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Information and Disinformation in Late Colonial New Granada*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Rebecca Earle
Rebecca Earle*
Affiliation:
The University of Warwick, Coventry, England
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In 1814, Alexander von Humboldt, the great traveller and explorer of the Americas, drew attention to an unusual feature of the movement for independence in the Viceroyalty of New Granada: the establishment of printing presses and newspapers followed rather than preceded the outbreak of war. Humboldt was struck by the contrast New Granada's war of independence offered with the two more famous political revolutions of the age. A great proliferation of printed pamphlets and periodicals had preceded the outbreak of revolution in both the Thirteen Colonies and France. How curious, Humboldt commented, to find the process reversed in Spanish America. Humboldt is not alone in viewing the newspaper as the expected harbinger of change in the age of Atlantic revolution. While the precise role played by the printed word in the French and American revolutions remains a subject of debate, many historians acknowledge the importance of print in creating a climate conducive to revolutionary challenge. Were newspapers and the press really latecomers to the revolution in the Viceroyalty of New Granada, as Humboldt suggests? What does this tell us about late colonial New Granada? How, in the absence of a developed press, did information, revolutionary or otherwise, circulate within the viceroyalty? Moreover, what means were available to either the Spanish crown or the American insurgents to create and manipulate news and opinion? What, indeed, does it mean to speak of the spread of news in a society such as late colonial New Granada? This article seeks to address these questions.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 54 , Issue 2 , October 1997 , pp. 167 - 184
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 1997

Footnotes

*

I am grateful to the British Academy for their financial support, which made possible this research, and to the two reviewers for their very helpful comments.

References

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19 For a large collection of “personal” letters from 1823, see AHNM, Estado, legajo 6375.

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26 See, for example, Toribio Montes to Despacho Universal de Indias, Quito, 7 December 1815, AGI, Audiencia de Quito, legajo 275; and Informant to Juan Sámano, Cartagena, 20 March 1819, AGI, Papeles de Cuba, legajo 708.

27 Francisco de Paula Santander to Manuel del Castillo, 1814 Santander y los ejércitos patriotas, 1811–1818, vol. 1, Andrés Montaña, ed., (Bogotá: Biblioteca de la Presidencia de la República, 1989), p. 82; and Simón Bolívar to Francisco de Paula Santander, Guayaquil, 29 March 1823, Lecuna, Selected Writings of Bolívar, vol. 2, p. 367. For a useful discussion of the “contagious diffusion” of news and its importance to members of the elite in North America, see Brown, Knowledge is Power, chapter 10.

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