Justicia y gobierno: La Audiencia de Puerto Rico (1831–1861)

Abstract

The Audiencia was an appellate high court established after 1511 by the Spanish monarchs in their American territories, where it became a powerful and influential institution. It had from three to six oidores (judges) whose main duty was to oversee all legal cases brought to them by minor courts or local officials. However, these Audiencias also had administrative and legislative powers whenever a viceroy, a captain general, or governor was absent from the territory or when these officials came in conflict with the crown. These officials, advised by counsel, presided over the Audiencias in their territories.Eighteen Audiencias were created in the Americas over 300 years. The last one was decreed for Puerto Rico in 1831 by King Ferdinand VII. Gerardo Carlo Altieri postulates that its creation was forced by the island’s increasing population and growing wealth and was due to Spain’s fear of losing Puerto Rico. Before 1831, all Puerto Rican legal problems and cases had been sent to be resolved by the Audiencias of Santo Domingo, Puerto Principe, Cuba, and Caracas.The Audiencia’s importance has been brilliantly studied in the general institutional histories of Charles Gibson, Clarence Henry Haring, and J. M. Ots y Capdequí. Other authors such as Alfonso García Gallo, Mark A. Burkholder and D. S. Chandler, J. H. Parry, Pilar Arregui Zamorano, Juan Matienzo, Feliciano Barrios Pintado, and Tomás Polanco Alcántara have written on specific Audiencias, and various other authors have written articles on those created in their countries. The themes researched are diverse: from the art of the Royal Audiencia at Quito to the government of the Audiencia in New Galicia or New Granada. It is accepted that the jurisdiction of each of the Audiencias in the continental lands served to delimit the territorial boundaries of the new independent countries of Spanish America. The Audiencia as the foremost legal institution in the New World has not been studied in the richness of its legal activities since the foundation of the first one.This useful book, originally created as Carlo’s doctoral dissertation at the University of Seville, presents ample research on the Audiencia of Puerto Rico. An introduction, nine chapters, conclusions, a comparative chronology, and a most valuable bibliography fill its 493 pages. It is a notable contribution to Puerto Rican, Caribbean, and Latin American legal and institutional history.Carlo analyses the importance that the Audiencia had for Puerto Rico and how it became more modernized and more localized than its older sisters in Spanish America. He examines the role of the captain general of the island and his relation to the court. He also studies how the new acuerdo (agreement) decreed by the crown in 1832 gave the presidency of the Audiencia to an official called regente, an act that impinged on the captain general’s power.Carlo discusses the new bureaucracy of oidores — judges brought to Puerto Rico from the lost Audiencias — and the numerous new officials and judges (alcaldes mayores) who were part of the new legal network in the island. He includes cases and decisions of the court on such issues as municipal relations, taxes, commerce, military cases, servitude, and slavery. Carlo uses excellent documentary evidence from major archives in Puerto Rico and Spain, which is supported by fine secondary material. This book helps the reader see the manifold actions carried out by the Puerto Rican Audiencia during its first 30 years, when a body of decisions and legal interpretations were made solely for the island. Law has been given scant attention in the study of colonial Latin America, and this work contributes to that knowledge.This valuable work, however, needed to lose its dissertation format and explain in a good glossary many legal terms taken from royal decrees and Spanish courts of previous centuries. It is a book readable mainly by legal historians of Spanish America but not by the general public. The writing is repetitive and confusing in many places (pp. 175–76) in the author’s effort to cover as many aspects as possible of the Audiencia’s activities. There are also long discussions on topics not specifically related to the Audiencia in an effort to bring out the “origins” of the cases seen or decisions by the court.Nonetheless, with his treatise, Gerardo Carlo Altieri opens anew a path for legal and institutional research of Spanish America’s colonial history and of Puerto Rico’s Spanish history.