How the Recta Provincia of Chiloé was tried and freed

A pamphlet printed in Santiago in 1908 ends the case of the warlocks of Chiloé with the judge’s sentence. Mateo Coñuecar, 70, got three years in prison and three others got 541 days; that, the pamphlet says, brought about “la desaparición de los demás brujos”.³¹⁰

The pamphlet does not mention what came next. The Court of Appeals of Concepción set the sentence aside and freed every one of the accused.²¹⁰

The sentence had been for illicit association, not for witchcraft.¹ It lists the society’s officers: a king and queen, presidents, intendants and commanders.¹¹ The cave and the creature in it appear in one defendant’s statement to the judge, and the creature looks different in the folklore book of 1914.⁸⁶⁷

An Intendant’s roundup

The roundup was the Intendant’s, not a court’s.¹⁴ Luis Martiniano Rodríguez had heard so many complaints of the brujos’ abuses, Ramón Espech wrote two years later, that he decided to root them out.¹⁵ On the model of the Jesuits’ expulsion in 1767, Espech says, the Intendant ordered that on one given day every brujo in the archipelago be rounded up and sent to Ancud with his herbs as evidence.¹⁵ Then, in Espech’s account, he shut himself in with them and convinced them one by one of the powerlessness of their institution, and kept for trial only those implicated in ordinary crimes.¹⁵

His decree of 7 April 1880 put “machis, brujos o hechiceros” on one list with military deserters.¹⁶ Anyone who hid either kind of man was to be arrested too, and all of them “deben ser preferidos para el servicio”, “must be given preference for the service”; the decree’s own opening lines are about men called up to military service.¹⁶ Catepillan sets the April arrests beside the war then under way with Bolivia and Peru.¹⁷

By May the Intendant was writing that the persecution had put the brujos to flight, and he asked each subdelegate for a monthly report on anyone who passed as a healer and on any brujo who came back.¹⁸¹⁹ He denied in print on 21 May that he had had healers flogged; the rumour was that he had taken them to a cliff, whipped them and told them to fly.²⁰

The counts of people caught up differ because they count different things. Catepillan says at least 54 were jailed.²¹ Rojas Flores says more than 80 had been put under investigation by 10 May, many of them released for lack of grounds.²² The prosecutor says about a hundred “figured” in the file.²³ Thirty-eight healers were freed by three orders in 1880, and the appeal court later approved those releases.²²

A killing in 1879

The pamphlet does not begin with the society. It begins with a killing in February 1879.²⁴ Cipriano Rain and Santiago Rain, two farmers, killed Andrés Netor on Caucahué island, and told the judge they believed Netor, one of the island’s chief brujos, was the cause of their illnesses.²⁴ The judge was the same Beytia who sentenced the society two years later.²⁵¹ He gave them 15 and 10 years in the penitentiary, and 100 lashes each.²⁵ The appeal court at Concepción confirmed it in June 1879, set both terms at 12 years and dropped the lashes.²⁵

No source we read says whether this killing set off the Intendant’s roundup.

What is left of the file

The original file, more than 260 folios under the title “Contra Mateo Coñuecar y otros por asociaciones ilícitas y envenenamientos”, is missing, apparently lost in a fire at the Ancud court, says Rojas Flores.²⁶ The pamphlet’s editors said in 1908 that it was in the court of letters of Ancud.²⁷

What exists is a copy of part of it. Ramón Espech copied a run of folios from the case against the brujos, and a shorter run from another, for Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna.¹⁵²⁸ Catepillan dates the copy to 1882.²⁸ The copy is in the Archivo Nacional, and Cipriano Osorio printed all of it in 1960.²⁹ He thinks a few declarations in the 1908 pamphlet were taken from the same copy.²⁹ Catepillan calls the surviving documentation precarious: the two sentences, some provincial press, orders from local authorities, and the Espech copy.³⁰

The pamphlet’s editors say they print the case “a fin de destruir esos cuentos de pura fantasía”.³¹ They describe the accused as ignorant and wicked families of wholly Indigenous descent, and close by saying warlocks will exist as long as there are superstitious Indigenous people and an uneducated lower class.³¹ That is the editors’ view, not a finding of the court.

Death asked for, three years given

That is the prosecutor, José N. González, describing the Recta Provincia to the judge.³² He says the penalty most often used was death, that its councils named local chiefs, “reparadores”, to carry out the penalties, and that its healers charged fees.³² He says about a hundred people figured in the case and nine or ten deserved heavier penalties.²³ For Mateo Coñuecar, “el más criminal de todos”, he asks for death; for the 98-year-old Santiago Rain and the 90-year-old José María Chiguai he proposes that time served be enough.³³

The judge did not go that far. Beytia dropped every homicide charge for lack of proof.⁵ He found a society with a king and queen, presidents and vice-presidents, intendants, secretaries, commanders, reparadores and doctors, and convicted those implicated of illicit association.¹¹¹

The record does not agree with itself about the date or the list of convicts. The sentence is dated 2 March 1881 in the pamphlet, in Catepillan and in Rojas Flores, and 2 February in Osorio’s introduction.³⁴ The three accounts of it list different convicts.

On 24 May 1881 the Court of Appeals of Concepción, by three votes to one, changed the sentence almost entirely.² It held that nothing showed the society aimed to harm social order, morals, persons or property, that the small gifts the healers received paid for their services, and that no body of the offence had been established in the homicide charges.³⁵ Espech, copying the file, put it in one line: the first-instance sentence gave “algunas de las penas pedidas por el fiscal”, but the second-instance sentence acquitted them.³⁶

A cave nobody found

The cave and its two prisoners come from one statement. On 26 March 1880 Mateo Coñuecar, a farmer from Tenaun, told the judge that at Quicaví there was an underground house lined with timber, with a table, chairs and benches, its door hidden under turf.⁸ Twenty years earlier, he said, he had been sent to carry meat to some animals inside.⁶ When the door opened two disfigured beings came out:

They called him the “Ibunchi”.⁶ The other, the Chibato, dragged himself along, and bristles had been grown on his body with a herb.⁶ The council chose such men, took them by force and shut them in, and fed them goat, kid, or the bodies of dead children stolen from the graveyard.⁶ Coñuecar said he took meat to them twice and saw them once more at a council in the cave.⁶

He said the key was kept in a belfry that burned down shortly before the arrests, and that when two men went to open the cave the door was barred from inside.³⁷ Aurora Quinchem, questioned the next day, said she had never gone to it.³⁸ Miguel Raicahuin, 85, denied that he had ever been sent to open it.³⁹ A police party sent to Quicaví on 7 April 1880 to inspect the cave came back after a week without finding it, according to Rojas Flores, who quotes a local paper.⁹

The Invunche grows a leg

Memoria Chilena says popular imagination later built many legends on the trial.⁴⁰ Cavada’s Invunche of 1914 is not the man Coñuecar described. In his Chiloé y los chilotes the Invunche is a deformed being with its face turned to its back and one leg stuck to its neck, made from a child twisted out of shape from its first months and fed on the flesh of a newborn child.⁷ Cavada says the common belief makes him the coven’s chief, which he corrects: the Invunche is a consultant and an instrument for the brujos’ vengeance.⁴¹

Romo’s dictionary, which collects the later tradition, still has the Invunche as a child whose leg the brujos fix to his back, and as the cave’s guardian.⁴² Its note on the word quotes Latcham, who transcribes a dictionary of 1777: “ivumche”, “hombre bestia”, and sorcerers said to rear nursing children in their caves with the anus sewn shut.⁴³ Rojas Flores argues that tradition kept only a fragment of the two men Coñuecar described and fused them into one monster with the look of a goat.⁴⁴

Set against the file, the story’s main claims come out like this.

Presidents at Salamanca

Mateo Coñuecar described how he was brought in. His brother Andrés, “Comandante de la Tierra”, took him to Juan Quinchepane, who asked “Jura usted por indíjena” and made him promise secrecy and obedience on pain of death.⁴⁶ He traced the society’s beginning to a man called Moraleda who came to Payos on a Spanish ship and lost a contest of magic to a woman called Chillpila, who got his book of sorcery and took it to Quicaví.⁴⁷

The officers have papers behind them. An order of 26 July 1878, signed by Domingo Coñuecar as “presidente” and dated from the “Presidencia de Salamanca de Quicabí”, names a local chief and tells him to obey the civil and political judges.⁴⁸ In the society’s own names, Quicaví was Lima or Salamanca, Payos was España and Achao was Buenos Aires.⁴⁹ Cavada, for his part, sets “nuestra Salamanca o sea nuestra «Casa Grande» de Quicavi” beside the necromancers’ Acheron in Campania.⁵⁰

Other papers in the file speak of Spain. A letter of 23 November 1866 mentions a queen in the capital of Spain, and notes signed Pedro Chiguai in 1880 speak of his “vuelta de España”.⁵¹ The letter is addressed to Cosme Damián Antil, a Chiloé cacique whom the governor of Castro had sent to Ancud in 1856 as a reputed brujo, and who after another arrest in 1864 was sentenced to a madhouse.⁵²

Two scholars read the file as more than witchcraft. Catepillan calls the Recta Provincia a “República de la Raza”, whose members spoke Spanish, called themselves Indigenous and were not organised as resistance to Chile, and proposes that it drew on the colonial república de indios.⁵³ Valenzuela objects that it is a fallacy to say brujos appeared in the case just because the sentence finds at least two of the accused guilty; he reads the file as discourse that makes witchcraft real.⁵⁴ He summarises Rojas Flores, who traces “La Mayoría” to the eighteenth century and to the kalku of Mapuche-Huilliche tradition.⁵⁵ Earlier writing, Catepillan says, treated the case as a relic, as resistance, or as a stand-in for a weak court system.⁵⁶

In March 1882, travelling between Castro and Achao, Espech was told that since the Intendant’s persecution the brujos cure only in hiding.⁵⁷