1731: Alejo Calatayud, Mestizo
January 31st, 2017 Headsman
On this date in 1731, rebel Alejo Calatayud was beheaded in present-day Bolivia.
A silversmith of mixed Spanish and native lineage, Calatayud (English Wikipedia entry | Spanish) was all of 25 years old when he came to the fore of an indigenous-Mestizo rising in the Andean Cochabamba valley.
What began as a tax revolt against fresh impositions being mooted for the province soon gathered grievances of both class and caste and frightened the empire with a massacre of 39 Spaniards when the rebels overran the city of Cochabamba.
Ultimately, it was more rebellion than revolution — one among a sporadic series of resistance movements in the Andes — and was quelled within weeks by the intervention of a Spanish viceroy for whom the quick dispatch of the insurrectionary leader was no more than natural.
Today, Cochabamba remembers its very brief master Calatayud with an excitingly kinetic equestrian monument.
On this day..
- 1964: Nguyen Van Nhung, Diem executioner - 2020
- 1821: Henry Tobin, extortionist - 2019
- 1851: Ruben Dunbar, Destructiveness and Combativeness - 2018
- 1550: Four Anabaptist martyrs at Lier - 2016
- 1679: Robert Foulkes, adulterous minister - 2015
- 1902: A day in the death penalty around the Pacific Northwest - 2014
- 1923: Eligiusz Niewiadomski, assassin-artist - 2013
- 1632: Aris Kindt, Rembrandt subject - 2012
- 1879: Takahashi Oden, dokufu and she-demon - 2011
- 1955: Moshe Marzouk and Shmuel Azar - 2010
- 1945: Private Eddie Slovik, the last American shot for desertion - 2009
- 1606: Guy Fawkes and other Gunpowder Plot conspirators - 2008
Entry Filed under: 18th Century,Beheaded,Bolivia,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,Disfavored Minorities,Execution,History,Occupation and Colonialism,Power,Racial and Ethnic Minorities,Revolutionaries,Spain,Treason,Wartime Executions
Tags: 1730s, 1731, alejo calatayud, cochabamba, indigenous, january 31, tax revolt
