*•.¸☆˚.◞♡ ⃗  Case Study Comparisons🎐*ೃ༄☆¸.•*

｡ﾟ･✧･ﾟ: *. ｡ﾟ❀ R a c i a l i z e d P r o s e c u t i o n ❀･*･. ° . ✿ ｡ﾟ･

Across both colonial Guatemala and colonial Cartagena de Indias, Inquisitorial records reveal a consistent and racialized pattern of heavily charging women of color for practicing the same knowledge that circulated freely across racial lines. The same chocolate-based love magic that a Spanish doña accessed through a mulata intermediary could result in that intermediary's conviction or imprisonment. The same healing traditions that made Afrodescendant women indispensable to Cartagena's sick and desperate also made them the primary targets of a witch craze that dismantled an entire community. 

Santiago de Guatemala and Cartagena de Indias were separated by geography, colonial administration, and the specific contours of their Afrodescendant and Indigenous populations. What they shared was a colonial institution tasked with enforcing religious orthodoxy that consistently used the charge of sorcery and witchcraft as a mechanism for racial and social control. In Santiago, the Inquisition records Few (2011) analyzed reveal that mixed-race, Indigenous, and African women were described specifically as using chocolate as the basis for sorcery activities, while elite Spanish women who engaged in the same practices faced a categorically different level of scrutiny. In Cartagena, the distinction was written directly into the legal apparatus: hechicería was charged against individuals, while brujería, a charge implying collective guilt, satanic pacts, and the rejection of Christianity itself, was leveled almost exclusively against people of African descent (McKnight 2003).

The comparison is not incidental. It reveals that the pattern of differential prosecution was not a local aberration or the product of individual inquisitors' prejudices, but was systemic. The colonial body politic, was the arena in which institutions regulated bodies to reproduce social order. In both Guatemala and Colombia, that regulation operated through race. Determining whose body was a site of dangerous knowledge required only discreet distance.

｡ﾟ･✧･ﾟ: . ｡ﾟ❀ Same Networks with Different Consequences ❀･･. ° . ✿ ｡ﾟ･

Perhaps the clearest evidence of racialized prosecution lies within the networks that produced the cases in the first place. In both cities, the knowledge and practice of love magic and sorcery circulated through cross-racial networks of women who consulted one another, referred clients, and transmitted ritual knowledge across lines of caste and class. In Santiago, Gerónima de Varaona served as a go-between for doña Luisa de Gálvez, traveling to the home of an Indigenous woman named María de Zumagra to trade for ritual powders on a Spanish elite woman's behalf (Few 2011. 88). The knowledge flowed from Indigenous woman to mulata intermediary to Spanish doña. The bread used as payment flowed in the opposite direction. The women who held the knowledge and performed the labor were the ones who appeared in the Inquisition's records as the accused, while doña Luisa's participation was framed as the story of a client rather than a practitioner.

In Cartagena, the same asymmetry structured the entire witch craze of the 1630s. Paula de Eguiluz treated Spanish doñas, soldiers, bishops, and clergy alongside her own Afrodescendant community, and her clients across racial lines came to her voluntarily, often through personal recommendation. Doña Ana de Fuentes, whose confession triggered Paula's second arrest, had sought Paula out for love magic to manage her failing marriage, paying cumulatively across multiple consultations (Von Germeten 2013, 150). When the remedies failed to satisfy her, doña Ana went to the Inquisition to have Paula imprisoned. 

This asymmetry was not accidental. It was the operational logic of a system that needed these knowledge networks to exist because elite women relied on them. Even those struck with illness across all socioeconomic classes sought out these healers which was a perfect reflection of survival depending on practitioners like Paula de Eguiluz. This resulted in their categorization as "dangerous" or "threatning," all because they organized, economically independent, epistemologically autonomous communities of color that were subversive to colonial order. The prosecution of women of color for sorcery was the colonial state's solution to this contradiction: use the knowledge, destroy the origins.

｡ﾟ･✧･ﾟ: . ｡ﾟ❀ Inquisitorial Charges ❀･･. ° . ✿ ｡ﾟ･

In Guatemala, the charge leveled against women of color was almost always hechicería, the lower charge, but still carried real consequences of conviction and imprisonment. What is striking about the Guatemala records is how thoroughly the association between women of color and dangerous bodily knowledge had permeated colonial consciousness, so thoroughly that it became a weapon available to anyone who wished to use it. When Padre Francisco de Castellanos attempted to seduce Rosa de Arrevillaga, a mulata slave in the convent of Santa Catalina Martir, and she refused him, he deployed the charge of sorcery preemptively, accusing her of having put powders in his chocolate to bewitch his desire (Few 2011, 88). He did not need any real evidence, simply just the stereotype.

In Cartagena, the charge operated at an entirely different scale. The distinction between hechicería and brujería was not merely theological but racial. In the tribunal's records between 1610 and 1650, every case of brujería involved a person of African, mixed African, or mixed Indigenous descent, while no white Europeans were prosecuted under that charge at all (McKnight 2003, 78). The charge did not describe what these women did any more accurately than hechicería did. It described what the colonial state needed them to be in order to justify the scale of the response: the mass arrests, the confiscations, the auctions, the banishments.

The sentences that followed reflected this racialized tiering with brutal consistency. In the 1634 auto de fe, the women of Los Jagüeyes received punishments including public penitential garments, lashes, and years of banishment from Cartagena and any place where they might have support from family or community (Silva Campo 2011, 209). Paula de Eguiluz, across her three trials, accumulated public marches in autos de fe, two hundred lashes, and years of imprisonment (Von Germeten 2013, 138). Meanwhile, the Spanish doñas who consulted her went home.

｡ﾟ･✧･ﾟ: . ｡ﾟ❀ Who Could be Accused by Whom ❀･･. ° . ✿ ｡ﾟ･

The racialized structure of prosecution also shaped who had the institutional standing to make accusations stick. In both cities, the Inquisition's case-building depended heavily on denunciations, and the social weight of a denunciation was not equally distributed. In Guatemala, Juan de Fuente, a thirty-three-year-old mulato construction worker, denounced his mulata wife Cecilia to the Inquisition, accusing her of using sorcery to invert their household gender roles, naming as his primary evidence the fact that he prepared the morning chocolate while she slept (Few 2011, 88). The Inquisition took the case seriously enough to convict Cecilia and transport her to Mexico City. What is analytically significant is not only that Juan's accusation was believed, but that the inquisitors accepted domestic role reversal as evidence of supernatural interference. A woman who slept late while her husband prepared breakfast was, within the colonial body politic, legible as a social threat.

In Cartagena, the most devastating accusations came from within the community itself. Paula de Eguiluz's second trial was propelled by her own denunciations of other Afrodescendant women, and Diego López, her mulato rival in the healing trade, made accusations that led to arrests and the eventual torture of multiple defendants (Von Germeten 2013, 134). The Inquisition's reliance on self-denunciation and community denunciation was not incidental to the witch craze: it was the mechanism by which the institution inserted itself into existing rivalries and social tensions within the community of color, turning those tensions into prosecutable offenses. The colonial body politic did not need to generate the conflicts, but only to provide the framework in which those conflicts became evidence of diabolical conspiracy.

What the comparison between Guatemala and Cartagena reveals is that this mechanism operated identically across contexts: the Inquisition positioned itself as the legitimate judge of disputes that were fundamentally about desire and survival, and then systematically converted those disputes into charges whose consequences fell hardest on the most racially and economically vulnerable participants.

｡ﾟ･✧･ﾟ: . ｡ﾟ❀ What Racialized Prosecution Reveals ❀･･. ° . ✿ ｡ﾟ･