Devastations of Osorio

The Devastations of Osorio (in Spanish, las Devastaciones de Osorio) refer to a period in the colonial history of the

The population of the north resisted and Osorio had to ask for reinforcements to comply with the royal order. The help came from the governor Sancho Ochoa de Castro, who in September of that same year 1605 sent an infantry company to Santo Domingo to help out the forces of Hispaniola. The contingent, composed of 159 soldiers under the command of Captain Francisco Ferrecuelo, went to the north of the island, where the orders of Osorio were forcibly imposed, and the residents of the region obliged to abandon their farms and homesteads. In order to achieve their objective, the soldiers destroyed sugar plantations, burned huts, ranches, haciendas and churches, and dismantled everything that the villagers needed to live in those places. The main depopulated areas were Puerto Plata, Montecristi, Bayajá and Yaguana. At the end of January 1606, Antonio de Osorio wrote to the king, communicating that the devastation had ended and that he only needed to go through the herds of cattle of the north, and those of Santiago, San Juan and Azua. The process was however delayed until the middle of the year. Eventually, the governor established a border that stretched from Azua in the south all the way to the north coast, and prohibited the Hispanic inhabitants from crossing it. The inhabitants of Bayajá and Yaguana were concentrated in a new town that received the name of Bayaguana, and the inhabitants of Montecristi and Puerto Plata were relocated to Monte Plata.

In any event, the governor's operation failed to stop smuggling in the region. The destruction of about 120 herds of cattle, which totaled more than 100,000 cattle, cows, pigs and horses, proved to be disastrous, since only 15% of the cattle could be moved to new locations, while the rest were abandoned. Within a short time, these herds turned wild. Moreover, the destruction of the mills and

Historians conclude that the Devastations of Osorio constituted an error that brought no benefits to the colonists nor to the Spanish Crown. Instead, it left the economy of the island in a state of crisis and stagnation that lasted several decades. In addition, it presented an opportunity for foreigners and enemies of Spain to settle the abandoned territory, who later formed the French colony of Saint-Domingue. From the 18th century, thanks to its productive sugar and coffee plantations, it became one of the strongest economies of the Caribbean and the principal colony of France.

In fiction

• The Devastations form the backdrop of
  Antonio Benitez-Rojo's short story "Windward Passage" in the collection A View from the Mangrove
• The Spanish-Dominican writer Carlos Esteban Deive published a novel in 1979, Las devastaciones, which won the Premio Siboney
• Juan José Ponce Vázquez, a Spanish historian at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa has published a monograph dealing with this period, titled Islanders and Empire: Smuggling and Political Defiance in Hispaniola, 1580–1690 (2020).

References

 This article incorporates text by Rafal Reichert available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.