Códice
Latin American history told through the document: engravings, chronicles and archives, each one credited.
San Martin and Bolivar: One Room, Four Versions
On 26 July 1822 San Martin and Bolivar walked into a room in Guayaquil and closed the door. No clerk, no witness. Within two months San Martin had resigned and left Peru for good. ...
Monteagudo's Five Hundred Accusers Answered to One Club
On 25 July 1822 a petition reached the Lima city council. It carried more than five hundred signatures, all demanding the removal of the minister Bernardo Monteagudo. Within five d...
Bolivar Questioned Monteagudo's Killer Alone and Kept No Record
On the night of 28 January 1825 Bernardo Monteagudo was stabbed to death in a Lima street, and the knife was left in the wound. Forty-eight hours later both killers had confessed. ...
Carrera's Father Paid the Bill for His Sons' Execution
The bill came to 453 pesos and 4 reales. One line reads: for witnessing the sentence and its execution, and other notices, four pesos. It was addressed to Ignacio de la Carrera, an...
Manuel Rodriguez Was Shot by the Government He Saved
In the last week of May 1818 the most popular man in Chile was shot in the back, at night, by the soldiers escorting him out of Santiago. The government opened a file the next morn...
San Martin Told the Enemy Which Pass He Would Use
On the day the battle for Chile was decided, the Spanish governor had about 4,317 soldiers and brought roughly 1,500 of them to the field. Nothing had happened to the rest. They we...
The City Traded for Thirty Thousand People
In 1750, two crowns signed a treaty that traded a smuggling port for a territory full of people, and did it by abandoning, in a single sentence, the law that had justified Spanish ...
The Army of the Andes Bought 710 Men From Their Owners
The Army of the Andes has a published ledger, and it contradicts the monument twice. The enrolment was compulsory, not voluntary. And the single most expensive item in the account ...
San Martin Asked for the Job Nobody Else Would Take
In 1814 a colonel asks to be sent to the emptiest corner of the country, six hundred miles from any battlefield. It looks like the end of a career. Six months later the government ...
The Defeat That Made San Martin Refuse to Fight
Manuel Belgrano loses his army twice in six weeks, hands what's left to the man replacing him, and stays on as his subordinate -- and that man's first order as commander is not a b...
The Battle San Martin's Own Report Left Out
San Lorenzo is the fifteen-minute fight that made Jose de San Martin's reputation -- but the two things everyone repeats about it, the dying soldier's last words and who that soldi...
The Coup That Made Him Famous for the Wrong Reason
Jose de San Martin's first appearance in this history is not a mountain crossing. It's a colonel pointing artillery at his own government's fort, forcing out an administration that...
The Junta That Voted Out the Man Who Built It
He drafted the founding decrees of a revolution, launched its newspaper, and became its most demanding voice. Seven months later, the same government he built voted him into the mi...
The City That Executed the Man Who Saved It
The same city that fired a viceroy without asking permission in the last episode does it again in 1810 -- this time for good. And within three months, the government born from that...
The Colony That Fired Its Own Viceroy
A British force smaller than the census this series already counted took the capital of a silver empire in two days. The viceroy ran, with the treasury -- and lost that too. Twice ...
The Smugglers Who Became the Government
Spain's answer to a war it did not start was not more soldiers. It was an entire new government, and the biggest fleet it had ever sent to South America. This is how the port two e...
The Port That Was Illegal for a Hundred Years
In fifteen ninety-five the Spanish Crown closed the port of Buenos Aires to trade, and kept it closed for most of the next hundred years. The port never stopped working for a singl...
The Coin That Lied to Three Continents
In the sixteen thirties, bankers in Genoa and Antwerp began weighing silver bars stamped with the mark of Potosi -- and refusing them. The silver was short. It took Madrid another ...
The Mountain That Was Spent Before It Was Mined
In sixteen fifty the richest city in the Americas stood four thousand metres up, on a plateau where almost nothing grows and nothing at all is manufactured. It was there for one re...
The Empire That Ran on Knotted String
Two million square kilometres. Twelve million people. Administered, taxed and fed from a single capital — without writing, without the wheel, without draught animals, and without m...
The Letter Nobody Opened: 1,189 Pages Sent to a King Who Never Read Them
In 1615 a man in the Andes finished a letter he had been writing for thirty years. It ran to 1,189 pages and 398 drawings, and it was addressed to the king of Spain. The king never...
How 168 Men Captured an Empire of Twelve Million
On 16 November 1532, one hundred and sixty-eight Spaniards walked into a valley held by an army of eighty thousand. By sunset the emperor of the largest state on earth was their pr...