"I saw him, I saw him with my own eyes:
he was the same as always; he was the same;
he was the old chieftain;
he was the rural chieftain!..."
Luis de Tapia.
The word cacique originally meant "principal person of a town" and did not have a pejorative connotation, related to the exercise of arbitrary, illegitimate and corrupt power. The acquisition of this last meaning is the result of the ideological-political confrontations that took place especially in the 19th century. Some of the main meanings of the word cacique have to do with the historical process that led to the opposition and substitution of an old economic and political order, the manorial or Old Regime, for a new one, the capitalist.
The caciques could be rich people who abused their wealth or other people who could abuse their political power. In short, mayors, doctors, pharmacists and other professionals, various bureaucrats and landowners could become centers of networks of followers or clients at the local level. And they, in turn, be clients of other powerful caciques located in the cities or in the administrative centers.
Through the establishment of particular relationships with these people, their followers hoped to obtain resources, material or instrumental, such as land, employment, assistance, protection, loans or other benefits from the state administration, means to contact powers beyond the local community, for example, through "letters of recommendation" or "connections". At the same time, the followers or clients ensured various forms of services: loyalty to their employees, interest in the care of their assets, symbolic or material, supply of information relating to local affairs, political support...
The political and administrative centralization that took place throughout the 19th century created a series of goods that were, at the same time, cheap and inexhaustible and, at the same time, often vital for citizens: administrative decisions (authorizations, certificates, exemptions, etc.). In the administration of these "decisions" local officials obeyed the caciques and, at the same time, were protected by them. In this way, the administration could be inefficient in many ways and caciquismo grew on the illegality of its own decisions, sometimes by action and other times by omission.
In relation to the impression of inefficiency that derived from such an exercise of the administration, Joaquín Costa, in his book Oligarchy and Caciquismo, writes: "Each region and each province was dominated by an irresponsible individual, deputy or not, commonly nicknamed in this relationship cacique, without whose will or approval not a sheet of paper was moved, no file was dispatched, no exemption was declared, no judge was appointed, no work was undertaken, for him there was no law of fifths, no water law, no hunting law, no municipal law, no trial laws, no electoral law, no consumption instruction, no fiscal laws, no regulation of the Civil Guard, no Constitution, no State policy: Courts, Audiences, civil governors, provincial councils, central administration, were an instrument of his, neither more nor less than if they had been created to serve him".
Currently, in many of our towns the word "cacique" is often contrasted with the word "man". "Being a man" implies having "your feet firmly on the ground", "standing in your place". "Being a cacique" implies abandoning this place and going to "get under" the "master, gentleman or capitalist". And it is that, as the poet said: "That they buy you does not surprise me, / that you sell yourself... that's right!, / and what I least understand / is that it doesn't surprise you".
Francisco Arias Solis
