Arauco war

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The Arauco War ( Spanish Guerra de Arauco ) is the term used to describe the armed conflict between the indigenous South American Mapuche people (formerly called Araucans together with other peoples of the region ) and the Spanish conquerors in the south of what is now Chile . The term Guerra de Arauco serves as a generic term for a chain of military conflicts interrupted by periods of relative peace, which lasted from the beginning of the colonization of Chile until the 18th century. The war prevented Spanish colonization of the southern half of the country.

prehistory

1546 met Spanish conquistadors under Pedro de Valdivia on the river Bío Bío first time to the Mapuche that prevented the colonizers initially successful in building a fortress. It was not until 1550 that the Spaniards succeeded in founding the city of Concepción .

course

The Mapuche then decided to fight and in autumn 1553 there was the first large uprising of the indigenous people. In the Battle of Tucapel, the Mapuche, under the command of their war chief ( Toqui ) Lautaro, routed the Spanish soldiers stationed in the forts of Arauco and Tucapel and killed Pedro de Valdivia.

In the following years they destroyed a number of bases in several waves of attack, including the fortress Arauco and the fortified city of Concepción, but were then defeated by Francisco de Villagra in a surprise attack on the march to Santiago de Chile , in which Lautaro was also killed came. García Hurtado de Mendoza undertook a new campaign to the south in 1557, which in turn led to a loss-making defeat at the Battle of Millapoa. Arauco could, however, be occupied again. It was not taken by the Mapuche until a later uprising in 1723. Lautaro's successor Caupolicán was cruelly killed by the Spaniards in 1558 and served the Spanish writer Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga in 1569 as a model for his verse novel La Araucana ("The Araucanian"). In the period that followed, the Indians destroyed most of the settlements founded by settlers in the south of the country, thus preventing further colonization of Chile.

Another major uprising broke out between 1598 and 1604 after the Huilliche , a southern Mapuche tribe, defeated the Spanish troops at the Battle of Curalaba in 1598. The Spanish governor of Chile, Martín García Óñez de Loyola , was also killed. The Spanish administration in southern Chile collapsed and was only able to stay in Valdivia and on the island of Chiloé . A standing Spanish army was stationed in Chile as the only South American colony from 1601 onwards.

These Mapuche victories were the prelude to a long and bitter resistance struggle against the European colonizers, which was by and large victorious. From the Mapuche's point of view, it was initially a defensive war that later became a social rebellion. From the perspective of the Spaniards, it was the first and only major defeat in the conquest and colonization of Hispanic America . It was a costly war that was unpopular both overseas and in Spain , and the colony of Chile temporarily earned the name "Spanish Cemetery". The chronicler of the Kingdom of Chile Pedro Mariño de Lobera (1528–1594) describes in his work Crónica del Reino de Chile the battles with the Mapuche from the perspective of the conquerors.

End and consequences

The persistent resistance of the indigenous people forced the Spaniards to recognize an independent Mapuche nation in the Treaty of Quillín in 1641. In it, the Bío-Bío river was set as the border and the Mapuche people were granted sovereignty, a process unique in the history of indigenous peoples in South America. Nevertheless, the conflict flared up again and again in the following decades and practically dragged on until Chile became independent from Spain . Since many South Chilean Indian groups in the Guerra a Muerte (1819-1832) had fought on the side of the Spanish royalists against the new republic, they were unable to integrate into the new state and the conflict continued seamlessly against the now independent Chile. In the Indian Wars from 1860 to 1881, the Mapuche area was forcibly incorporated into Chile, the country was settled with immigrants and the Mapuche were concentrated in reservations. In 1934, the last major uprising in Mapuche failed near Ranquil.

literature

  • Ricardo E. Latcham: The Art of War of the Araucanos. Chile's natives against the Conquista (= Junius Collection # 3). Junius-Verlag, Hamburg 1988, ISBN 3-88506-403-0 .