Sep 4, 2020 |
Steven Schwartz, PhD Candidate, Anthropology
In the arid peninsula of La Guajira, along Colombia’s Caribbean coast, wind energy is experiencing an unprecedented boom. Since the early 2010s, over a dozen corporations have been in the process of licensing up to 57 wind farms, valued collectively at over US$6 billion (González Posso and Barney 2019, 18, 28). In the coming years, thousands of turbines are expected to appear in the constitutionally protected territory of the Wayúu—the largest indigenous people in Colombia and Venezuela. The strong and steady trade winds that traverse this indigenous land are capable of fulfilling Colombia’s national electricity demand (UPME 2015). During 2018–2019, I conducted ethnographic research among Wayúu communities and wind energy corporations venturing in La Guajira to learn how low-carbon energy regimes are reshaping people’s everyday lives, economic horizons, and imagined futures.
Fig 1. Department of La Guajira, Colombia. Source: Wikimedia Commons
One overlooked aspect of the renewable energy boom is the dozens of vehicles that keep the flow of workers, goods, and equipment for current and future wind farms. The cars, driven almost exclusively by men, are critical for visiting prospective Wayúu hosts, carrying out community workshops and consultation meetings, and marking points on the GPS for future maps. The preferred vehicles are Toyota SUVs—4Runners and Fortuners—which are viewed as capable of navigating the rugged, unpaved, and heavily eroded roads of the rural peninsula without breaking down. Their air-conditioned and musicalized interiors (with non-stop Vallenato tunes) insulate staff workers from the extreme heat, the dusty wind gusts, and the bodily pain of long and bumpy rides. The nascent wind energy economy is intimately dependent on these cars: they are “unlikely nonhuman collaborators in the development of renewable energy” (Howe 2019, 74).
Toyotas embody the promise of prosperity, development, and the good life that is commonly attached to wind energy in Colombia. In fact, owning and driving a car for a wind energy company is a key source of income for many Wayúu and non-indigenous guajiros (as rental fees can go as high as US$135 per day). However, for NGOs, journalists, and indigenous leaders that are skeptical of the wind energy boom, the cars portend a wave of conflicts and territorial dislocations: they are a fossil-fuel technology aiding a novel form of energy extraction with potentially violent effects.
The extractive imaginary surrounding Toyota SUVs was vividly captured in a newspaper ad I came across by chance while reviewing old editions of Wayuunaiki—a bilingual monthly newspaper published in Venezuela aimed at a Wayúu readership. The ad, published in the early 2000s, had an image of a Toyota 4Runner and the phrase: “How far would Christopher Columbus have gone if he had had a Toyota? Till the end of the world, because Toyota is the most comfortable and resistant vehicle on the market.” A few weeks later, I heard the postcolonial version of this ad on a morning radio show broadcast from Riohacha, where Christopher Columbus had been replaced by Simón Bolívar—who led Colombia’s independence from Spanish rule in the early nineteenth century. Both iterations capture the ambivalent nature of these cars: while they crystallize rousing economic possibilities, they also evoke foreign and colonial actors that have arrived to capture a natural resource.
Fig. 2. Toyota Ad. Source: Wayuunaiki.
Yet, the Toyotas moving across the peninsula have another layer of ambiguity surrounding their identity. About 70 percent of all cars in La Guajira are Venezuelan (Benjumea Brito 2006), which is visible in their license plates—distinguishable by their white background and blue letters, the Venezuelan flag, and the Venezuelan states from which they originate. Most, if not all, of these cars also have a dark past: they were either stolen in Venezuela, or fraudulently reported as stolen to insurance companies, and then resold in the Colombian black market. The appeal of these vehicles is mainly their price. They can cost between 10 and 30 percent of the market price of a Colombian car (thereby making cars with Colombian license plates a sign of distinction). For this reason, the Colombian Guajira is filled with all kinds of Venezuelan vehicles, from motorcycles and old Ford-350 pick-up trucks to Toyota 4Runners and Fortuners.
Fig. 3. A Venezuelan Fortuner on the side of the road from Uribia to the Upper Guajira.
Most of these cars live relatively undisturbed due to a peculiar legal exception. Per numerous regional decrees, starting in 2003, these vehicles can go through a bureaucratic process—called interning or internación—after which they can move around legally, but only within the department of La Guajira. If they leave for the interior of Colombia, the cars will be detained. Ironically, they cannot circulate in Venezuela either, since owners fear that if they cross the border the police can easily confiscate the cars (since they remain reported as stolen). Neither fully Venezuelan nor Colombian. These are authentically guajiro cars that occupy a liminal space.
Since the 2000s, state governments in La Guajira have periodically attempted to legalize all Venezuelan cars, through the interning processes, yet new cars keep arriving. At several times in the past, they have also announced measures to eliminate their legal immunity to curtail the binational black market of stolen vehicles. Yet, these actions have been temporary and have almost always been met by protests (e.g., El Tiempo 1993, 1995). Interned cars are such an essential part of the social fabric of La Guajira that blocking their movements disrupts the entire region: it keeps children from going to school, people from going to work or to the doctor, tourists from reaching hostels, and kin and friends from visiting each other. Mobility in La Guajira is deeply intertwined with Venezuelan cars.
Interned cars are emblematic of the binational dynamics that have come to define La Guajira. They reflect the long and rich history of illicit flows that flourished since colonial times, from the smuggling of pearls and cattle to the Caribbean in the eighteenth century (Polo Acuña 2012) to the recent bonanza of marijuana (Britto 2020) and gasoline (Orsini Aarón 2007). The cars are both licit and somewhat illegal, periodically persecuted by state regulatory agencies, and yet a pillar of people’s mobility and social life. These cars also disclose the lurking and unexpected presence of Venezuela’s petro-state in fueling Colombia’s transition to a low-carbon energy future. In fact, most of them run on subsidized Venezuelan gasoline that has been smuggled across the border and sold in small plastic containers (see Fig 4). Subsidized Venezuelan gasoline provides up to 90 percent of the demand in the Colombian Guajira, powering many of the vehicles used to license, assemble, and maintain wind farms. Together, Venezuelan cars and gasoline demonstrate the “dim line between fossil-fueled modes of modernity and non-carbon-based forms of power” (Howe 2019, 75). They also suggest that Colombian wind farms are, perhaps inadvertently, a binational undertaking.
Fig. 4. Venezuelan Gasoline sold in Coca-Cola containers (called pimpinas) at the Jepirachi Wind Farm of Empresas Públicas de Medellín. Source: Photo by author.
References
Benjumea Brito, Paola, “En La Guajira 7 de cada 10 carros son robados,” El Tiempo, April 6, 2006, https://www.eltiempo.com/archivo/documento/MAM-1979573.
Britto, Lina. 2020. Marijuana Boom: The Rise and Fall of Colombia’s First Drug Paradise. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
El Tiempo, “Controlarán carros venezolanos,” September 23, 1993, https://www.eltiempo.com/archivo/documento/MAM-227487.
El Tiempo, “Dueños de vehículos venezolanos tomaron ayer las calles de Maicao,” May 26, 1995, https://www.eltiempo.com/archivo/documento/MAM-333021.
González Posso, Camilo, and Joanna Barney. 2019. El viento del este llega con revoluciones. Multinacionales y transición con energía eólica en territorio Wayúu. Bogotá: Instituto de Estudios para el Desarrollo y la Paz.
Howe, Cymene. 2019. Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Orsini Aarón, Giangina. 2007. Poligamia y contrabando. Nociones de legalidad y legitimidad en la frontera guajira siglo XX. Bogotá: Universidad de Los Andes.
Polo Acuña, José Trinidad. 2012. Indígenas, poderes y mediaciones en la Guajira en la transición de la colonia a la república. Bogotá: Universidad de Los Andes.
Unidad de Planeación Minero Energética. 2015. Plan energético nacional Colombia: ideario energético 2050. Bogotá: Unidad de Planeación Minero Energética.
Jan 9, 2019 |
Jack Mensik, MA Student, LACS
“This is the water!” Elena exclaimed. She scurried back to the living room from the kitchen and excitedly set the glass down on the table in front of me.
“Wow, it looks pretty clean,” I responded. I was not exaggerating. Specks of distant sunlight shimmered in the translucent water, whose unblemished appearance belied the fact that it had been collected from rainfall in a city notorious for its air pollution. For the past few years, Elena and her husband, Antonio, have relied on a household rainwater harvesting system to meet a substantial portion of their family’s water needs. Isla Urbana, an organization dedicated to the proliferation of rainwater harvesting in Mexico City, designed and installed this system, which captures water from Elena and Antonio’s roof, passes it through a series of filters, and stores it in a 5000-liter plastic cistern in their backyard. In their kitchen, another set of filters purifies the water to a quality suitable for drinking. They’ve done tests, Elena told me, and the quality is consistently excellent.
Figure 1. A household rainwater harvesting system that serves as an important source of clean water for residents of Mexico City’s periphery.
In truth, the clean water contained in the glass offers Elena and Antonio more than just good health. It affords them the possibility for a stable livelihood amidst circumstances in which they enjoy only marginal access to the rights and privileges promised to citizens of North America’s largest city. Reliance on the rain has meant that the family is no longer at the mercy of a government that is unsure of whether their household is deserving of piped water service. Yet, as Elena beamed with pride over the immaculate glass, I also wondered whether this newfound stability would make their otherwise rightless status more tolerable. After all, why would the family bother to seek legal recognition from government authorities if a public service like water was no longer urgently needed?
Elena and Antonio’s lack of formal land tenure explains how they discovered rainwater harvesting, and why they are so enthusiastic about it. The family’s home sits in a rolling mountain valley on the southern periphery of Mexico City within the city’s “ecological zone”, a conservation area in which human habitation is prohibited. Elena, Antonio, and their young children settled the unoccupied piece of land without legal sanction in the early 2010s. The growing family had become too big for their small house in San Gregorio Atlapulco, an urbanized area located a few miles away in the borough of Xochimilco. They had to build a home from scratch on the mountainside, but they found relief from the cramped conditions in which they had been living. Yet, because they had illegally occupied their land, they were ineligible for almost all government services. Elena and Antonio felt the absence of piped water most acutely. They narrowly missed an opportunity to enroll in a municipal program that would have offered them a monthly delivery from water trucks (locally known as pipas) at a subsidized cost. Meanwhile, the full cost of a monthly pipa delivery was more than they could afford on a regular basis. So, they would make trips down to a pump in San Gregorio, fill up a half-dozen or so 19-liter jugs with water, and either hire a taxi to bring them home or haul the jugs back uphill themselves in a cart. It was tiresome work, but unless the city government redesignated their community’s land tenure status as part of the “urban zone”, rather than the “ecological zone”, avenues for improvement remained limited.
Figure 2. An example of a pipa, or water tanker truck, that delivers water to many of Mexico City’s residents.
Elena and Antonio’s decision to seek a better life on Mexico City’s geographic and legal periphery repeats a logic that has been commonplace in the city for nearly a century. Since the end of the Mexican Revolution in 1917, inner-city residents have looked to the city’s periphery as a place where single-family home ownership could be realized, far from predatory landlords, burdensome rents, and squalid living conditions. Meanwhile, since the end of the Second World War, informal settlements on the periphery have also absorbed influxes of rural migrants seeking economic opportunities in the national capital. Over time, many informal communities have received legal recognition from the state, and have been integrated into the city through the extension of public services. These patterns of migration, settlement, and eventual legalization have played a key role in the Mexico City’s rapid expansion from a contained city of 369,000 in 1900 to a sprawling megalopolis of over 20 million today.[1]
Yet, city and municipal governments are often hesitant to recognize informal settlements. In decades past, officials marshaled concerns about sanitation as a justification. Today, environmental considerations, specifically those surrounding water, occupy a central role in government discourse. The vast majority of the “ecological zone” occupies territory in the southern portion of Mexico City comprised of rural towns, farms, and mountain forest. The area’s vegetation plays a vital role in absorbing rainfall and recharging the subterranean aquifer upon which the metropolis depends for its water supply. Authorities are concerned that unrestricted settlement will lead to urban sprawl and loss of this important green space. [2] These apprehensions are justified, as the future of Mexico City’s water supply looks bleak. Decades of intensive extraction to quench the city’s thirst, coupled with miles of paved surfaces that prevent replenishment, have severely diminished water levels in the aquifer. In fact, this drop has caused parts of Mexico City to physically subside—the sight of uneven streets or buildings tilted at alarming angles are fairly common. Aqueducts that supplement the city with water from neighboring states are inefficient and costly.[3] Indeed, Mexico City is running out of water, and years of unsustainable growth have threatened the city’s survival.
Figure 3. The “ecological zone” found prominently in southern Mexico City in which vegetation plays a vital role in absorbing rainfall and recharging the subterranean aquifer.
However, the city’s vigilance over the aquifer also means that residents living in hundreds of informal settlements within the “ecological zone” are unlikely to receive the adjusted land tenure that will be necessary for basic improvements in water services and infrastructure. “It puts us in a dilemma,” one municipal official told me, “because on one hand, [water] is a right that everyone has. But by beginning to recognize these irregular communities, then what becomes of the conservation of natural land? Yes, [water] is a right, we cannot deny it. But also, there are certain limits that we cannot exceed through our actions.”[4]
Isla Urbana’s rainwater harvesting systems offer one solution to this dilemma, as the contraptions can expand water access without placing additional stress on the aquifer. “Rainwater harvesting gives you a tool that you can select exactly the houses or neighborhoods that are most problematic, or for any reason the city has failed to supply adequately,” explained the organization’s founder, Enrique Lomnitz. If these water stressed areas are supplemented with rainwater, he reasoned, it would reduce the burden on Mexico City’s water supply and infrastructure.[5]
Most of Isla Urbana’s work consists of government-sponsored programs, in which they install rainwater harvesting systems in formally recognized communities where water infrastructure performs poorly. Yet, through private donations, Isla Urbana is also able to service informal communities, many of which are in the “ecological zone.”[6] After connecting with Isla Urbana through mutual acquaintances, Elena and Antonio rounded up enough interested neighbors to begin a project of their own. The couple had to pay 3050 pesos (about $150 US dollars) to cover part of the cost of their own system, but they began harvesting rain shortly after its installation.
So far, Elena and Antonio are thrilled with the results. During Mexico City’s rainy season, roughly between June and October, powerful rains fill their cistern up with water that lasts into the dry season, meaning they save money they spent on pipas and time they spent on trips to the water pump. In the coming years, the couple hopes to expand their storage capacity so that their supply will last even longer. “To this day, we don’t suffer from water,” Antonio declared, “The system is very good and it has helped us a lot.”[7]
While rainwater harvesting has brought greater stability and comfort, the couple still expressed a desire for legal land tenure and improved infrastructure. They would like to see some form of piped water service, or at least more pipa trucks. “We all have rights to these things,” Elena argued, “Just as we have a right to light, we have a right to water. We have rights to urban services. And just because we live up here doesn’t mean we have no rights. We have the same rights as those who live down [in the city].”[8]
I sensed a gap, however, between Elena and Antonio’s belief that they had these rights and their ability to live without them. Previously, I had spoken with numerous residents of formally recognized communities, most of whom saw rainwater harvesting as more of a temporary fix that could never truly substitute for efficient piped water service. Elena and Antonio, on the other hand, seemed committed to rainwater harvesting for the long-term and relatively unfazed by the improbability of infrastructural improvement in their community. When I asked them why, they stated that they were concerned about the dwindling aquifer, and felt that rainwater harvesting and water conservation were essential steps for a better future. Even if their land tenure changed and services arrived, they said, they would continue to harvest rainwater. “We have [rainwater harvesting], it has helped us a ton,” Elena explained, “But yes, if piped water came, then that too. But also…as we said before we have to be conscious, right? Although we have piped water, save it, right? Take care of it.”[9]
Residents of other informal settlements echoed Elena and Antonio’s enthusiasm for rainwater harvesting, as well as their ambivalence toward legal land tenure and improved service. “I am doing very well with rainwater harvesting. I’d neither ask nor demand much else,” one woman told me, “If they come to tell us, ‘Guess what? They’re going to install pipes,’ I’d say, ‘Well, That’s fine. That’s good, isn’t it?’ But if not, then no. Because…with the rainwater harvesting system, well, the truth is that I’m fine.”[10]
Others expressed a similar dedication to rainwater harvesting on account of environmental concerns. “Sure, I would like to see it regularized,” one man said, “but I will keep collecting rainwater. Yes, I would keep doing it. Why? Because this way I am helping out the environment a bit, I’d say. Because sometimes you talk and you don’t do much…”[11]
These comments reveal the extent to which Mexico City’s water crisis is not simply an environmental issue, but cuts to the core of the city’s longstanding struggle with social inequality. Rainwater harvesting appears to do an excellent job of meeting informal residents’ water needs, and provides them with a greater sense of security that they can remain in their homes for the immediate future. Yet, the systems do not resolve critical legal issues surrounding land tenure in informal settlements that would establish permanent residence. Residents’ ambivalence toward resolving these issues may simply reflect doubt that their day of recognition will ever come. Their passion for rainwater harvesting is inspiring, but laden with resignation toward a tolerable, but rightless, livelihood on the periphery.
Both authorities and residents of Mexico City care deeply about their city’s environmental future. However, reaching a sustainable solution to an increasingly dire water crisis will require reckoning with difficult questions about what it means to be a full citizen of Mexico City and who can acquire this status. Until then, every raindrop that falls in the Valley of Mexico will be worth saving.
[1] Matthew Vitz, City on a Lake: Urban Political Ecology and the Growth of Mexico City (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 4, 89-92; Thomas Benjamin, “Rebuilding the Nation,” in The Oxford History of Mexico, ed. William H. Beezley and Michael C. Meyer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 470; Wayne Cornelius, Politics and the Migrant Poor in Mexico City (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975), 16-17, 27-28.
[2] Jill Wigle, “The ‘Graying’ of ‘Green’ Zones: Spatial Governance and Irregular Settlement in Xochimilco, Mexico City: Irregular Settlement in Xochimilco, Mexico City,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38, no. 2 (March 2014): 573–89, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12019.
[3] Barkin, David. 2004. “Mexico City’s Water Crisis.” NACLA Report on the Americas 38, no. 1: 24-28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10714839.2004.11722401; Connolly, Patricia. 1999. “Mexico City: Our Common Future?” Environment and Urbanization 11, no. 1 (April): 53-78. https://doi.org/10.1177/095624789901100116; Kahn, Carrie. “Mexico City Goes Days Without Water During Maintenance Shutdown.” NPR.Org. Accessed November 10, 2018. https://www.npr.org/2018/10/31/662786981/mexico-city-goes-days-without-water-during-maintenance-shutdown.
[4] Interview, August 27, 2018.
[5] Interview, August 14, 2018.
[6] Interview, August 14, 2018.
[7] Interview, August 24, 2018.
[8] Interview, August 24, 2018.
[9] Interview, August 24, 2018.
[10] Interview, August 22, 2018.
[11] Interview, August 15, 2018.
Feb 28, 2018 |
Fidel J. Tavárez, Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar, History
The eighteenth century was an age of imperial reform throughout the Atlantic world but especially in the Spanish Empire. Indeed, during this period, Spanish ministers made a concerted effort to transform Spain’s far-flung composite monarchy into a modern commercial empire capable of competing with Britain and France. Where did this interest in creating a Spanish commercial empire come from? What were its intellectual origins? These are some of the central questions that my research addresses and that I would like to explore very briefly in the paragraphs that follow.
I will begin by defining what I mean by “modern commercial empire.” The term does not simply refer to an empire that engaged in trade. What empire hasn’t? Rather, a modern commercial empire was a kind of polity that first took shape at the turn of the eighteenth century, when Enlightenment statesmen began to distinguish “empires of conquest,” which were almost exclusively focused on hoarding silver, from modern “empires of commerce,” which focused on promoting economic improvement through labor and trade. While British and French thinkers initially developed this modern ideology of empire, it was Spain that carried out the largest experiment of the eighteenth century with modern commercial imperialism.
In spite of its far-reaching nature, this new vision of empire had inauspicious beginnings in Spanish administrative circles. Its origins are to be found in the 1740s, when a manuscript titled Nuevo sistema de gobierno económico para la América circulated in the court among Spain’s most important statesmen. Indeed, the Nuevo sistema contained a basic blueprint of reform, which ministers of the second half of the century followed almost to the letter. It is surprising, to say the least, that few historians have attempted to reconstruct the intellectual context in which this relatively unpretentious but essential manuscript was written.
To understand the intellectual context that gave birth to the Nuevo sistema, it is necessary to provide a brief inventory of the most important versions of the text. While the first printed version of the Nuevo sistema dates to 1789, the most important manuscript versions allegedly date to 1743. There are at least two known versions of this 1743 manuscript, one at the Biblioteca Nacional de España and another at the Biblioteca del Palacio Real in Madrid. Additionally, portions of the Nuevo sistema appeared in the second half of Bernardo Ward’s Proyecto económico. There is a manuscript version of Ward’s Proyecto at the Biblioteca del Palacio Real, and a printed version appeared in 1779.
Scholars have assumed that the author of the Nuevo sistema was José del Campillo y Cossío, who is listed as the author in the manuscript versions of 1743. Given Campillo’s reputation as a respectable, hardworking, and learned minister, the attribution is not entirely unwarranted. However, upon close inspection, Campillo’s authorship becomes increasingly implausible. In particular, a passage within the Nuevo sistema alludes to a report written by Antonio de Ulloa, which likely refers to the celebrated Noticias secretas. This report was written in 1747 or 1748, which means that the Nuevo sistema could not have been written in 1743 and consequently that Campillo could not have written the text, especially considering that he had died in 1743.
The author of the Nuevo sistema probably was Melchor Rafael de Macanaz, a prolific writer and adviser to Philip V, the king of Spain until 1746. Among other reasons, Macanaz’s authorship can be proven by the existence of two manuscripts signed by the aforementioned adviser: 1) Discurso sobre la America española, held at the Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid, and 2) Nuevo sixtema para el perfecto gobierno de la América, which currently sits in the Instituto Valencia de Don Juan in Madrid. Both texts coincide almost to the letter with the manuscripts signed by Campillo. It is likely that Macanaz wrote the text earlier in century and continued to update it until the late 1740s. At that point, someone else, whose identity we may never recover, circulated the text as if Campillo were its author.
The fact that Macanaz was the original author of the Nuevo sistema provides a rich context from which to reconstruct the main ideas of the text. Although Macanaz was a faithful adviser to Philip V, he lived in exile in France from 1715 until 1748. In France, he experienced firsthand what contemporaries called the “John Law system,” an innovative scheme of administrative reform for the French Monarchy designed by the Scottish projector John Law. Law’s system included a national bank, a credit-based circulating currency, and a commercial company. Although Macanaz did not agree with everything the Scottish projector proposed, the fact that he used the concept of a “new system” clearly shows that the experience in France inspired him to design a project for a Spanish commercial empire. The notion of a “new system” allowed him to rethink the very foundations of the Spanish Monarchy, while portraying the king as a political engineer and his ministers as scientific advisers.
The key idea proposed in the Nuevo sistema was that Spain had to abandon the “spirit of conquest,” associated with the pursuit of mines and territories in Spanish America, and adopt the “spirit of trade and industry,” which was concerned with stimulating economic improvement by creating synergy between the colonies and the metropole. The reason behind this proposal was simple. “Real wealth,” the Nuevo sistema suggested, “consists in the products of the land and the industry of men,” not in hoarding bullion.[1] And the most efficient way to stimulate work was to promote commerce, “for it [commerce] revitalizes agriculture, the arts, factories and the manufactures of industry.”[2] Macanaz had a specific kind of trade in mind: comercio libre (free trade within the bounds of the empire). In fact, he continued, it was important “to think of liberty as the soul of commerce, without which it [commerce] could not prosper nor live.”[3] Commercial liberty, he concluded, “is the soul of all the improvements which we argued will occur in Spain’s agriculture, manufactures and other significant matters.”[4]
Macanaz’s new system had many more dimensions, among which we can cite the institution of a new administrative apparatus for the New World. However, for our purposes here, we should keep in mind a few of the tenets of commercial empire that Macanaz put forward in the 1740s: 1) that to become powerful Spain had to acquire markets, not bullion, 2) that Spain had an abundant source of markets in the colonies, and 3) that the best way to control colonial markets was to implement comercio libre between the metropole and the colonies. According to Macanaz, what would come about as a result of instituting comercio libre was a highly integrated imperial economic system in which the colonies and the metropole worked in concert to stimulate economic growth. This new vision of empire is what subsequent ministers had in mind when they issued and implemented decrees or charters of comercio libre in 1765, 1778, and 1789. As an exiled intellectual who lived in France during the first half of the eighteenth century, little could Macanaz have suspected that his advice paper, the Nuevo sistema, would transform the political culture, the administrative system, and the economy of Spain’s vast empire for the rest of the century.
[1] José del Campillo y Cossío, Nuevo sistema de gobierno económico para la América (Mérida, Venezuela: Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Humanidades y Educación, 1971 [1789]), p. 209.
[2] Ibid., p. 95.
[3] Ibid., p. 94.
[4] Ibid., p. 146.
