Viceroyalty

[2] According to the lawyer Fernando de Trazegnies, the status of the Viceroyalties was like that of a Kingdom among the Kingdoms of the Indies, and that the fact that legal Pluralism was practiced in Derecho Indiano would be sufficient proof that the Crown did not seek to practice a Exploitative colonialism (where local institutions, which protect the socioeconomic rights of the Vassal people, are ignored, under the excuse of the Right of Conquest), if not political integration into the Hispanic Monarchy in the same plural way that had already been done with the rest of its territories in Europe, based on the characteristic Fueros of the traditional and composite Monarchy that maintained the regional laws of each nation integrated into the Spanish Monarchy (and that was even practiced within peninsular Spain after the Reconquista, such as the Fueros of Aragón or the Fueros of Navarra).

On the other hand, the Papal Bull itself, which granted the Catholic Monarchs the dominion of these new lands, established the Supreme and Universal Principality for the Crown of Castile, but did not deprive the kings and natural lords of the Indies of their lordships.

For this royal resolution to take effect, they must appoint the Viceroyalties of New Spain, Peru, New Reyno de Granada and Buenos Aires, and the independent General Captaincies of the island of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guatemala, Chile, the Province of Venezuela and the Philippines, one individual each representing their respective district.

Listen to the words with which a chapter of the titled laws of the year 1542 ends, where the Emperor Charles thus speaks: -we want and command that the Indians be treated as vassals ours from Castile, since they are.

[9] "Lempérière points out that from the first dates of the arrival of Europeans to America until – at least – the beginning of the 19th century, the term “colony” means – following the ancient Roman convention – a settlement that is established outside its political community.

At the same time, this institutionality corresponded to an adhesion that was not imposed nor the result of the military strength of the Crown, but of the common involvement in the monarchical, Catholic, corporatist and pactist ideology, in short, a sincere belonging for a long time elaborated and that had the participation of broad social sectors, from the Creoles to castes and indigenous people (...) Therefore, it is more appropriate to compare New Granada with Aragon or even Naples than with Haiti, the British possessions in the Caribbean or, what is considered even more misguided, with colonial domination imposed by England on India at the end of the 18th century.

For Lempérière, the process of decisive fragmentation of that Hispanic community after 1810 will be a consequence of an unexpected situation – the crisis of legitimacy that emanates from the vacatio regis and the Napoleonic invasion of 1808.