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?