Bolivia

What Bolivian history keeps of the Basques is above all one episode: the three years in which Potosí split into two factions, told afterwards in such different ways that even the name for what happened is still disputed.

The war between Vicuñas and Vascongados (1622-1625)

At the beginning of the seventeenth century Potosí was, in the Auñamendi’s words, a world of adventurers, idle former soldiers, miners, friars and swordsmen.¹ According to Crespo, the Vascongados formed a united body, while Andalusians, Extremadurans and Castilians stood up to their dominance for years, each on their own. They joined forces only when the conflict broke out, and they were the Vicuñas. Between 1622 and 1625 the town lived through assaults, acts of revenge and executions.²

The story has been told in two ways. The first is that of the chronicler Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela, who in his Historia de la Villa Imperial de Potosí devotes almost a whole book to the war. He speaks of 3,332 Spaniards and Peruvians and 2,435 mestizos, Indians, mulattoes and Black people killed in the town, and of a company of 4,000 soldiers. In his version, the factions sign a peace and seal it with a wedding: Eugenia, daughter of the captain of the Vicuñas, Francisco Castillo, to Pedro de Oyanume, son of the Vascongado leader Francisco de Oyanume.²

The second is the historian’s. Alberto Crespo, who researched the conflict in the Archivo General de Indias, maintains, with the documents in hand, that those figures are several times higher than the real ones and that the company had little more than 250 soldiers. And the ending he found in the papers was a different one: the war ended with dozens of Vicuñas hanged from the balconies of the town council and the extermination of their ringleaders.²

Crespo even disputes the name. “War” is the traditional term, but for him it was less than a war and more than a riot. He takes up the proposal of the historian Gunnar Mendoza, who called it an “urban guerrilla war”.²