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Racial Succession in the Colombian Choco

1939; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 29; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/209885

1931-0846

Robert Cushman Murphy,

Conflict, Peace, and Violence in Colombia

HE greater part of the Pacific seaboard from Panama to western T Ecuador was never effectively occupied by the Spaniards.' To this day, indeed, the rain-forest area between shore line and Andes remains a region of sparse human population, as well as one in which the original armed contest between white and red men has been succeeded by a struggle, biological rather than warlike, in which red and black peoples are the chief competitors. As Eder2 has written, large parts of Colombia once overrun by conquistadors and missionaries have ever since remained all but untraveled by white men. In this second phase, however, the native Indian of the Choc6 has become a steady loser to the introduced African, and the ultimate inequality is likely to prove more marked than that of the earlier and overt conflict between aborigines and Caucasians. Various fates overtook the groups of Indians with whom the Spanish conquerors came in contact in the Caribbean, Panama, and northern Colombia. Caribs and Chibchas, for example, were exterminated, either in warfare or in subsequent enslavement. The Cuna, on the other hand, successfully resisted encroachment from the beginning and, after conclusion of a large-scale migration from the Pacific to the Atlantic side of Darien, have maintained both independence and racial integrity to the present day. The Choc6 tribes, of the Pacific watershed and the San Juan-Atrato Valley, at first resisted; next, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, they partly capitulated, mainly as a result of the enmity between themselves and the Cuna ;3 but subsequently, in 1726, they violently threw off the Spanish yoke that threatened complete subjugation. After that date the Choc6 peoples retained a large measure of security, from aloofness even more than from combativeness, until a new source of danger appeared in a negro population capable of outbreeding them in their own territory. Records are hazy and conflicting as regards the density of population in Darien4 during pre-Spanish times, but Wafer, in i68i, found conditions to be as follows: