Encomienda - Abolition of The Encomienda

Abolition of The Encomienda

The downfall of the encomienda system began as early as 1510, when Dominican missionaries began protesting the abuse of the native people by Spanish colonists. A sharp encounter between an encomiendero named Valenzuela and a local Cacique named Enriquillo represents the relationship between the natives and the enforcers of the system. By 1538, Emperor Charles V realized the seriousness of the Taíno revolt and compelled policy changes over the labor of the Indians. Conceding to Las Casas's viewpoint, the peace treaty between the Taínos and the audiencia was eventually disrupted in four to five years. The crown also made two failed attempts to end the abuses of the encomienda system, through the Law of Burgos and the New Law of the Indies. Furthermore, these laws were indeed beneficial to the authorities.

The priest of Hispaniola and former encomendero, Bartolomé de las Casas underwent a profound conversion after seeing the abuse of the native people. He dedicated his life to writing and lobbying to abolish the encomienda system which he thought systematically enslaved the native people of the New World. Las Casas participated in an important debate where he pushed for the enactment of New Laws and an end to the encomienda system. The Laws of Burgos (1512–13) and the New Law of the Indies (1542) failed in the face of colonial opposition and, in fact, the New Laws were postponed in the Viceroyalty of Peru. When Blasco Núñez Vela, the first viceroy of Peru, tried to enforce the New Laws, which provided for the gradual abolition of the encomienda, many of the Encomenderos were unwilling to comply with them and revolted against Núñez Vela.

Nevertheless, the encomienda was generally replaced by the repartimiento throughout Spanish America after mid-century.

The encomienda system was succeeded by the crown-managed repartimiento and the hacienda, or large landed estates, in which laborers were directly employed by the hacienda owners. Like the encomienda, the new repartimento did not include the attribution of land to anyone, only the allotment of native workers. But they were directly allotted to the Crown, who, through a local crown official, would assign them to work for settlers for a set period of time, usually several weeks. The repartimiento was an attempt "to reduce the abuses of forced labour." As the number of natives declined and mining activities were replaced by agricultural activities in the seventeenth century, the hacienda arose because land ownership became more profitable than acquisition of labor force.

The encomienda was strongly based on the encomendado's tribal identity. Mixed-race (Mestizo) individuals, for example, could not by law be subjected to the encomienda. This moved many Amerindians to deliberately seek to dilute their tribal identity and that of their descendants as a way for them to escape the service, by seeking intermarriage with people from different ethnicities, especially Spaniards or Creoles. In this way the encomienda somewhat weakened Amerindians' tribal identification and ethnicity, which in turn diminished the pool of available encomendados.