So far, our discussion of conditions in the Chocó in the eighteenth century has concentrated mainly on the shape and conduct of secular and religious administration, and on the abuse and exploitation inflicted upon Indians by frontier officials and other settlers, both lay and religious. This is largely because, in their concern to expose the worst features of Spanish administration in this isolated corner of the empire, senior officials and ecclesiastics in the colony focused almost exclusively on the effects of corruption and misgovernment on native populations, rather than on the ways in which Indians adapted to the changed conditions of colonial rule during the early decades of the eighteenth century. This does not mean, however, that native peoples in the Chocó came passively to accept the efforts of Spaniards to incorporate Indians into the local economy as providers of labour and tribute and as a market for Spanish goods, or indeed to inculcate Christianity and European norms more generally. Far from resigning themselves to the ‘fate the Spanish Crown designed for them’, Indian groups in the Chocó continued to seek ways to challenge Spanish domination and Christian evangelisation, and to protect their ethnic interests, identity and cohesion.

To escape Spanish retribution in the aftermath of the Citará rebellion, many Indians established runaway communities in distant and inaccessible parts of the region which remained undiscovered until the 1710s and 1720s. Giving evidence in 1710, the Indian Joseph Veragone, of the community of Bebará, informed protector Rafael de Oquendo that many cimarronas had been in existence in the Chocó since the outbreak of rebellion in 1684. Pedro Hato de la Banda, a Spanish settler in Quibdó and Bebará, similarly reported that ‘since the uprising many cimarroneras have been formed consisting of large numbers of Indians’. Other natives in Citará province, rounded up and reduced to villages in the late 1680s and early 1690s, repeatedly deserted those villages in the decades that followed, also in order to establish independent communities in ‘the remotest of places’, well out of the reach of Spanish colonists.