ABSTRACT
THE foundations of the viceroyalty of Buenos Aires were scarcely laid before the southern part of the continent was startled by a great popular uprising. The Indians of Upper Peru had at last turned upon their aggressors, and sought relief under arms. With the results of the rebellion before us, we are able to see clearly what the Indians themselves dimly discerned, that the resort to force carried little hope of success, but it was the only hope the Indians had of attaining the conditions of even a tolerable existence. What their actual state was, which furnished the motive and reason of revolt, has almost entirely passed out of the mind of this generation; and if a writer of the twentieth century, not greatly influenced by Spain’s ancient political or ecclesiastical ideals, should tell plainly the story of the Indians under the colonial administration, he would hardly be believed. He would run the risk of having his statements attributed to ignorance or prejudice. If, however, loyal Spaniards and devoted churchmen speak of what they saw and what their personal investigations revealed, their report ought to be accepted. Fortunately we are able to listen to the testimony of two Spanish witnesses whose distinguished scholarly and scientific attainments, and whose attachment to the interests of the Church and the government have not been questioned. They are George Juan and Antonio Ulloa, and under the king’s orders they wrote of their observations and investigations during their residence in Ecuador and Peru just before the middle of the eighteenth century. During the whole of the last half of the century, the king and his council of the Indies had before them this report, which was finally published in London about a hundred years after it was written. It is the famous Noticias Secretas de America. Although it brought to the king unimpeachable evidence of the oppression and misery the Indians were suffering at the hands of the officials and the clergy, he refused to spread abroad the information contained in the report, or to make it the basis of the needed reforms. This refusal was not, however, an indication of sympathy with the abuses practised in America; on the contrary, it was simply the result of weakness, of lack of courage, of helplessness in the presence of the impending fall of a great governmental structure that had been wrecked by the avarice and incapacity of those immediately in charge of it.
