Peru

An invitation signed in Bergara

Talambo is the story of an organised emigration that went wrong: some three hundred people from Gipuzkoa who crossed the ocean under contract to work a Peruvian estate, an armed clash three years later and a lawsuit that ended in a Spanish diplomatic protest.

It all began with a need in Peru. In the middle of the nineteenth century its agriculture was short of labour, and the government wanted to attract foreign settlers; as a trial, it authorised the entry of a thousand Spanish settlers.²

The first expedition was negotiated by the landowner Manuel Salcedo, owner of the Talambo estate, in the province of Chiclayo, with his partner from Gipuzkoa, Ramón Azcárate. On 27 October 1859, in Bergara, Azcárate signed an invitation to the farmers of Gipuzkoa: he was looking for some three hundred people, in families, who would go with a Basque chaplain, doctor and schoolteacher to grow cotton for eight years.²

The voyage

The families who accepted gathered in Getaria and in Bordeaux, and on 14 April 1860 they embarked on the French ship L’Asie. According to the passports, there were 95 men, 49 women and 125 children. It took them 92 days to reach El Callao, and three more children were born on the crossing.² On 1 August 1860 they reached the estate.²

The problems began the next day. The settlers did not know how to grow cotton, and the final contract, signed in Talambo on 6 August 1860, already had to include changes the families were asking for.²

4 August 1863

The conflict between Salcedo and the settlers broke out three years later. On 4 August 1863, after an argument with the settler Marcial Miner, the estate’s overseer hired armed men in the village of Chepén, who entered Salcedo’s house looking for Miner. The Basques tried to stop them, and there was a shoot-out and a fight with knives. The settler Juan Miguel Ormazábal was killed, and five settlers were seriously wounded, among them Miner and the expedition’s administrator, Julián Fano.²

What followed in the courts went back and forth. The judge of Chiclayo convicted two Basque settlers; the Superior Court of La Libertad overturned the sentence and ordered Salcedo to be tried; and in February 1864 the Supreme Court in turn overturned that of La Libertad.² That last decision provoked protests from the Spanish consulate and from Admiral Luis Hernández Pinzón, whose squadron was sailing off the coast and had sent a ship to Pacasmayo to pick up the settlers who had fled the estate.²

That is why Talambo matters beyond its settlers. The historian Rodolfo Aguado Cantero presents it as a precedent of the Spanish-Peruvian conflict of those years, and points out that in Spain the incident was used for propaganda purposes, while in Peru neither the press nor the government tried to hide it.²