncing D; it did not exist in their languages. So the Spanish word for God—Dios—was often rendered as Tios, and when terrifying semblances of El Tío emerged in the mine shafts,
• “In all history,” one source reports, “only 161,000 tons of gold have been mined, barely enough to fill two Olympic-size swimming pools.” More than half of the world’s supply has been extracted in the last fifty years.
• “Illegal mining is crowding out the legal,” one Peruvian economist lamented. Improvised, primitive, toxic mines have claimed a firm place in the boom, although they wreak havoc on the environment. In Peru, illegal mining is now twice as profitable as trafficking cocaine. <> The repercussions are punishing. No logger, no matter how destructive—or any other breed of tree-clearing agricultural entrepreneur, for that matter—has cut as ruinous a path through the nerve centers of biodiversity as an illegal miner does in this part of the world. Deforestation from mining in the Peruvian Amazon alone tripled from more than five thousand acres per year to more than fifteen thousand each year after the gold rush that followed the 2008 global financial crisis.
• In 1973 Chile’s threat to nationalize Anaconda Copper was sufficient rationale for President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger to sanction the bombing of Chile’s presidential palace, oust Salvador Allende, and pave the way for the installation of military strongman Augusto Pinochet.
• Metal imperialism—not terribly different from that practiced in the sixteenth century—still prevails in the copper mines of Chile, the coal mines of Colombia, the diamond fields of Brazil, the silver quarries of Mexico, even as profits are funneled away to London, Beijing, Zurich, Melbourne, Toronto, Johannesburg, or Butte, Montana. As President Danilo Medina of the Dominican Republic pointed out a few years ago: for every $100 of gold it rips from the Dominican countryside, Barrick Gold Corporation—whose owners reside in Canada—will receive $97 of the profits and the Dominican people, $3.

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• Rapacity, gold fever, a desperate courage against overwhelming odds, a hyperinflated sense of superiority, a basic contempt for the Indian—call it what you will—these are the impulses that galvanized them,
• Colonials were barred from owning printing presses. Indeed, when Simón Bolívar, liberator of six republics, undertook his wars of independence in the early nineteenth century, he made a point of hauling a printing press onto the battlefield as a direct provocation to the Spanish masters.
• It was thought that the Inca ruler Pachacutec, among the most successful in extending the Empire of the Sun, had perfected the art of conquest. It was he, after all, who had established the highly successful method of conquer and divide. Once a tribe was defeated in war, Pachacutec would divide it into two, north and south. The upper half would be called hanan; the lower, hurin. He would then goad the districts into competing against each other. Sundered geographically and psychologically, a population would be too preoccupied about its brother enemy to care much about its conqueror, and too exhausted to mount a unified rebellion against the Incas.
• His neighbors’ riposte was fierce and immediate, almost as if it had been the desired goal all along: Brazil, Argentina, and the puppet government in Uruguay joined efforts, formed the infamous Triple Alliance, and mounted a punishing invasion of Paraguay.... These struggling, fledgling American republics, like the mythological Saturn, were now devouring their own sons. Divvying up the spoils of the Paraguayan bloodbath, no one got richer than the British financiers—the Bank of London, Baring Brothers & Co., Rothschild & Co.—whose vaults had financed the incursion. Meanwhile, a nation of 900,000 had been brutally reduced to 221,000.
• Castro pledged to produce the Zafra de los Diez Millones, a whopping ten-million-ton harvest of sugar, breaking all records and doubling the production of the year before. In that single-minded pursuit, meant to prove that the new Cuba was a nimble, vibrant economy, Castro sent the entire population to the sugar fields to cut cane. By then, Fidel was the self-proclaimed dictator of Cuba: its prime minister of the Revolutionary Government, first secretary of the Communist Party, commander in chief of the Armed Forces, and president of agrarian reform. He governed as the old Spanish colonial Marquis of Havana once said one could easily govern Cuba: con un violín, una baraja y un gallo fino—with a fiddle, a deck of cards, and a fighting cock. His Zafra was not an idle goal; it became a dictum. Cubans who had been gainfully employed as doctors, professors, dockworkers, soldiers, farmers were abruptly directed to drop their professions and take up work as cane cutters.
• Although to the rest of the world Sandino seemed to have achieved the picture-perfect revolution—a non-Soviet, non-Marxist uprising by a young, moderate population pitting itself against the embodiment of corrupt, dictatorial rule—the United States left no doubt that it would not tolerate Sandino’s brand of nationalism. President Theodore Roosevelt’s corollary to the Monroe Doctrine ... Protected and funded by the United States, General Somoza—and eventually his sons—would rule Nicaragua with a hard hand for more than forty-three years.
• Gaitán’s death changed the course of Colombian history... One man’s death—blamed variously on the CIA, the Colombian Communist Party, the Soviet Union, Fidel Castro, random student revolutionaries, and the newly elected right-wing president, Mariano Ospina—had razed the capital’s heart, sparked a homicidal civil war, forcibly displaced three million souls, and brought the country to financial ruin. At no time in memory, aside from the bullet that took the life of Austrian archduke Francis Ferdinand and sparked the First World War, had a slug of steel cost so much human life and suffering.
• he resolved that aiding the upstart Marxist revolution in Angola would almost certainly send the right message, achieve a wider purpose. He would prove that Cuba, despite its size and isolation, could have a profound influence in world affairs, stand for justice, make a mark in the global politic. Toward that end, he would join forces with the Soviets and engage in a proxy war against the United States.
• When Argentina’s steely military dictator, General Videla, who had overseen the hecatomb, was asked how the Argentine people should think about the thousands devoured by his maw of improvised justice, he answered archly that the question’s logic was all wrong. The Argentine people had seen law work on their behalf. They deserved human rights, and those rights had been threatened in Argentina. In an argument that swelled to Orwellian proportion, he explained that the truly loyal, honest citizens had been faced with a metastasizing terrorist threat—a Communist infiltration—and they needed to pay down that cancer in human blood. The victims, if there were victims, were nobodies. “Who is a disappeared person?” he asked rhetorically. “Anonymous. Nobody. He has no identity, is neither dead nor alive. Just disappeared.” His answer was all too reminiscent of the answer given to the debate that had raged in Seville during the late fifteenth century: Were the victims of the conquest truly human? The answer five hundred years later was still a resounding no.
• even as prisoners were being flayed alive, or herded into concentration camps, or drugged and dropped from biplanes and helicopters into the Atlantic or the Paraná River—a grinning General Videla swanned through festivities with Secretary Kissinger, and the military ranks ran the games as efficiently as they did their torture machines. At the very apogee of the cruelty, with unidentified bodies washing ashore, with young girls being snatched screaming from buses, with a whole world watching, the 1978 World Cup closed with a victory for the home country. Argentina trounced the Netherlands by a score of 3–1.
• For a hundred years, limpieza de sangre was law in fifteenth-century Spain, and it required an official certificate, meant to exclude Jews and Arabs. Eventually the concept became more fluid, more corrupt: when Spain was in dire need of money in the early 1800s, it decided to sell cédulas de Gracias al Sacar, certificates that granted a light-skinned colored person in the colonies the same rights as every white:... In modern-day multiracial Latin America, the notion of limpieza de sangre has become even more fluid, although it remains a useful crutch for prejudice. Whiteness has a sliding scale.
• In Buenos Aires, Argentina, it may cost you more—$10,000 is the going rate for a quick, efficient, premeditated murder this year—but it can be done. As one journalist has said, sicarios have done for murder in Latin America what the transistor did for the radio.

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• In the Andes—whether among Quechua, Huanca, or Aymara people—that reverence for spirited stone continues: in their awe at the beauty and power of jutting rock; or their sympathy for a random piedra cansada, a “tired stone,” an abandoned hulk that never made it to the Herculean structure for which it was meant; or even their delight in small, perfectly shaped or unusually colored rocks they carve or choose to represent a loved one.
• The monoliths at Quiriguá also tell us that each rock had its purpose and meaning: the first represents the throne of the jaguar, lord of the fertile earth; the second, the water throne, where sharks coexist with lilies; the third, the throne of the flying snake, emperor of the skies. Curiously enough, with slight variations, that trinity mirrors the beliefs of the Incas, who lived two thousand miles away and four millennia later. Like the Mayans, the Incas revered three spirit animals above all: the puma, the snake, and the condor—masters, respectively, of earth, water, and sky.
• It was worship, pure and simple, and he was taken aback by its intensity. Evita, a former actress—and not a very good one—had made a career of establishing schools, orphanages, old-age homes, hospitals, charitable institutions, and encouraging woman’s suffrage. She had done the kind of work missions strove to do.
• In the immense territory that surrounds the Río de la Plata, by the end of the seventeenth century, more than half the Indian population lived and worked on Jesuit lands. <> But too much success proved to be the Jesuits’ undoing. Over the course of 150 years, their missions became such thriving businesses that the Crown decided they were a competing economy—a state within a state—that needed to be stopped, ejected from the Americas entirely. On February 27, 1767, King Carlos III expelled the Jesuits from all Spanish territories.
• So wealthy, in fact, did the colonial clergy become, that by the nineteenth century, when revolutionaries stormed the palaces to seek independence from Spain, almost half of all property in Mexico City belonged to the Church. In Caracas, when Simón Bolívar inherited the wealth that would make him rich enough to fund the liberation of six republics, it was from an uncle priest,
• But left to their own devices, rural churches allowed the worship of nature and idols, creating a highly syncretic religion—a fusion of Christian and tribal beliefs—unlike anything the Church had ever seen: a Virgin’s image was likely in the shape of a mountain—a nod to the Earth Mother, Pachamama—with a sun crowning her head and a half moon cradling her feet.
• in the course of two hundred years of solitude, the Coras had returned to worshiping the Sun. But, to his surprise, the Sun God was now Jesus Christ, complete with passion, crucifixion, and resurrection. Some Indians were even capable of reciting whole portions of the Mass in something that resembled Latin. Judas, an incomprehensible figure to the Coras—unlike any god they had ever had—no longer existed, but his tribe, the Jews, had become los borrados, “the erased ones,”
• Lucho became a spokesman for the abuses. In his quest to improve conditions throughout the country, he cofounded the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights.
• Evangelical Christianity: Although they are not necessarily better off politically as evangelicals, (women) stand to reform their households by luring men to the faith. A religion that brooks no drink, no extramarital sex, or domestic abuse can have a demonstrative impact on the family.
• In a funhouse distortion of all history that has gone before, evangelicals are joining right-wing political parties that historically have been oppressors of the poor, yet align with their socially conservative views on gay rights, abortion, and the role of women. Strangely enough, on the basis of these abiding shibboleths of culture, the Catholic Church cannot disagree.
• But as Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes once wrote, “We are all men of La Mancha.” We are people of the stain. Or, as the old joke goes, like bananas, we Latin Americans eventually show our black spots.

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• The study of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance is a young science... it is generally accepted that a curse can echo its way down the generations. As recently as my father’s lifetime, it was believed that the sins of an ancestor might predispose you to be born with a tail.
• We tend to think of the arc of these Americas as the story of Columbus and the Taíno. The story of Cortés . . . and the Aztecs. Pizarro . . . and the Incas. Cabeza de Vaca and the Guaraní. Spain and its colonies. The tinpot dictator and his unfortunate casualties. The Roman Catholic Church and the pagans. The vast world economy and the coveted veins that lie dormant in the earth. Even here, in this book, the juxtaposition of winners and losers seems to be the only way to frame the past. <> But it is the “ands,” the second parties to each dyad, that reveal the underlying and often more enduring aspects of the story