The aftermath of rebellion

The pacification of the Citará rebellion of 1684–87 did not immediately lead to a mass influx of miners intent on exploiting the new conditions on the frontier. The years of rebellion had been immensely destructive of both life and property, and the job of reconstruction was slow. Writing in 1688, Don Antonio de Veroiz y Alfaro, newly appointed sargento mayor and corregidor by Popayán's governor Gerónimo de Berrio, described how the years of warfare had not only brought agricultural activity to a standstill in Citará province, but had also brought in their wake famine and disease: ‘there has been ferocious hunger [here], followed by its companion, disease’. The death toll had been high – half the population, according to Veroiz. Many of the survivors, fearful of Spanish reprisals, had gone to ground. Food was in short supply. No more than 34 slaves – belonging to three small cuadrillas or slave gangs – remained in the region in 1688. ‘These, their overseers and four men to procure food’,Veroiz stated, ‘are the only Christians left in this miserable and wretched province, and one doctrinero, a secular priest who is very ill and longing to leave to recuperate’. More than a decade passed before Indians were finally rounded up and resettled and some semblance of normality returned to this part of the Chocó frontier.

With the exception of a handful of miners and a couple of officials, few Spaniards ventured to Citará province in the late 1680s and early 1690s. This does not mean, however, that they withdrew completely from the Chocó; rather, they concentrated their activities in those parts of the Pacific lowlands that were both more accessible to the cities of the gobernación of Popayán, and unaffected by the violence. Members of the leading families of the Cauca Valley, especially of Cali and Popayán itself, were already well entrenched in Raposo-Iscuandé and Noanama province before the outbreak of rebellion, since these were the areas over which that gobernación traditionally enjoyed jurisdiction. Some, such as the Caicedos of Cali, cautiously withdrew their slaves from Noanama when violence broke out in 1684, but, eager to prevent others moving in to exploit mining interests to which they had laid claim, they returned a few years later.