A Power-Mad Conquistador

I re-watched Werner Herzog’s 1972 Aguirre: The Wrath of God, one of my favorite films, then researched its central character, Spanish conquistador Lope de Aguirre (1510–1561). Called El Loco, the Madman, Aguirre showed skill at exploiting weaknesses in the rules and power structures of his day and getting revenge on those who defied and looked down on him.

Born in Spain’s Basque region, Aguirre decided in his 20s to seek New World riches after Hernando Pizarro returned from Peru with treasures looted from the Incas. Aguirre arrived in Peru and was caught up in conflict among the conquistadors over new laws aimed at scaling back the system of encomiendas, in which natives were forced to work for local Spanish officials. The laws purported to improve treatment of the Indians, but also were an attempt to reassert centralized control. Aguirre initially was on the side of a viceroy fighting to enforce these laws, but eventually was arrested for breaking them.

In 1551, a judge named Francisco de Esquivel sentenced Aguirre to a public flogging. Once the judge was out of power, Aguirre pursued him to avenge this humiliation. Esquivel sought safety by moving from city to city and wearing a chain-mail layer. Aguirre moved on foot without shoes, which held populist appeal, and a band of soldiers followed him. Esquivel took refuge at a friend’s house in Cusco and was napping in the library there when Aguirre plunged a dagger, first into the chain mail and then into Esquivel’s head.

After this murder, it seemed Aguirre’s career was over, but his supporters shielded him from legal accountability. Friends hid him from arrest, and in 1554 Aguirre made a comeback. Imperial forces needed more troops to put down a rebellion by Francisco Hernández Girón, and so Aguirre and his associates were pardoned so they could serve as soldiers. In 1560 they were assigned to look for El Dorado, the city of gold, likely motivated in substantial part by authorities’ desire to get rid of them.

Aguirre: The Wrath of God is based on the 1560 expedition but merges it with a 1541 one chronicled by monk Gaspar de Carvajal. The film depicts a doomed expedition down the Amazon or connected river, a few hundred Spanish soldiers and enslaved Indians (and one enslaved African) seeking El Dorado. Aguirre, second-in-command, has little respect for the leader, Pedro de Ursúa. When Ursúa decides the group should turn back and rejoin the forces of Gonzalo Pizarro (brother of better-known Francisco Pizarro), Aguirre mutinies. He takes over the expedition, installing a nominal “emperor” whom he directs to declare independence from Spain. Food’s running out, the “emperor” is murdered, and arrows rain down from Indians in the jungle. Aguirre’s increasingly unhinged, staying in charge through terror and beheading. At the end he rants that he’s the “wrath of God” and will marry his own daughter (who’s dead) to create a “pure” line to conquer and rule. Monkeys scamper on a raft amid the dead and dying.

Herzog’s script originally called for Aguirre to make it to the coast but fail to navigate from there. This went by the wayside in the chaotic production, though it was adapted for a different character in the ending of the director’s 1987 Cobra Verde. The original ending would’ve been closer to the truth, in that Aguirre made it through the jungle and got his force to Venezuela, conquering Isla Margarita. There he declared himself “Prince of Peru,” among other titles, but was killed after his men surrendered to the Spanish authorities in exchange for pardons. With the end in sight, Aguirre killed his own daughter so she wouldn’t be defiled by the victors. Aguirre’s body was cut into pieces and his skull put on display as a warning to others.

In the 2021 adventure-comedy movie Jungle Cruise, Aguirre is alive, or undead, in 1916, the result of a curse placed on him and his men by indigenous people for the crimes they committed in seeking a tree that has mystical powers. Aguirre and his followers, dormant for centuries in the jungle, reawaken, still villainous and now empowered with traits derived from flora and fauna; Aguirre, for instance, can unleash snakes from his body. He’s defeated, though it may not be his end. There are plans for a sequel.

In 1922, writer and anthropologist L. E. (Lilian) Elliot recounted Aguirre’s destructive career in an article for The Pan-American Magazine, including this striking passage that echoes into the present:

“Few such hardened criminals as Lope de Aguirre appear in history; most of them were created by the opportunity for tyranny, and by the [paralyzed] cowardice of the people who surrounded and suffered from them. But in almost every case there have been special circumstances that set the tyrant’s feet upon a career of crime, and again and again it appears as if immunity from punishment for one lawless act brought with it a sense of triumph, a belief in unique safety from common law, in unusual destiny, or sometimes it seems as though the prick of conscience must have been so sharp that the only means of checking its attacks was to defy it by more and worse crimes.”

—Kenneth Silber is author of In DeWitt’s Footsteps: Seeing History on the Erie Canal