9 Ramos Mejia, J. R., Rosas y el Dr. Francia, p. 264. 1917.
10 Amunategui Solar, D., La Trata de Negroes en Chile. Revista Chilena de Historia y Geografia, Vol. 44, pp. 25-40. 1922.
11 La Barbinais de Gentil. Voyage autour du monde, p. 64. 1731.
12 Sarmiento, D. F., Life in the Argentine Republic, p. 276. 1868. (Trans, by H. Mann.)
Chapter Five
PERU, ECUADOR, COLOMBIA, PANAMA
NEGROES came to Peru with the first Spaniards. The first European ever to reach that country was Alonza de Molina and a Negro was with him. Bombon, a Negro, accompanied Pizarro, conqueror of Peru, to Cuzco, while Negro soldiers fought at his side. As in other Latin-American lands both Spaniards and Negroes found mates among the, Indian women, and had children by them.
Later Negro slaves were taken in great numbers to Peru. Arriving at the then Isthmus of Panama, they were transshipped in boats down the Pacific Coast. By the end of the eighteenth century, the number of Negroes, mulattoes, zambos, and free Negroes in Peru, greatly exceeded the whites, being about 100,000.
Negroes and mulattoes dominated along the hot Pacific slope, while the whites lived inland in the mountains. However, high up on the Andes at the capital, Lima, were many mulattoes. Stevenson who visited it in 1824 says, “Many of the surgeons are mulattoes and frequently do great honor to themselves and credit to their profession. If a female slave could only prove that she had connections with her master, she was freed.”1
Negroes seemed to have been well-treated on the whole in Peru. Three of its presidents were men of mixed white, black, and Indian ancestry, namely Manuel Ignacio de Prado, “one of the best,” Nicoles de Pierola and Sanchez Cerro, who was president from 1930-1933. A former sergeant-major, who had served in the French Foreign Legion, he stirred up the oppressed Negro and Indian workers, and overthrew the government. He was assassinated in 1933. A fourth, Leon Escobar, held office for one day only.2 In the field of literature there have been several distinguished mulattoes, among them Enrique Lopez Albujar, novelist. Callao, the principal port, has a mixed population of Negro, mestizo, mulatto, and zambo. The unmixed Negroes live principally in a quarter of the city known as Malambo.
Ecuador
This republic to the north has an Indian-Negro-White population, with a fairly large percentage of unmixed Negroes. Of the estimated 2,500,000 Ecuadorians, only some 200,000 are white, or near-white. The majority are Indians, some of whom are mixed with Negro.
REVOLUTIONARY LEADER.
XXI. Colonel Sanchez Cerro, President of Peru, 1930-1933.
There are several Negro settlements, the principal one being in the province of Esmeraldas, which was settled by Negro slaves who had overcome both the whites and the Indians. Enock says, “The relatively considerable black population of the Esmeraldas province and the mulattoes and the zambos associated therewith have come about from a curious circumstance. In 1623, according to Cevallos, at the time when Esmeraldas was almost entirely inhabited by the Cayapas, a vessel arrived at a small port of Atacames with several hundreds of Negro slaves bound for Peru. The Africans broke out, overpowered and killed all the whites on the ship, landed and killed every man, white or Indian within their reach, and made themselves masters of the country for miles around. The women were spared and taken as wives by the black men who remained in undisturbed possession of the port and the lands they had taken. As a result the numerous mixed progeny of colored people grew up and formed the existing settlements.”3
One of the richest portions of Ecuador, the gold-bearing region of the middle portion of the Santiago River basin is also occupied by Negroes. In the 1900’s large numbers of West Indian Negroes were imported to build the railroad. The majority of them settled in the country and took wives there.
Colombia
The inhabitants of Colombia are chiefly Negroes, mulattoes, and zambos. In the deep hot valleys of Magdalena, and Cauca, as well as in the Choco, the Negroes were brought in to work the mines in 1630 after the Indians had been exterminated, and the Negro strain still predominates in that region. Carthagena, populous Colombian seaport, was the scene of St. Peter Claver’s work among the Negro slaves.
Of this part of the Pacific coast, Waldo Frank, who visited it, says, “The Negro is not lost. He spread south and west, crossing the Isthmus, prospering in the jungles of the Colombian Pacific. There, are towns on this shore which are entirely black. Tumaco, for instance, a little town just north of the Equator.” Here, he says the life is entirely African.4
Of the Colombian population of 8,893,000, the unmixed whites constitute a small percentage. There are between 600,000 to 1,000,000 Indians; 3,500,000 mestizoes (mixed Indian, Negro, and Caucasian); 450,000 unmixed Negroes, and 3,000,000 mulattoes.
Panama
Negroes, thirty of them, not only were with Balboa at his discovery of Panama and the Pacific Ocean in 1513, one of their number being a black nobleman, Nuflo de Olano, but there is the clearest possible evidence that they had been living in that region long before Columbus, and were strong enough to make successful war on the Indians.5
Later, the Spaniards brought in slaves in such great numbers, and they throve so well in the hot climate that Panama has remained chiefly a Negro country to this day, though modified somewhat by white immigration since the building of the Canal began in 1878.
Under the Spaniards, the white strain was quickly absorbed by the Negroes, who were often rebellious, and joined the pirates. There is the romantic story of King Bayamo, an escaped slave, as told by Pedro de Aguado, a sixteenth century historian. Taking to the mountains with a number of other slaves, Bayamo set up a kingdom of his own, from where he descended on the pack-trains of the Spaniards, capturing a great quantity of gold, silver, and precious stones. It was only with the greatest difficulty that the Spanish commander, Pedro de Orsua, succeeded in defeating him and his valiant band. Finally captured, Bayamo was taken before the Spanish viceroy, who not only received him with honors for his bravery and resourcefulness but sent him a free man to Spain where he lived in luxury from the loot he had captured.6
The Spaniards in Panama mated freely with the black women, who used all their wiles to be legally married because it was only as the wife of a white man were they permitted to wear silk or jewelry.
Of the half a million or more inhabitants of this republic, the vast majority are of Negro ancestry, with some Indians, among whom are the famous so-called “White Indians.” There are also a number of Chinese, Syrians, and Japanese. Numbers of the blacks are West Indians, who came to dig the Canal, and remained there to rear families.
Some of Panama’s most distinguished citizens are of mulatto ancestry, one of its presidents, Carlos Mendoza, being a dark mulatto. Mendoza, who was president during the digging of the Canal by the Americans, had several clashes with General Goethals, builder of the Canal, over the question of color.
Of the republics to the north, Costa Rica, San Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala, Costa Rica comes nearest to being a white country. Guatemala’s first president, Rafael Carrera, was a zambo,7 that is the son of an Indian and a Negro woman. Rallying the oppressed Negroes and Indians around him, he overthrew the government, and was named president for life. Though totally illiterate, he possessed great military and organizing ability and was worshipped as a god by the Negroes and the Indians.
Nicaragua is the birthplace of Ruben Dario, who is credited with being Latin-America’s foremost literary figure. Dario was of mixed Indian, Negro, and white ancestry, though there is a tendency to deny the Negro portion of it.
Inman thinks he may be of Negro ancestry, while Beals says he is. “The two most gifted men of Latin-America,” says Inman, “ranking high among the geniuses of the nineteenth