Guaicaipuro

The cave at San Corniel goes further back into the hill than anyone in Guareguare has cared to follow it. Old men in the mountains above Los Teques say it runs all the way through to La Victoria, or perhaps to the valleys of Aragua, and that somewhere along it stand barrels of gold that Guaicaipuro hid there four and a half centuries ago and never came back for. One man went in after it. The dark closed over him completely, the kind of dark that presses against the eyes, and out of it a voice with nobody attached to it told him to put the gold back. He put it back. The light returned and he found the mouth of the cave again.

None of that happened. Very little of what most Venezuelans could tell you about Guaicaipuro happened either, or at least nobody has ever been able to show that it did, and the distance between the man and the figure is the most interesting thing about him.

What survives of the man is a lawsuit. Two colonists of Santiago de León de Caracas went to court over the encomienda of the Indians of Guaraypuro, and the witnesses called to testify said they had belonged to it, that they were his kin, that they had lived in his village, that they had known him. That is the whole primary record. No other document of the period names him at all. From it the ethnohistorian Horacio Biord Castillo draws the one safe conclusion available: Guaicaipuro was a village headman, of the sort the Carib-speaking peoples of north-central Venezuela had in abundance.

Those peoples had no kings, and their chiefs did not give orders. A village of two or three extended families chose a head whose real work was keeping the peace inside it, advised by the older men. When something threatened several villages at once they picked one of those headmen as a war leader, and when the threat passed they unpicked him. Nobody in that arrangement could compel anybody. Everything ran on argument and consent, which makes the standard picture of Guaicaipuro, the supreme cacique commanding Naiguatá and Chacao and Paramaconi and Guaicamacuto the way a general commands regiments, an import from a different kind of society altogether.

That picture comes from one book. José de Oviedo y Baños published his Historia de la conquista y población de la Provincia de Venezuela in Madrid in 1723, a hundred and fifty-five years after the events, and he cites nothing. His ethnography of the region is oddly good, good enough that he was plainly working from something now lost, and Biord’s guess is a chronicle by a soldier and poet named Fernán Ulloa who was in Caracas in 1593. Whatever the source, Oviedo wrote the rest as epic. Diego de Losada comes over a rise and sees every ridge crowned with banners and feathers, more than ten thousand warriors under Guaicaipuro, drums beating and trumpets sounding as they offer him battle. Elsewhere the allied chiefs, finding Guaicaipuro absent from a council, read his absence as an omen and begin to come apart.

The narrative everyone repeats sits inside that book. The Spanish find gold in the streams of the Teques country and open workings there. Guaicaipuro drives them off. The governor sends Juan Rodríguez Suárez up to settle the highlands, and Rodríguez Suárez beats him in the field and withdraws, leaving miners and his own sons behind. Guaicaipuro comes back and kills all of them. Then he catches Rodríguez Suárez on the road to Valencia with six men around him, and kills him too. Tradition adds that he took the dead man’s sword and carried it for the rest of his life.

He was still holding a sword at the end, in Oviedo’s telling. Francisco de Infante, sent out from the new city of Caracas by Losada, was brought to the hut by guides who knew the country, and since the Spanish could not get in they set the palm thatch alight and waited. Smoke, then heat, then the door. Guaicaipuro came out and ran a soldier named Juan de Gámez through the arm so that the point came out at his shoulder, and shouted that they were cowards who lacked the courage to take him and used fire instead, that he was the Guaicaipuro they were looking for and had never feared their arrogant nation, and that since fortune had left him nothing to fight with they had better kill him and be free of the fear he had always caused them. Then he went into the swords. Twenty-two of his men died around him. The strangest detail in the whole account comes next: the Spaniards, having won, looked at the body and broke. They fled uphill in disorder until they reached Infante, collected themselves, and went back to the city.

Nobody knows what he looked like. Oviedo gives him a speech and no face, and every statue of him since is a guess. The one in Los Teques shows him with his daughter, which is not history at all but the other tradition, the one that grew in the hills where he supposedly lived.

In that tradition he is enormous. He carries stones uphill on his back, throws an iron bar from one mountain to the next, digs the cave through the hill with his own hands and stops up the mine so the Spanish will never find it. And he kills his daughter. The versions collected around Guareguare in 2003 disagree about why: because the Spanish took her hostage and she told them where he was hiding, or because she wanted to marry one of them and he came at her with an axe, or because he shut her in the cave and cursed her, and jaguars keep the entrance dangerous to this day. The gold in the cave is in bars, and in old coins, and it cannot be removed.

He also comes when he is called. In the cult of María Lionza he stands at the top of the whole structure with the goddess herself and the Negro Felipe, the three of them known as the tres potencias, the powers behind everything below. He belongs to the corte india, which several researchers think was the original and only court before the others budded off it. Mediums go into trance and he descends into them and speaks. On the twelfth of October, the day the country now keeps as the Day of Indigenous Resistance, pilgrims climb the mountains of Sorte and Quibayo through the night, and the initiated walk barefoot across a bed of burning coals. He was in that cult long before the state came looking for him.

The state came anyway. A canton was named for him in 1853, and the nineteenth-century schoolbooks made him the indigenous hero of Venezuela, his resistance read backwards as a first draft of independence. In 1992, as an answer to the coming celebrations of Columbus, the Senate resolved to move his remains to the National Pantheon, and in December 2001 the ceremony was finally held. There were no remains. The main motorway of Caracas carries his name, and a woman who worked in the government once told an anthropologist that Guaicaipuro appeared at the side of President Chávez, as his protector.

Every power attributed to him is a power somebody needed him to have. The eighteenth-century gentry wanted a worthy enemy, so Oviedo gave them one who could raise ten thousand men and put a victorious army to flight with his corpse. The nineteenth century wanted a founding patriot. The people of the Altos mirandinos wanted a giant with a treasure. The mediums want a spirit who will come down and talk. His weaknesses run along the same line. He could be tracked by neighbours who knew the paths, burned out of a building, and outnumbered in the dark, and none of that has ever been in dispute. The deeper limitation is that a figure with one lawsuit behind him cannot resist being filled, and he has been filled, repeatedly, by everyone who has wanted him.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Guaicaipuro?

Guaicaipuro was an indigenous chief in the mountains south of present-day Caracas during the Spanish conquest of central Venezuela, roughly between 1560 and 1568. He is remembered as the leader who united several peoples against the Spanish, and he is today the indigenous hero of Venezuela. The evidence for the epic version of him is much thinner than the fame suggests.

Is Guaicaipuro a real historical figure?

He was almost certainly a real person, but a much smaller one than the legend. The only primary document naming him is a colonial lawsuit over an encomienda, in which witnesses said they were his relatives or had lived in his village, which suggests he was a village headman. Everything else, including the great coalition and the battles, comes from José de Oviedo y Baños, writing in 1723 and citing no sources.

How did Guaicaipuro die?

According to Oviedo y Baños, Francisco de Infante was led by indigenous guides to Guaicaipuro’s hut and set fire to the palm-thatch roof to force him out. Guaicaipuro came through the door with a sword, wounded a soldier named Juan de Gámez through the arm, shouted that the Spanish were cowards who needed fire to beat him, and was cut down. Twenty-two of his men died with him.

What is Guaicaipuro’s role in the cult of María Lionza?

Guaicaipuro is one of the tres potencias, the three powers at the summit of the cult of María Lionza, alongside María Lionza herself and the Negro Felipe. He belongs to the corte india, the court of indigenous spirits, which researchers believe was the cult’s original court. Mediums in trance are possessed by him and speak in his voice.

Why are Guaicaipuro’s remains not in the National Pantheon?

His body was never found, so the 2001 transfer to the National Pantheon in Caracas was symbolic and the tomb is empty. The Venezuelan Senate had resolved on the move in 1992, as a counter-celebration to the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s voyage, and the ceremony was finally carried out in December 2001.

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Maria Lionza, Amalivaca, Makonaima (Makunaima), Kanaima, La Sayona, El Dorado, Mohan, Bochica, Bachué, Patasola, La Llorona, Viracocha