Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
far and wide for money, Spanish ministers chose to loot the wealthi-
est single institution in the Americas: the Catholic Church. For three
centuries, the various church investments had been amassing capital in
the colonies from bequests of money and real estate. Church authori-
ties rented out haciendas and town houses and lent their accumulated
liquid capital to landowners, taking mortgages at the rate of 5 percent
per annum. These massive mortgage holdings became the target of a
desperate Spanish wartime treasury. In 1804, the Crown ordered the
church to call in its loans and send the proceeds to Spain. Before this
order was finally suspended, in 1808, nearly all the colonies had suf-
fered this form of imperial decapitalization. Colonial blood ran hot over
this affair.
In the Río de la Plata, the collection of church assets illustrated well
the sort of bureaucratic-commercial advantages that many influential
Spaniards enjoyed. They assumed that public service and private profit
were not mutually exclusive. Through his connections in the royal
court, the Spanish-born merchant Ventura Miguel Marcó del Pont, for
example, received the imperial commission to collect the special war-
time taxes on church-held mortgages from Chile, Bolivia, and Mendoza.
He was to remit the proceeds to Spain. This tax commission enabled
Marcó del Pont to profit personally from the collection and transfer
of public monies, as he had the right to deduct his fees from the total
proceeds. Spain was raising unpopular taxes at the very moment that
the colonial economy was declining, giving rise to much resentment
from the colonists.
The collection proved successful, and Marcó del Pont soon came into
the possession of some 101,000 pesos in cash and an additional 20,000
pesos that had been paid in hides. However, wartime events soon were
to compound his profits when British warships and troops in the Río de
la Plata prevented Marcó from remitting the tax revenues to Spain.
The British Invasion
Another weakness of the empire was soon exposed in the Río de la
Plata. When British troops invaded Buenos Aires in 1806, Spain's colo-
nial defenses were shown to be vulnerable and her military officers
incompetent.
Great Britain had suffered from the same trade disruptions that
afflicted the Spanish Empire, and unsold goods piled up in the ware-
houses of Liverpool as Napoléon Bonaparte's armies closed off one
European market after another to British commerce. The interruptions
