In 1513, the Spanish conquistador Vasco Núñez de Balboa reached the Pacific Ocean.  Soon, many Spaniards began finding evidence from coastal Indians that a vastly wealthy empire existed to the south.  In 1532, Francisco Pizarro set out with 200 men to discover and conquer these people.  The Spanish were confident it could be done, had not Cortez defeated the mighty Aztec Empire with even less?  The Inca Empire was, at this time, recovering from a violent civil war waged between two claimants for the throne: Huáscar and Atahualpa.  By the time Pizarro reached Incan territory Atahualpa had defeated his brother’s armies, but the empire was on shaky ground at best.

           Atahualpa quickly discovered that a force of foreign invaders had entered Inca lands.  For reasons still not understood, the great Inca decided to let the strangers pass through the empire without harassment and decided to meet personally with the Spaniards. There might have been an Incan legend the predicted the return of white, bearded gods who had sailed away centuries early, much like the Aztec story of Quetzocoatl.[1]  The Inca met the Spaniards at Cajamarca with an army of 40,000 men.  When a priest showed Atahualpa a bible and told him he must abandon his current gods, the Inca was insulted and tossed the book down.  Using this as a pretext, the Spanish opened fire on the Indians and captured their emperor-god.  Pizarro ransomed Atahualpa for a gold-filled room, but killed the Inca rather than return him to his people.  By the year 1533 the Spanish had taken the empire’s capital of Cuzco and the age of Spanish colonialism had begun.

            The Spanish system of administration in the New World began with a viceroy, appointed by the Crown, who acted as chief-bureaucrat-governor-general of the anointed viceroyalty sectioned out by the Spanish government.  Viceroys typically opposed the conquistadors that came before them.  They were in America to consolidate royal power and to protect the indigenous peoples from the machinations of settlers and local officials.[2]  Many were only interested in personal advancement and cared little for the Indians supposedly under their care.  They were assisted by an audiencia, or council, to rule over the land.  Spain had recently re-conquered most of Iberia from the Muslims and had yet to fully escape the Middle Ages.  As a result, many of the feudal practices of the kingdom of Spain were transplanted to Ecuador; foremost among these was the encomienda.  The encomienda was a system by which land, theoretically owned by the Spanish Crown, was given to soldiers and settlers to farm and/or mine.  Any people who lived on that land when it was transferred were given as slaves to the holders.[3]  A landed elite was created in Ecuador with the labor provided by enslaved Indians.

            Ecuador’s indigenous population before the Spanish conquest was between 750,000 and 1 million.[4]  Through disease and overwork the people of the coast were practically exterminated within 100 years; the Quichua, the mountain-dwelling peoples were able to survive better by their unfitness to work on hot, lowland encomiendas.  Many also escaped into the jungles of the Oriente and Esmereldas.  Some assistance came in 1542 when the Spanish government established the “New Laws.”  These acts put restrictions on the amount of maltreatment that could be inflicted on Indians and took away many of the titles conquistadors had for Indian workers.  As a result many conquistadors revolted against the viceroy.  Spanish rule was not restored in Quito and the rest of Ecuador until 1548.

            Religiously, the flow of Catholic priests and missionaries into Ecuador was initially spurred by a sense of optimism and impetus to “improve” Indians’ lives through their conversion.  With the advent of the Counter Reformation, however, few priests were allowed any room for innovation or experimentation and were soon cooperating with the exploitive encomenderos rather than opposing them.[5]  But the encomienda may not have been as oppressive to the Quichua as originally thought.  Under the Inca Empire ayllu communities paid tribute, or mita, with a curaca acting as a negotiator; this tribute in goods and labor was largely continued with the Spanish in the place of the Inca.[6]

[1] Marion Morrison, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia (Austin, TX: Steck-Vaughn Company, 1992), 28.

[2] C. H. Haring, The Spanish Empire in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), 127.

[3] Roderick Cameron, Viceroyalties of the West: The Spanish Empire in Latin America (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1968), 149.

[4] Erin L. Foley, Ecuador (New York: Marshall Cavendish, 1995), 22.

[5] John Leddy Phelan, The Kingdom of Quito in the Seventeenth Century: Bureaucratic Politics in the Spanish Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), 52.

[6] David W. Schodt, Ecuador: An Andean Enigma (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987), 21.