10 - Newspapers and Atlantic Revolutions: The Circulation of the Gaceta de Madrid in the Spanish Caribbean

Summary

IN JULY 1795, the Council of the Indies in Madrid revised the charges that the General-Captain of Venezuela, Pedro Carbonell, made against Juan Bautista Olivares, a mixed-race pardo musician from Caracas who had been sent to Spain. Carbonell accused Olivares of disturbing the tranquil-lity of the region by reading seditious materials to others and writing texts in which he supposedly referred to revolutionary ideas. After analysing Carbonell's letters, the Council decided to follow the regular legal pro-cedure, appointing members of the Justice Chamber in Cádiz to conduct Olivares's trial.

The judges in Cádiz investigated Olivares's written correspondence and reading materials. They particularly inquired about his reading habits and preferences; they asked him if he had read, copied and circulated docu-ments on the French Revolution or about republicanism. He answered that he had not read any papers regarding this issue, except for ‘the Gaceta de Madrid and the testament of the King of France’. The judges were not surprised that Olivares had read about the French Revolution in the pop-ular Gaceta de Madrid, as many readers in Spain had learned about the Revolution through the pages of this peninsular official newspaper, widely read in different corners of the kingdom. A few months later, Olivares was released and able to return to Caracas; the judges in Cádiz could not con-firm that Olivares was in fact an insurgent planning to encourage insubor-dination in Venezuela.

Through the judicial investigation, Olivares showed that the sources of information he had consulted to learn about Atlantic politics were much the same sources that everyone in both Spain and Spanish America used and knew well. He also demonstrated that reading Spanish official news-papers was not a crime and not even an act of defiance towards colonial authority. However, local authorities in Venezuela felt threatened by Oli-vares's readings and knowledge and, as a result, officials fabricated all kinds of accusations to call the attention of imperial officials to a situation that was getting out of control: the increasing circulation of news about the French Revolution and the Saint-Domingue rebellions and the danger that the spread of this information represented for the tranquillity and peace of the Spanish possessions in America.