by Dwight Wayne Coop

True Peace is an odd name, one you might give to a new form of meditation but never to a province. Yet on any map of Guatemala you see not one but two departments with this name: Alta (Upper) and Baja (Lower) Verapaz. Before 1535 the region was called Tezulután, which in K’ekchi means “Land of War.”

Bartolomé de las Casas.
100 Personajes Históricos de
Guatemala, José Antonio Mobil,
Serviprensa Centroamericana.

The christening of the “Verapaces” coincided with their Christianizing; both transitions were wrought by a young lawyer who came to the New World initially as an adventurer. “Bartholomew of the Houses” is another odd name you hear if you are in Guatemala long enough. But who was he?

Bartolomé de las Casas was born in Seville in 1474. Throughout his childhood he was utterly unaware of the hemisphere where he would leave a mark that is still felt. Only when he turned 18 did Admiral Columbus make his first landfall.

With Columbus on his second voyage was Bartolo’s father, a merchant who returned with accounts of human-sacrificing civilizations and humming-winged birds so tiny that the Spaniards called them pájaros moscas. In 1502, Bartolo himself arrived in what is now the Dominican Republic as a planter and legal advisor to the governor of Hispañola Island.

Spanish imperialism was still confined to the shoreline of the Caribbean Basin; the spectacular mainland exploits of Cortez (1521) and Pizzaro (1532) were still a generation off. But as Spanish power grew, so did the plight of the indigenes they enslaved — and the sympathy of the first Spaniard to address this plight.

Las Casas’ conscience ignited a spiritual pilgrimage which in turn led to a series of New World firsts. In 1512, he became the first priest ordained in the Americas and, two years later, he was the first owner of an encomienda to yield possession of it and emancipate its population. (Encomiendas were vast royal land grants given to colonists; the people living on them became slaves.)

In 1515 Las Casas went to Spain and made the first ever appeal to a European monarch, in this case, King Ferdinand V, for the abolition of slavery. It would take over three centuries for the debate he launched to be won by Abraham Lincoln, Wilberforce and others. Ferdinand, medieval potentate that he was, would not brook abolition, but he sent Las Casas back to Hispañola as the indigenes’ official protector.

In this role, Las Casas became the first social engineer of the Americas, a century before Massachusetts Pilgrims formulated a liberal pact with their neighbors. Las Casas would have little success in his social experiments in the ensuing decades, since, although otherwise ahead of his time, he never suspected that European means could be pragmatically modified for his desired ends.

So it was that his model colony of indigenes on the coast of modern Venezuela (1520-21) flopped. Still, to the extent his cultural frame of reference allowed, he would learn enough to attempt later experiments in Guatemala, with lopsided success.

He began writing and, after entering the Dominican Order in 1522, spent six years chronicling the earliest account of Spain in the Americas, History of the Indies.

Las Casas would continue writing the story, more by his actions than with his pen. By 1531, the sanguinary conquistador Pedro de Alvarado had subdued the entire region save for the K’ekchi kingdom: Tezulután, Land of War. After three attempts, the Spaniards gave up. In 1535, Alvarado’s lieutenants sardonically invited the anti-slavery crusader, who had visited Guatemala several times, to try his luck in Tezulután.

Las Casas saw an opportunity every lesser man of his time missed: the K’ekchi, freed of the specter of invasion, might be more amenable to conversion. Within two years, he persuaded the viceroys, Gov. Maldonado and Bishop Marroquín (of Q100-bill fame) to decree that Tezulután could not be parceled into encomiendas and, further, that no Spaniard could enter the region without Las Casas’ permission.

Las Casas was by now 61, far beyond the life expectancy of his day, but gave no sign of slowing down. His evangelism strategy was another novel first: a poetic narrative in K’ekchi about the “Fall of Man in Genesis.” This was set to music and taught to four Mayan traders with commercial ties to Tezulután, who were sent in with scissors, mirrors, bells and other novelties — and the poem. They eventually arrived at the court of Rabinal city-state, where the prince and many of his subjects asked to be baptized.

It was no coincidence, then, that in that year (1537) Pope Paul III issued an apostolic brief recognizing the New World peoples as “true humans, eligible for conversion.” One of Las Casas’ close associates made the case personally before the Pontiff; Fray Bartolomé himself might have coauthored the brief.

He did not limit his lobbying to ecclesiastical authorities. In 1540, he appealed to Emperor Carlos V, grandson of King Ferdinand, and won a five-year extension of the ban on Spaniards in Tezulután. Since this was perfunctorily renewed for the entire colonial period (until 1821), Tezulután became and remained an autonomous enclave — the first “Indian reservation.” This extra protection from mestizaje (blood-mixing) and cultural erosion seen elsewhere abetted conversion and true peace, since the K’ekchi converted more voluntarily than did their neighbors.

Conversion of the Verapaces was not, and is not, anywhere near complete. The incompleteness is double-sensed: the inability of missionaries to reach everyone, and the syncretism that still characterizes the beliefs of so many individuals. This failure is at least partly rooted in Las Casas’ well intentioned social experimentation, notably the so-called reducciones.

These were villages or even towns formed of people drawn in, often under some compulsion, from the countryside. The idea was that Christianizing and administration would be streamlined by urbanizing people who were rurally orientated. Communal land was given to the reducciones, yet another first, in a system anticipating the eventuality of the Mexican revolution of 1910. The prince of Rabinal and other Las Casas allies bought into and backed the policy.

In the end, it did at least as much harm as good. Most of the people resisted the relocations which, after Las Casas’ final return to Spain in 1547, were pushed with reckless zeal by some of his successors. To prevent people from deserting the reducciones, priests often resorted to burning their rural homes. But many people did return; others returned only seasonally. This phenomenon is still seen in towns like San Pedro Carchá (Alta Verapaz), where some houses, albeit fewer each year, stand empty for some months each year.

Another policy dreamed up by Las Casas but never implemented because it depended on the success of the reducciones was daily religious instruction. The great irony is that the partial urbanization that Las Casas’ ideas required became a conduit not only for Catholicism but also pagan heritage. Even today, community councils in parts of the Verapaces, descendents of reducción councils, are places where certain “old beliefs” are transmitted from one generation to the next. One is that monkeys should not be hunted since they are, according to creation myth, elder brothers to humanity.

Yet history judges Las Casas kindly. His achievements, including many hemispherical firsts and even some universal ones, far outweigh his missteps. He did not retire to Spain until he was 73; even then he continued pleading for “his people,” notably through controversial writings that circulated among European intellectuals. Indeed, Las Casas was a principal Spanish proponent of the Enlightenment. In 1566, he died in Madrid, full of a quantity of years — 92 — almost unheard of in his day. His eulogizers expected him to pass to an afterlife of — what else? — true peace.

The Earthly True Peaces, renamed on his account, are among many optimistically named departments in Central America: Paraíso, Libertad, Unión, Progreso, among others. Alta Verapaz and Baja Verapaz have their problems. They were far from untouched by the Civil War of 1961-1996, but calling them by their names is not Orwellian doublespeak. The real Land of War was further west, while the Verapaces were spared their share of the worst violence. Some credit is owed to Bartolomé de las Casas, who delayed their subjection for so long that it never fully took place.