Why They Signed

Deeper Roots?

In respect to the possibility that protesters were from older and therefore more venerable families, perhaps with more at stake therefore in the colony, there was only the slightest difference between those who did or did not sign the 1744 memorial. For the most part all elite cosecheros, consistent with the definition of their elite status, belonged to families that had been resident in Caracas since the seventeenth century. By definition—except in the very unusual case of immigrants who had married into an elite family—all elite hacendados, both signatories and nonsigners, were colonyborn creoles. As a rule the parents of both factions had been born in Caracas as well. At the level of grandparents a modest difference emerges: while fully three-fourths (twenty-nine of thirty-eight) of the elite hacendado signatories knew that all four of their grandparents had been native Caraqueños, a somewhat smaller proportion, two-thirds (thirty-six of fifty-eight) of the elite hacendados who did not sign shared this status of having four Caracas-born grandparents. At the level of great-grandparents the signatories' roots continued strong, since many (sixteen of thirty-eight; 42 percent) of the signatories could find in their family trees that all eight of their

great-grandparents had been resident in Caracas, while those who made no overt protest did not have quite the same long family tenure in the colony. Less than a quarter (thirteen of fifty-eight; 22 percent) of elite planters who did not sign were descendants of eight native-Caraqueño great-grandparents.

The depth of these family roots, when viewed from the perspective of the mid-eighteenth century, meant that for signatories the most recent ancestor to immigrate had typically come to Caracas at least two, and typically three or more, generations before they were born, which meant that in 1744 the last family member to immigrate to Caracas was only a historical figure, never known to them in person. They and their families were truly part of the permanent elite of the town. For those elites who did not sign, although they were all locally born criollos , and although a few of them were members of families such as Bolívar and Tovar that had been in Caracas since the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, it was somewhat more likely that a grandfather or, rarely, even a father had been an immigrant to the colony. And yet, as conscious as these provincial aristocrats might have been of the tenure of their families' residence in Caracas, the difference in antigüedad between those who signed the protest memorial in 1744 and those who did not sign was slight, not more than a generation on the average.

A Basque Connection?

A second possible distinction between signatories and nonsignatories is that of an affinity for the Guipuzcoana Company based on the Basque origins of some of them. A number of the elite hacendados who did not oppose the Guipuzcoana Company in 1744 were of Basque parentage. Three examples will suffice: the father of Feliciano Sojo Palacios Gedler had come to Caracas from Burgos in the 1670s and died in the town in 1703. Don Feliciano had served as alcalde ordinario in 1719, in 1735, 1736, and again in 1744; his son, José de Sojo Palacios Lovera, was born in 1705 and was elected alcalde in 1743. Together father and son owned 57,000 cacao trees on four haciendas; neither of them signed the 1744 memorial. Domingo Rodríguez de la Madrid, born in Santander, immigrated to Caracas and married there in 1664. His son, Andrés Rodríguez de la Madrid

Vásquez, married Germana Liendo Gedler, the granddaughter of Basque immigrants, in 1693. In 1744 don Andrés and his sons, Santiago and Salvador Rodríguez de la Madrid y Liendo, owned 18,824 cacao trees on three haciendas. They did not sign the memorial. Finally, the grandfather of Sebastián de Arechederra Tovar, a Vizcayan, had come to Caracas as royal treasurer late in the seventeenth century. Arechederra's father married Luisa Catalina de Tovar y Mijares, a daughter of perhaps the wealthiest Caracas family, in 1682. In 1729 and 1730, with the cabildo locked in a bitter struggle with Governor Lope Carrillo y Andrade, no elections for alcalde were held and in both years Sebastián de Arechederra was named to the position by the king's representative. In June 1730 the replacement for Carrillo y Andrade arrived at La Guaira aboard the first of the Guipuzcoana Company's ships to sail to Venezuela, and as the new governor disembarked he was received by the alcalde Arechederra.^[22] In 1744 Sebastián de Arechederra and his sister María were owners of 37,000 cacao trees on three haciendas. They did not sign the 1744 memorial.

In general, then, elite hacienda owners whose families were of slightly more recent residence in Caracas, some of whom were of Basque ancestry, did not protest the policies and activities of the Guipuzcoana Company in the years just prior to the 1749 rebellion. And yet, some individuals with deep criollo roots in the colony and no immediate Basque connection did not come forward in outspoken opposition to the Company. Cacao hacendados from several of the colony's oldest families remained silent in 1744: José Bolívar Aguirre, owner of 20,000 trees on two haciendas; sisters Josefa and Teresa Bolívar Arias, with 17,000 trees on two haciendas; the brothers José Domingo, José Manuel, and Fernando Tovar Galindo, owners of 62,500 trees on six haciendas; their cousin Martín Tovar Galindo, whose large hacienda in the coastal valley of Cuyagua contained 24,000 trees; and the brothers Mauro and Antonio Tovar Mijares, who held 27,000 trees on three haciendas. A criollo presence of many generations and no Basque ancestors describes many of the elite who wanted the crown to rescind the Company monopoly; but the fact that there were more than a few mantuanos who fit these criteria yet did not sign the 1744 memorial suggests that other factors may more adequately explain why some mantuanos protested against the Company while others did not.

Political Activists?

One such factor may be a tradition of political activism possibly more characteristic of the families of those who protested the Company than of the families of those who did not. The political history of Caracas during the half-century prior to the rebellion of 1749 was marked by a series of confrontations over the right of the cabildo's annually elected alcaldes ordinarios to administer the province in the absence of the governor. This privilege applied both to short-term absences, for example when the governor left Caracas to inspect the other towns in the province, and also in the event that the governor died while in office, in which case the alcaldes would occupy the post until a successor arrived from Spain. Originally granted by royal cédula to the Venezuelan town of Coro in 1560 and reaffirmed for Caracas in 1676 and again in 1723, cabildo alcaldes exercised the authority of the governor for more than six months in no fewer than eight years during the period 1700 to 1730, the year in which the first ships and employees of the Guipuzcoana Company reached Caracas.^[23] On only one occasion did the cabildo assume the obligations of governor because the holder of the office was physically unable to carry on with his duties: in 1704 it became evident that Governor Nicolás Ponte y Hoyo was mentally unbalanced and the alcaldes replaced him. It was far more common for governors to be removed for political reasons: three of the four governors appointed to the Caracas post after Ponte y Hoyo were charged with malfeasance and forced from office by order of higher royal authority (Cañas y Merino in 1714 by the Audiencia of Santo Domingo; Betancourt y Castro in 1719 by the viceroy of New Granada; and Portales y Meneses in 1723 and again in 1724, also by the viceroy of New Granada).^[24]

In most of these instances, the cabildo's alcaldes did not simply take possession of the governor's office, but rather they were obliged to struggle for the gubernatorial authority against aggressive viceroys and other agents of the centralizing Bourbon monarchy who probably regarded the Caracas cabildo's traditional privilege as excessive. Conflict was especially bitter in the 1720s. Supported by the Caracas bishop, and with backing from influential friends at court in Spain, Governor Diego de Portales y Meneses fought openly with the Caracas mantuanos, who were in turn usually sup-

ported in their opposition to the governor by the colony's new viceregal administrators in Santa Fe de Bogotá.^[25] Tensions generated during this bitter political struggle, discussed in detail in chapter 4, carried into the governorship of don Lope Carrillo y Andrade, who succeeded Portales in 1728. Under Carrillo, the issue was one of red damask parasols, which the cathedral clerics used in formal processions out-of-doors to protect themselves from the tropical sun. The governor found the practice to be excessively vain and lacking dignity, and threatened the churchmen with physical violence when they refused to give up their umbrellas. The regidores of the cabildo made common cause with the clerics, and in protest they refused to attend the New Year's session of the municipal council, with the result that elections for alcaldes ordinarios were not held for the years 1729 and 1730. Governor Carrillo was obliged to appoint alcaldes for these years.^[26]

On the surface these fights may be viewed simply as the petty posturing of provincial aristocrats who were starved for symbols of status, but the rights to act as governor pro tem and to use red parasols were in fact issues of deeper meaning. At stake was nothing less than royal usurpation of customary local authority in the Caracas polity, authority that in the minds of many Caraqueños was naturally theirs to exercise. Jealous of privileges embodied in their town government, the town's political elite showed little patience in matters that seemed to threaten the traditional balance of power in their relationship with the monarch and state. In fact, at the turn of the century, some elites had even been bold enough to question whether the Bourbon Philip of Anjou, victor in the War of Spanish Succession, had sovereignty over the Caracas province.^[27]

Local political sensitivities were directly challenged in a more serious and threatening fashion after 1730 by the activities of two Basque governors. That the first years of the Guipuzcoana Company's residence in the province coincided with a long period of Basque governorship, the administrations of Martín de Lardizábal (1732 to 1737) and Gabriel José de Zuloaga (1737 to 1747) caused many Caraqueños to believe that the governors and the monopolists were conspiring to deny them their traditional authority for the economic benefit of the Company. The long-standing belief of the Caracas elite that the Bourbon state was eager to reclaim local administrative privileges thus merged with a widespread popular

antagonism toward the Company. As a result, the political tradition of protest against royal encroachment provided a rationale for the participation of many mantuanos in the popular uprising in 1749 when Juan Francisco de León and his followers from Panaquire and other settlements in the Tuy Valley occupied the Caracas plaza. There was little doubt about the collaboration of the Caracas elite in this armed protest; the view of Juan Manuel Goyzueta, the Guipuzcoana Company factor who fled for his safety to La Guaira in 1749, was widely held if difficult to prove:

Juan Francisco de León is the head of this uprising, but there is no doubt that all the citizens of Caracas have agitated for it, for it is said that this infamy originated on the 25th of August, 1744, first put into motion by a woman, and this is obviously true because since the time of his arrival in this port, no gentleman, neither military nor civil nor cleric, has come down to give support to the Governor, not even for the sake of appearances.^[28]

With events out of hand, the cabildo defended itself and placed the blame on the governor, who had fled to La Guaira, abandoning the city and his authority. The cabildo's struggle for interim authority was an old game in 1749; on other occasions the town council had fought with official decrees and jail terms for the right to govern in the absence of the royal representative. But with an armed mob in the plaza and accusations of conspiracy and treason in the air, the old debate took dramatic new meaning. By leaving the cabildo to resolve the problem of the rebellion, the governor in fact forced the town's principal citizens to either give up their support for León's protest, which had now become a rebellion because the king's representative had been forced from his office, or leave themselves open to charges that they were part of the conspiracy.

Castellanos's flight proved to be an effective tactic, and on this occasion, for the first time in the history of the town council, the alcaldes ordinarios were not eager to assume the governor's authority. The cabildo's claim of innocence in 1749 does not specifically mention the nature of the responsibility placed upon it by the governor's departure, but its self-image as long suffering was made perfectly clear:

[F]or eighteen years this Province has begged Your Majesty to release it from the yoke and tyranny of the Company, and just as we have been loyal while we made such efforts (even though our ap-

peals were not heard), so will we remain loyal as long as we are able to serve Your Majesty; but for the Governor, because the citizens of Panaquire have forced the Company to abandon Caracas, out of fear and because of other things that took place here in Your Dominion, to pass the blame to this city, treating it as a town of traitors and provoking the townspeople in any way possible, is a hardship never before dealt against a loyalty maintained in the face of so much suffering.^[29]

As the list of signatures on the protest memorials reveals, the Guipuzcoana Company factor exaggerated when he claimed that "all the citizens of Caracas" had been actively seeking an end to the Company since "the 25th of August, 1744," a date that refers to no event that has yet been identified.^[30] But there was a sharply contentious political tradition in Caracas that antedated the creation of the Guipuzcoana Company. Rather than a homogeneous elite, united in opposition to the Company (as the Company stated for its own purposes in 1749 and historians have accepted since), perhaps only the most politically active portion of the Caracas elite, those whose families had participated in the cabildo's struggles to administer the province in the absence of the governor during the first decades of the eighteenth century, made their opposition manifest by signing the 1744 letter. Those of the elite who wrote to the king claiming that the Company was openly abetted in its activities by the Basque governors Lardizábal and Zuloaga might have been following in an activist tradition begun by their fathers in the decades before the establishment of the Guipuzcoana Company. Is it possible that the opposition of certain prominent Caraqueños to the Company in 1744 was still primarily political, the most recent of a series of jurisdictional struggles between local and royal agencies?

Two men were elected by the cabildo regidores on the first day of every year to be alcaldes ordinarios for a one-year term. This means that from 1700 to 1749, the half-century prior to the rebellion, a hundred different men could have been selected for the position; in fact, seventy-one men actually served, many of them on more than one occasion.^[31] Of the seventy-one, sixty-six have been identified as men who were born to elite Caracas families or were immigrants who had married into such families. If the relationship of these sixty-six men to the mantuanos who signed and did not sign the 1744 protest memorial is determined, it appears that the signatories did in fact have a stronger history of cabildo

participation than those who did not sign, although this is not immediately evident. Of all adult elite men who were alive in 1744, both signers and nonsigners had cabildo experience, and elite men who signed the 1744 document were only slightly more likely to have been alcaldes ordinarios before León's rebellion in 1749 (thirteen of fifty-five signatories; 24 percent) than were elite men who did not sign (nine of forty-eight nonsignatories; 19 percent). However, the somewhat deeper generational roots of the signer group contributed to the fact that they were twice as likely as the nonsigners to have had fathers who had been alcaldes ordinarios. There were seventy-six elite men and women who signed the 1744 memorial, and forty-five of them (59 percent) were the children of men who had served at least one term as alcalde. Of the fifty-eight elite cacao hacienda owners who did not sign, only seventeen (29 percent) were the children of fathers who had been selected for the alcalde position.

Only a few of all those men who became alcaldes ordinarios ever governed the Caracas province in the absence of the governor, and very few of them were still alive in 1744. During the twenty years of the Guipuzcoana Company presence in Caracas prior to the events of 1749, the Basque governors remained healthy and dutifully at their post, and consequently the cabildo alcaldes did not have occasion to act as governor as their predecessors had done with such frequency during the first thirty years of the eighteenth century. Most of those men who, decades earlier, as alcaldes ordinarios had served as governor pro tem (eight men on six occasions), were either protesters themselves in 1744 or the fathers of individuals who signed the 1744 letter. Conversely, although the mantuano cacao hacendados who did not speak against the Company in 1744 were more numerous than those of their class who did sign the memorial that year (fifty-eight in contrast to thirty-eight), they and their fathers were only half as likely to have governed the province in the absence of the royal executive (four men on three occasions).^[32]

Comparison of those elites who protested against the Guipuzcoana Company in 1744 and those elites who made no written remonstrance indicates that the protesters were for the most part members of families that had been Caracas residents in both the paternal and maternal lines for three and four generations. The protesters' families had been well represented on the town council

during the first half of the eighteenth century and, what is more significant for the protest against the Basque monopoly, members of these families had participated directly in a rough-and-tumble political tradition in which the violent quarrels between cabildo and governor were frequently decided by distant higher authority, both viceroy and king. Mantuanos who did not protest in 1744 had local roots that were somewhat less deep, and their involvement in cabildo politics was both more recent (their fathers had not often served as alcaldes ordinarios) and had not been directed at the royal governors (they rarely served as alcaldes—governors pro tem). Yet the difference between the two elite groups on these social and political points is still less than striking. Were there other differences that might better distinguish them from one another, and in the process provide us with a clearer idea of the impact of the Guipuzcoana Company on the Caracas planter elite?

Debt with the Company?

Within a few weeks of the creation of the 1744 protest memorial, officials of the Guipuzcoana Company prepared a most interesting document of their own. A complete list of all the debts owed it by hacienda owners and merchants, both Caracas vecinos and non-vecinos, showed that the Company had provided a substantial sum in loans and merchandise on credit in the Caracas region, most of it since 1740, and much of it to those same individuals who were most vociferous in their opposition to the Company. By the reckoning of accountant Nicolás de Aizpurua, as of December 1744, at its Caracas factoría , the Company was owed 299,444 pesos. About 12 percent of this amount (37,195 pesos) were loans made to unnamed individuals in Spain to be paid in Caracas; the remainder was loaned out in Caracas and registered by name of the debtor in two categories: cosecheros and merchants. Cosecheros had been given cash and goods in credit to the value of 200,618 pesos, and mercaderes had received 61,631 pesos.^[33]

The individual with by far the largest debt owed to the Basque monopoly was don Juan Javier Pacheco Mijares, the second Conde de San Javier,^[34] who was also the principal activist among the elites who opposed the Company. The 1744 protest memorial was signed in his house. In 1740, the year his father the first Conde de San

Javier died, don Juan Pacheco borrowed 20,671 pesos from the Company factor, Nicolás de Francia. The Conde made but one small payment, and the loan had not been paid when its term expired in March 1743. In December 1744, he still owed 19,365 pesos, 6 reales. This sum amounted to 7.4 percent of all the loans made by the Company in Caracas. There were three other debtors with obligations of more than 10,000 pesos, and two of them, Antonio Gregorio Landaeta and Fernando de Aguado Lovera, were also signers of the 1744 protest. Doña Ana Juana de Tovar, Marquesa del Valle de Santiago, who did not sign, owed 11,911 pesos. These four owed a total of 55,806 pesos, 21.3 percent of the total debt, but in all, 154 individuals and 3 convents owed money to the Guipuzcoana Company in 1744. Of these, 56 have been identified as members of Caracas elite families, 28 of whom signed the 1744 memorial, and 28 who did not. The signatories' total debt was 87,141 pesos, more than twice the 42,922 pesos owed by those who did not sign. But in both cases this was mostly new endebtedness, contracted since 1740, and on the average the sums were not particularly large. Excluding the four debts of more than 10,000 pesos (three belonging to signers, one to a nonsigner), the average amount owed by 25 elite signatories was 1730 pesos, while 27 mantuanos who did not sign owed an average of 1149 pesos.

The large debts held by the Conde de San Javier, Antonio Landaeta, and Fernando de Aguado may go far toward explaining their personal interest in reforming or suspending the monopoly's operations, but since the typical amount owed was less than 2000 pesos, and since there was but little difference in the debt of those who protested versus those who did not, it does not seem likely that endebtedness by itself was a strong motive for protest against the Company. Yet it may have been the case that, as cacao prices sharply declined and few ships departed La Guaira loaded for Veracruz—circumstances both related to one another and directly caused by Company policies in the minds of many—there were those who feared that the Company was purposefully seeking to keep them in its debt indefinitely. The 1744 protesters had more reason to be concerned because they were, as a group, more dependent on cacao sales to repay their loans than were other elite Caraqueños, some of whom had sugar as an alternative cash crop.

Sugar Trapiche Ownership?

Sugar was an agricultural commodity that was sold exclusively within the Caracas region, and it was therefore isolated to a degree from the crisis in cacao exports. A census taken in 1752 estimated the annual renta , or gross income, of all the sugar trapiches throughout Venezuela.^[35] Of the 135 trapiches located in Caracas, the Tuy Valley, Valencia, and the coastal regions, 41 belonged to elite citizens of Caracas. The total renta from these 41 sugar estates amounted to 91,400 pesos, of which 36,100 pesos came from the 17 trapiches that belonged to the protest group; another 55,300 pesos were generated on 24 trapiches that belonged to mantuanos who did not sign the 1744 memorial. The sugar earnings of the protesters represented less than half of the 87,141 pesos that they owed the Company, but the nonprotesters, with a total debt of 42,922 pesos, could have paid their obligation to the Guipuzcoana Company with the income from one year's sugar sales. Thus protesters had no choice but to export or sell cacao in exchange for the cash they borrowed and the merchandise that they bought from the Basque monopolists, who held the exclusive license for the sale of imported goods of all kinds, including food and clothing. In 1744, with the price paid for cacao at only 8 pesos the fanega, this had become an intolerable situation for those Caraqueños whose income came mostly or entirely from cacao.