This chapter analyzes the implementation of a plan the crown approved in August 1604 to depopulate by force the northern and western coasts of Hispaniola by destroying the existing villages and relocating their population to newly erected villages around Santo Domingo. The depopulations of Hispaniola were an attempt by the crown to impose order on a colony that in the previous two decades had been perceived as increasingly disorderly from the perspective of its extremely active contraband trade, but also from a social and religious perspective. Even though smuggling might have been the cause of the increasingly frequent alarms that reached Madrid during these years, the perception of religious and political impropriety, and the risks that these posed to the presumed religious purity and loyalty of Spanish vassals on the island might have been just as important (or arguably even more so) in spurring the Council of the Indies to action. This narrative, however, was fiercely challenged by the Hispaniola elites, who exculpated themselves of all wrongdoing while blaming any and all questionable behavior on landless peasants, whom they accused of leading all the smuggling efforts.

This chapter reveals the great level of control that local elites accumulated over both local and royal institutions in Santo Domingo, to expand their influence to other parts of the Spanish Caribbean and acquire a profitable network of associates and introduce contraband goods into the city. Rodrigo Pimentel’s political life provides an illuminating example of the particularities of Santo Domingo’s institutional life, but on a larger scale, it also reveals the profound limitations that the Spanish Monarchy’s bureaucratic apparatus had to govern its own Caribbean territories and, by extension, most of its colonial dominions beyond Mexico City and Lima. Under the Habsburg, colonial centers of royal authority, Audiencias and governors often became extensions of the communities that hosted ministers and royal officials, and not anchors of royal power in remote Spanish possessions, as the crown initially intended. In theirdealings withhigh courts, these local groups of power both made and unmade the Spanish empire: they limited the influence of Madrid, but by using royal institutions for their own ends, they shaped the edges of the empire according to their own interests.