"The First 'Panama Papers': Smuggling and Organized Crime in the Atlantic World, 1739-1760"

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They mocked colonial authorities, declared their disobedience of the king, massacred people, and defrauded the Royal Treasury through impressive illegal trade reaching beyond the borders of their home region. The over two hundred and fifty smugglers who rebelled in Panama in the mid-1700s thus deserve to be studied in their full complexity. Penonomé, Natá, Villa de Los Santos, Las Cruces, Portobelo and Panama City, roads and rivers such as the Chagres and Coclé, and neighboring Caribbean and Pacific shores, served as enclaves and routes for the development of clandestine trading. This business both enriched and empowered smugglers, as well as raised the alarm among authorities at the local and imperial level, in theory charged with weeding out fiscal fraud and other crimes against the majesty of the king. Known as Apostolado de Penonomé, Compañía de Natá, and Sacra Familia, smuggler’s confederate associations were organized around 1724, taking advantage of the arrival of foreign ships, which “maliciously” made landfall in Portobelo from different continental and insular strongholds such as Jamaica, Saint-Domingue, Curaçao, and New England. Underpinned by a hierarchical structure led by Panama’s patricians, whose “leader and chief” was don Joseph Martínez Fajardo, smuggling confederate societies managed to bribe, defraud, and carry out petty crime as well as, of course, crimes against fiscal regulations and civil order outlined by Bourbon officials and their unparalleled legislative corpus. Towards 1748, a good number of the confederate associates had been executed, some thrown into jail or exiled, and a few had escaped. There were several trials against them, and their activities left a myriad of consequences: a few years later, officers from the Real Audiencia in Santa Fe, the capital of the viceroyalty of the New Kingdom of Granada, discovered that several magistrates of the now defunct Real Audiencia of Panama, as well as the city’s bishop, had been associates of the smugglers, providing them with legal help on more than once occasion. This story, along with all its intricacies It's the subject that Sebastián Gómez González will talk about in his lecture.

Sebastián Gómez González is Associate Professor of History at the University of Antioquia in Medellín, Colombia. He holds Master's and Doctoral degrees from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). His research interests focus on the history of the overseas territories disputed by the European empires between the 16th and 18th centuries. His latest book, Frontera Selvática. Españoles, portugueses y su disputa por el noroccidente amazónico, siglo XVIII won Colombia’s national prize for best historical research in 2013 awarded by the country’s Ministry of Culture and the Institute of Anthropology and History.

The USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute has provided parking reservations for this event in the McCarthy Way Structure (formerly Parking Structure X). Please use parking code: 234534.