III. THE GUANES

The Guanes: brave Indians, elegant and industrious. The rite and the wheel. The domination of the Great Cacique Guanent. The minor cacicazgos. The whiteness of the skin, the loveliness of intelligence, the dexterity of arms, General Chanchon. The Guane argument. Ambrosio Pisco, King of the Chibcha country, Prince of Bogota, Lord of Chia and the last Guane.

When the European conquerors arrived in the country, they found several independent Muisca or Chibcha Caciques kings: Guanent in the old province of San Gil Tundama in Santa Rosa de Viterbo Susa in Ubate, Cqueza, Guatavita and Chiquinquir Sugamuxi in Sogamoso, Duitama and Soat Zaque in Tunja, Ramiriqui and Tenza Valley Zipa in Bogot, Zipaquir, Facatativ, Fusagasug and Chocont. The latter was the most powerful king of the Chibcha nation. Spaniards brought to America, among their golden ambitions, a rite and the wheel which the poor natives did not know nor imagined. As a gift to their spirits, the Spanish brought a new religious rite and for their material progress, the wheel, which changed the face of universal and American civilizations in those times. In January 1540, the Spaniards arrived to Guane territory. They were commanded by Martin Galeano. They penetrated through the lands of the small Cobaraque Cacique southeast of Oiba. After wandering around San Gil, they fought in the “Pozos” site against the brave Macaregua, and marched against Barichara Guane and Chanchon Cacique who were imprisoned after brave battle.
According to the Coral Book, Captain Martin Galeano was son of an Italian family from Genoa who lived in Valencia where he was born. He came with Nicols de Federman in the Quezada Expedition, as a second lieutenant of the company commanded by Captain Lazaro Fonte. Galeano was favored by General Jimenez de Quezada who entrusted in him the foundation of a city in the Chipat province in 1539, so that it would serve as the conquest center of that province, and to attend the Spaniards who would come to the new kingdom by way of Carare.
The historian Lucas Fernandez Piedrahita states that when the Spanish conqueror Martin Galeano found Velez, he commanded a company of one hundred and fifty men.The majority of his soldiers were Navarros and Asturians, well mounted and armed with catapult and coat of mail.
The Guanent Province is named after the great cacique of the same name, whose royal dominions were located between the Chicamocha, Oro, Surez and Saravita Rivers. The Guane population situated over the Surez right margin still subsists as a Corregidor’s District. This was one of the most ancient towns of the Chibcha Empire. Before the conquest, it was the ordinary residence of the Guane chiefs. The latter one, the Tisquesuza Zaque resident of Hunsha (today Tunja), and the Sugamuxi formed the most powerful governmental trilogy of the Eastern Chibcha Empire. From the Guane seat, also named “El Aliso” depended the lesser caciques of Chanchon, Macaregua, Butaregua, Charal, Matareque, Coima, Cobareque, Yargui,Chitareque, Soayta, Pitiguao, Curiti, Barichara, Bocore, Carahota, Chimane and others named by the physician historian Calixto Camacho.
Chanchon boasted the title of Parish at the end of the seventeenth. century. There functioned as curate priest, the Presbyter Alfonso Orates Galeano, relative of the conqueror. “In the year 1752, the Chanchon lands were auctioned in 4,000 silver coins, the village was moved to Socorro rather than Guane” as, the academic and historian from Socorro, Rodriguez Plata afrms. It corresponded to Diego Antonio de Cespedes y Loyola, ordinary major and judge of collection of the town of San Gil to inform, extinguish and transfer Chanchon to Guane in accordance with the Royal Decree of November 28, 1750.
The human element who inhabited the Guanent Dominions from time immemorial was one of the enormously preponderant, brave, and well conformed of the Andean racial group. That is why, according to legend, all the erce warriors and heirs of the Chibcha Dominion were permitted to choose companion from the Guane Indians to continue their descent. They stood out as lighter in complexion, intelligent and dexterous in arms. Even today, travelers admire the exponents of a race which seems formed by generations of superhumans found on the margins of Chicamocha, Surez and Fonce Rivers. When the General President Pedro Nel Ospina traveled to San Gil, he demanded to my father, then the province prefect, to present a pair of Mochuelanos or pure Macareguas. My father presented a tall herculean Indian with his wife, an elegant girl with hazel straight hair. The General exhorted them to join his party they refused, blushed by modesty, but later, they were the admiration of the presidential retinue. The Guanes used to dress, as the tradition says,differently from other tribes, with a multi-colored coarse cotton cloth. They would t it tight to their bodies, and would use another cloth as a cape tied above the left shoulder. They would adorn their heads, according to the hierarchy to which they belonged,with beautiful tropical bird feathers. Also, they used a band as a turban with special distinctive marks of gold and emeralds. They used several classes of collars, breastplates and shields of pure gold.
The Guanes used work tools made of hard silica and wood, similar to the axe of the Caribe. The churlish and dry farmlands were cultivated with curious systems of irrigation. Their methods are used in several places even today. Their domestic constructions or huts were built over wooden stakes, the same way, as it is used by our rural countrymen, with straw covered roofs in a conic form.similar to the frames used at present. The temples were dedicated to the adoration of the stars. The caciques’ and priests’ palaces were built with art and painstaking attention. Fine wood and stones were predominant. Furniture and portico were of solid construction. The Guanes raised some precarious stone monuments which did not stand the avalanche of centuries. There is one remaining wall situated over the right margin of the Surez river near the Guane town. Benjamin Ardila Diaz made a very complete description of this monument.(1)
The Guanes ceramic industry was of first line and quality. Their styles can still be appreciated in the Barichara, Curiti, Villanueva and Guane markets. Their cotton yarn was strong and well displayed. Their textiles, wrapping the mummies, have been conserved in the indigenous graves their harmonious and rich colors can still be appreciated. About the Guanes, the historian Carlos Arturo Diaz (2) stated the following: “The Guane Indians constituted a bellicose tribe that shared with the Chanchon one, a deserved prestige of brave warriors, since they have taken their triumphant arms to the boundary of their enemies, the Chitages, who have been infringed with serious defeats. This tribe had other neighbors on the other side of the Chanchon territory. One of the most vigorous military indigenous and the most capable strategist who defeated the most daring captains of the conquest such as Gonzalo Surez Rendon, Martin Galeano and Lzaro Fonte, making his name so notable, that the licentiate Gonzalo Jimenez de Quezada did not designate him in his memoirs as the known Cacique, but as the General. Their limits reached the jurisdiction of the Carare and the Opon Tribes, the boundaries of the Central Cordillera and the Magdalena Valley”. Later, the known intellectual and improviser adds about the Guanes: “The Guanes, in turn, were the descendants of the Caribes, the race which according to the last studies were the settlers of the Colombian interior, by succesives invasions, comprising the Gulf of Mexico from the Atlantic shores to the Amazon Valley. Such invasion was stopped by Spanish swords”.
It does not seem the Caribbean dominion would cover such large space, but it has been demonstrated, as ascertained by the erudite Carlos Navarro Lamarca, (3) “Such race populated the coasts called Caribe” and that its penetration reached the proper Chibchas territory such as the lands of the Chanchon Cacique in the eastern Colombian territory and the Calarc lands in the west. The fact that there are several disseminated places in the country with the name Guane, in Cundinamarca, Fomeque and Sasaima indicates certain spiritual unity in the Chibcha Empire. Soledad Acosta de Samper (4) afrms that :”the Guanes were of the Chibcha race, but more indomitable. Soon, they declared a crude war to the Spaniards. The Guanes were better dressed than their congeneric, and had a facility to learn the Spanish language. Notwithstanding, the Guanes and the Agates were completely exterminated during the first century of the Spanish Conquest. They were enemies and hated the Spaniards so much, that the ones who did not die during the wars committed suicide before giving up. The prisoners, taken by the Spaniards to Christianize, never submitted. The Chibchas who lived north of Chicamocha River, close to the Guanes, had the curious belief that all men after death would convert to stones. They adored their own shadow because they considered it as a tutelar god”. Yucca and corn were the Guanes’ most important agricultural products found by Quezada in 1536, also, cotton, tobacco, red pepper, fruits, potatoes and the systematic culture of grains. The work of spinning cotton was proper of the women who used to paint it with plant derived dyes of extraordinary strength. The Indians boasted of being skillful dyers. They stamped the textiles with wooden rolls. The men were dedicated to shing and hunting deer, rabbits, sainos (a kind of boar), curies (a kind of guinea pig), turkeys, picures, tinajos, armadillos and other components of the regional fauna.
The Guanes were industrious Indians, well conformed, hard workers, of independent character, valiant and more or less peaceful as long as they were not submitted to vassalage or their lands were not bothered. And, if at the end, the few surviving Guanes yielded to the Spanish pressure, they left, when they mixed with the conquerors, “well marked and established characteristics as the Santandereanos who carry other people’s blood which Spain’s dominium forced to fuse” as it is afrmed by the historian Carlos Cuervo Mrquez. (5) From caste, our peoples are an imminently proud and very industrious conglomerate, despite their aggressive and poor physical environment, surrounded by cordilleras and summits, and carried these characteristics during the colonial period, and the entire last century. From caste comes, also, their sincerity, their love for liberty, which rejects all foreign and state interventionism. The Guanes’ favored amusements were singing and dancing accompanied by drums and wooden flutes. Their dance was a sort of mambo of today. They would adorn themselves with feathers, flowers and jewelry proper of the caribes. The jewelry contained wild beasts’ teeth and ocean shells. Most of these objects stayed in the Guanent Museum of San Gil. They were found by the illustrious scientist Niceforo Maria of the Lasallista Community and by the citizen Michel Pointu in the Cueva de la Antigua. It can be conrmed with some certainty, that the Guanes knew writing. Stones with inscriptions similar to the Muiscas found in some immediate regions of Zapatoca and Jordan reveal their degree of progress. It is known that the Guanes, like the Chibchas, divided time in solar years, months and days. The nights were counted by the lunar phases. Such a complicated chronological system is explained very well by the historian Liborio Zerda (6) who affirms that “ the ngers of the hand and feet and knots in a rope were used to count from one to ten: Ata (1), Bosa (2), Mica (3), Muyhca (4), Hizca (5), Ta (6), Cuhupcua (7), Shuhuza (8), Aca (9) and U Chihica (10)”. With the words Quihicha or Quibicha (foot) they designated half a score, ten, so that eleven became Quihicha-ata and twenty Quihicha-ubchihica. For larger numbers, they indicated the numbers of scores and the fractions of tens ie: Muyhica-quihicha-suhuza implied eighty-eight. As far as their social progress, the Guanes practiced with delity the general laws of the Chibcha Empire. By different ways, proper of their totem, they cruelly punished the crimes of adultery, murder, robbery, incest, desertion, battery and animal stealing. They were punished with the rigor of talion. As far as the hereditary transmission of real estate, only women and children received equal parts. The clothing and jewels accompanied the dead to the grave. If the woman died during maternity half of the estate would go to her father as a way of indemnication for the loss of a daughter.(7) Baron von Humboldt (8) states that:”Weddings were celebrated with great pomp.The gift for the parents played a preponderant part, a sort of inverse dowry, according to their nominated jurisdiction. The groom should present a blanket of proportional value to his wealth and abilities” During the wedding, the jaque or priest intervened at the end of the ceremony asking the bride, according to the historian Cortazar, the following: Do you love Bochica (their god) more than your husband?, your husband more than your children?, and your children more than yourself? She would answer rigorously with a rotund Yes! From that moment, the great meal and dance would start with abundant fermented drinks and gabble around the newlyweds. The Guanes were primarily matriarchs. The woman was empowered, ipso facto, to punish her husband with up to eight strikes with a stick, according to the fault, without prejudice of the other legal sanctions, including the suppression of life.
All daughters born before the first born male were sacriced to Bochica, also one of the twins. The disabled and the elderly were also eliminated. This happened among the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans and other pagan peoples. This was an eminently moral act for the Guanes, throwing the valetudinarians to the Tarpeya rocks, according to friar Pedro Aguado.(9) Antonio de Herrera (10) narrates that “The Muisca people like the Guanes maintained a deep respect for cadavers. They believed in the trip of the dead to the country of the shadows localized, according to the chronicler Borda, in the center of the earth. To arrive there, they had to cross a wide river in a boat made of cobwebs. Their prejudice in this area made them consider the spiders as sacred. The writer Mora Diaz (11) inserts a detail about this theme in a publication. It is a concept taken possibly from the scientist Lubbock that due to the Hebrew influence, the Chibchas believed in the resurrection of the dead., in a future life and in the deluge. Those Indians who died as a consequence of a bite of a serpent had a cross placed over their graves. The priest Sarasola (12) relates, to underline the Mongolian, Tibetan, Malayan and Javanese influence on the Colombian Indians at the time of the conquest that they used to embalm the bodies of their dead chief warriors. They carried them in front of the combat troops to encourage the army to obtain victory. Later, they were buried in special tombs. The historiographer Adolfo Dollero and the geographer Eliseo Reclus (13) agree and affirm that all the native Americans belong to the same ethnic group despite their diversity of customs and their four hundred languages. For example: “when the bones of the warrior Ajax in front of his armies and the Athenians had Teseos’ spoils among the troops to ght in the Marathon elds”, as in Homer’s Iliad, such known facts among our aborigines indicate clearly an eastern influence. The Guanes like the Chibchas embalmed the cadavers of their caciques extracting the viscera and introducing in their place salts and caliginous materials.The caciques at the time of death would give peremptory orders to bury their women, dogs and their most faithful slaves in their graves. The chronicler Liborio Zerda states that those who were buried alive were narcotized with herbs or intoxicated with chicha to the third degree, so that the caciques would not undertake their trip alone in their cobweb boats to the land of the shadows. Then, the priests would take the cadavers to occult places unknown to the tribe, generally in natural caves and proceeded with the interment of the noble spoils throwing successive layers of dirt. This has been corroborated by von Humboldt who stated that the Mongolian and Native American races are the closest races in the world. This is also afrmed by Cesar Cantu (14) when he states that:”The primitive inhabitants of Asia came from America in very remote times”. Now I remember how my old professor of history Estanislao Leon (15) adds about the Asiatic origin of our ancestors that “The conquistadors found white and black people in certain regions of the new continent and that the Indians had similar customs to the Egyptians: embalming cadavers, disposing of mummies in similar fashion and with many signs in their alphabets similar to the hieroglyphics of that country”. The Guanes were good vassals of the Muiscas or Chibchas supremely religious pantheism. Their favored gods were: Sua (the sun), Chia (the moon), Chiminigagua (the creator of the universe), Chimichagua (all powerful tutelar god of light}, Chibchacun (workers’ god), Chaquen (god of farming), Cunchabiba (god of rainbow}, Bachue (mother of the natives) and Guahaioque (the devil). The main religious festivity was celebrated every fteen years in honor of god Sua. To the other gods they would offer holocausts of talking parrots, especially to Fo the god of drunkards. The idols were congured in gold and clay with diamond incrustations above cotton made platforms with golden threats.The narrations of Henao y Arrubla (16) say that the conquistadors were thought to be sons of Sua “ They threw them children to eat”. (In Homer’s Iliad, Agamemnon sacrices his own daughter in honor of the Greek gods). During great danger the jeques would climb the top of the mountains with their warriors, and “ there with howls and bombastic pantomimes sacriced children, in honor of Sua butchering them and exposing their entrails to the sun rays and marking the stones with their previously collected blood”, colonel Joaquin Acosta (17) states. The jeques played a preponderant role among the Indians, somewhat less than sacred. The training of these priests was done in seminaries called Cucas. There they would stay twelve years, observing the planetary phenomena with periods of prolonged fasts, until the moment they were consecrated to the cult, with great pomp, by the great priest or Zaque. He would impose austere life, celibacy and special investitures which provided rank and authority.
In Suamox, today Sogamoso, Miguel Triana (18) afrms: “The great pontiff or Sogundomuxo resided in his palace. To this personage, rendered spiritual vassalage all the jeques of the Chibcha Empire. Their power was transmitted by election among the families of noble blood”. In a chronicle of the already mentioned friar Pedro Simon, which reference is lost, it is said about the personality of the Guanentino cacique during the epoch the conquistador Martin Galeano found with his centaurs, in the dominions of the indigenous chief, the following extensive paragraph describing the naked personality and gure of the great leader: “ It can be well seen that the cacique made an elegant impression, brown color, prominent aquiline nose, strong musculature and abundant straight hair.bound by a bracelet in a pigtail. His forehead was covered with a wide golden band which had a row of diamonds and a voluminous emerald from which base surged toward the back a beautiful tuft of feathers. From his ears hung big earrings and from his neck a double collar of very white teeth of jaguar. His war and ceremonial embellishments were made out of ne linen cloth with embroidery of bright gures. Due to his hierarchy he used sandals painted in gold. During combat, when he raised bracelets and macana (an Indian wooden saber edged with sharp flint), his people exhilarated with a fever of deafening war singing in an echo of his command voice, as a sign of battle. His life was austere but his feats were innumerable in front of the invader, sealed with heroism, announcing his nal sacrice. The erceness of his people only had an equal in the Caribe gests and the Calarces advances”. Some legend relates that the first Chibcha ruler was Saguanmachica and ruled the destinies of his great people in 1470. The last cacique Mochuelo died in 1563. One of the maximum personages of the Guane people is, without doubt, Ambrosio Pisco, king of the Chibcha country, Prince of Bogot and Lord of Chia. The Cacique Ambrosio Pisco lived on the Guanentinas craggy and brambled ground around 1770. Chroniclers Camilo Pardo Umantildea and Luis Emiro Valencia affirm that he joined the Comuneros revolutionaries in the town of Guumlepsa on their march toward Santa Fe. Don Ambrosio was a man of the people’s heart, made of their brown clay, their dreams and their anxieties. In front was the advance of the great captain Jose Antonio Galn. Behind, the main body of the troops arrived with Captain Francisco Berbeo and at the end of the expedition, surrounded by his own, the one who was going to be proclaimed King of Colombia, Lord of Bogot and Prince of Chia, instead of the Spanish Monarch and his Viceroy. Who is this Pisco? No one but the last Zipa of Bacat would say the Comuneros in the inner gutter of the Viceroyship’s Capital. The same would the high ranking Commissioner Lords of the Government of Santa Fe de Bogot ask. Ambrosio Pisco arrived in Nemocon and after being proclaimed with the titles mentioned above, declared openly the expressed disregard of the Spanish authority. He abolished all the taxes and gave the Indians property of the Nemocon salt mines. At the beginning of the exercise of his autonomous and independent sovereignty, he proclaimed his laws, commands and ordinances according to the need of the revolutionary hour. First, he formalized a pact with the Comuneros, minted his own gold money, named his secretaries and imperial vassals, etc. But, before such independent and patriotic enterprise would take root, Berbeo and his followers signed the surrender of their troops in Zipaquir behind Galn’s back, and left Pisco as “a king of mockery”. But he was not considered as such by the Viceroyship authorities, because they respected his noble investitures among the Indians and permitted him to live the rest of his days in tranquility in the Tenjo and Tabio lands, where he continued to be lord of the will, dreams and anxieties of his vassals in a sane republican peace. Ambrosio Pisco’s rebellious gest against the Spanish Crown can be considered among the great episodes of our history which has constituted symbols of liberty in Indian America. “The great Indian names like Cuauhtemoc of Mexico, Caupolicn of Chile, Tupac Amaru, the extraordinary Inca of Peru, Hatuey of Cuba, Guayban of Puerto Rico, Urraca of Panama can say that they were the leaders who never gave up, as Ambrosio Pisco, the last Zipa of Bacat did” states Luis Emiro Valencia in Huellas Historicas .
The Pisco phenomenon, so criollo, so authentic from the heart of the pure national race, unknown, is worth more than many with less transcendency. What happened in 1810 was not the autochthonous Colombian gest, but the protest of the Spaniards’ son in our country. Carlos Martinez Silva is correct when he comments on Manuel Bricentildes’ book which appeared in Bogot in 1881. “The capitulations of Zipaquir are worth more to us as a basis of the representative system than The Rights of Man and of the Citizen translated and printed by Don Antonio Narintilde”. The Rights of Man and of the Citizen were carved in stone at the entrance of the University of America in Bogot in the act attended by President Lleras Restrepo in October 1967, in which no mention was made of the precursor Pedro Fermin de Vargas y Sarmiento who was afrmed of being the true translator, because he really knew French. Narintilde was the printer and both suffered the consequences of their subversive act. Article 11 of the famous Universal Declaration guarantees the free expression of thought and the freedom to write books and manuscripts according to the law. About the glorious ephemeris of July 20, 1810, it is important to bring up related opinions and judgment of historical character which at the end are being dogmatically consecrated by “Law or by decree”. A letter dated in San Gil on January 13, 1841, and sent by the Grand General Toms Cipriano de Mosquera to the Mayor of Coromoro answered an invitation to celebrate the 20th. of July there. The unpublished letter states: “Mr. Municipal Chief: To answer your kind letter, I must tell you, that I have never recognized, as a magistrate, as a public or private man, the national ephemeris or revolutionary act taken place in Bogot on July 20, 1810. If the first pronouncement made in the ancient Nuevo Reino de Granada has to be celebrated as a memorable ephemeris, it corresponds to the one taken place in Quito in 1809. But if we limit to what is the territory of Colombia today, the deposition of the Governor of Cartagena, Brigadier Montes, and the establishment of a provisionary government in that strong plaza on May 22, 1810, which had great political influence in the entire viceroyship, and was followed by Pamplona on July 4, 1810 and by Socorro on July 10, 1810, should be celebrated. The Legislature of the State of Cartagena was the first one with the character of public representation and ofcially proclaimed the independence from Spain on November 11, 1811. Mr. Municipal Chief, the public men who live and belong to the founders of the Republic must rectify the facts which we have witnessed so that history cannot be adulterated. Thus, I will conclude manifesting that I will not contribute to celebrate a holiday which does not commemorate the main event of our political generation or our independence. T. C. de Mosquera”.