Chichimeca War - Peace By Purchase

Peace By Purchase

As the war continued unabated, it became clear that the Spanish policy of a war of fire and blood had failed. The royal treasury was being emptied by the demands of the war. Churchmen and others who had initially supported the war of fire and blood now questioned the policy. Mistreatment and enslavement of the Chichimeca by Spaniards increasingly came to be seen as the cause of the war. In 1574, the Dominicans, contrary to the Augustinians and Franciscans, declared that the Chichimeca War was unjust and caused by Spanish aggression. Thus, to end the conflict, the Spanish began to work toward an effective counter insurgency policy which rewarded the Chichimeca for peaceful behavior while taking steps to assimilate them.

In 1584, the Bishop of Guadalajara made a proposal for a “Christian remedy” to the war: the establishment of new towns with priests, soldiers, and friendly Indians to gradually domesticate and Christianize the Chichimecas. The Viceroy, Alvaro Manrique de Zuniga, followed this idea in 1586 with a policy of removing many Spanish soldiers from the frontier as they were considered more a provocation than a remedy. The Viceroy opened negotiations with Chichimeca leaders and promised them food, clothing, land, priests, and tools to encourage them through “gentle persuasion” to settle down. He forbade military operations to seek out and capture and kill hostile Indians. Beginning in 1590 and continuing for several decades the Spanish implemented the “Peace by Purchase” program by sending large quantities of goods northward to be distributed to the Chichimecas. In 1590 the Viceroy declared the program a success and the roads to Zacatecas safe for the first time in 40 years.

The next step, in 1591, was for a new Viceroy, Luis de Velasco, with help from others such as Miguel Caldera, to persuade 400 families of Tlaxcalan Indians, old allies of the Spanish, to establish eight settlements in Chichimeca areas. They served as Christian examples to the Chichimecas and taught animal husbandry and farming to them. In return for moving to the frontier, the Tlaxcalans extracted concessions from the Spanish, including land grants, freedom from taxes, the right to carry arms, and provisions for two years. The Spanish also took steps to curb slavery on Mexico’s northern frontier by ordering the arrest of members of the Carabajal family and Gaspar Castano de Sosa. An essential part of their strategy was conversion of the Chichimeca to Catholicism. The Franciscans sent priests to the frontier to aid in the pacification effort.

The Peace by Purchase program worked. Hostilities died down and the majority of the Chichimecas gradually became sedentary, Catholic or nominally Catholic, and peaceful.