By Michael J. Ryan.
In this series on Venezuelan Garrote, Part One provided a brief overview of the multiple ways traditional stick, machete, and knife combat in the city of Barquisimeto is practiced and done today as a folkloric ritual performance, recreational practice, or fighting art. Continuing to look at how Garrote was developed in one place, in Part Two, the focus turns to the historical, political-economic, and ethnic elements that gave rise to the art here. Garrote was once common to the entire area, with each area having a different history. A few elements make Barquisimeto unique in a study of Garrote. First, Barquisimeto is the largest city in the midwest, with rural peoples from around the region fleeing an impoverished, forgotten, and backward society where absentee landowners ruled with an iron fist. Rural laborers were mired in debt, with only a few schools, even fewer hospitals, endemic diseases, and few routes to upward economic mobility. Since the mid-19th century, young men moving to Barquisiemto brought their own ways of armed combat, and it tested in innumerable struggles where only the toughest or the most skilled thrived.
Another unique factor regarding the way garote is done in Barquisimeto is it’s treasuring the combative roots of the art when machetes, knives, and lances rather than hardwood braided handled sticks was commonly used and are still part of the ritual performances dedicated to Saint Anthony. Seeing and hearing sharpened steel clash against each other reminds onlookers that choosing to take up Garrote at one time could result in serious consequences. Actually, up until 70 years ago, there was very little choice involved; almost every man had to have some knowledge of Garrote just to walk down the streets. Finally, historical research has shown that just after the Wars of Independence around the town of Cabudare, just outside Barquisimeto, the first couple of accounts of men using walking sticks to fight.
In keeping with the times, this conflict was not a polite, formal, one-on-one duel between gentlemen. Rather, it was a full gang melee with walking sticks and machetes being wielded freely and rocks being thrown with abandon. What makes this particular encounter so interesting is the underlying racial tensions that instigated the brawl. One market day in 1823, a group of mounted European men were driving a herd of cattle to the marketplace. Coming from town, a group of mixed-blood Indian, African, or European men were walking back home. Coming face to face, the mixed-blood men refused to move off the road and let the mounted European Venezuelans with their cattle have the right of way while meekly submitting to insults about their birth and occupations. These men demanded to be treated as men equal to all others and were willing to fight to uphold this claim. Although not commented upon much until recently, the interminable struggles over political power and access to resources, as it took place in Venezuela, were built on and depended on the reduction of Indigenous, African, and mixed-blood peoples to landless laborers with no history, no culture, and no claim to any land or natural resources where they had lived for centuries. This spirit of resistance to retain their humanity was one of the major factors in Garrote’s persistence up until today. Now, let us move to a history of Garrote in Barquisimeto and track its development.
Enjoy and watch!
Procession in honor of Saint Anthony in Barquisimeto.
Watch the ritual “battle” with the participation of Mestre Felix García, among other garroteros.
Images: Matthias Assunção, 06/13/1996.
Nueva Segovia de Barquisimeto
Located about 200 miles west of Caracas in the Segovia highlands of Venezuela, Barquisimeto is a Caquetío Indian word, possibly meaning muddy river, referring to the Turbio River that marks its southern boundaries. Barquisimeto was established in 1552 as a waystation to supply the short-lived gold rush in the nearby mountains. The city itself has moved three times since its founding. Once floods washed it away, it was moved up to higher ground. The next time, it was burnt to the ground by Indians. Moving it again, it was eventually abandoned, as it was too exposed to the winds. Finally, the town was permanently established in its present site in 1563.
Jumping ahead to the 19th century, the first accounts of Garrote as a type of armed combat done with walking sticks and machetes came from around Barquimeto. At this time, the Segovia Highlands, where Barquisimeto is located, served as an unintentional geopolitical dividing line in a series of civil wars that rocked Venezuela throughout the whole of the 19th century and into the 20th. Throughout this era of political instability, Barquisimeto and its environs served as the site of over ten major battles. The last occurring in 1904 had men shooting at each with rifles and firing cannons at each at point-blank range from others from opposite sides of Avenida 20, the main street that runs through the city. For this reason, there are very few historical buildings in Barquisimeto left for tourists to see.
Map of Venezuela, highlighting the state of Lara, whose capital is Barquisimeto.
The Indigenous Roots of Garrote
In the 1880s, then President of Venezuela Antonio Guzman-Blanco declared, except for a small pocket near Lake Maracaibo and the Amazon, that no Indians existed in the country. With a stroke of the pen, Venezuela became an officially modern European country with only a few descendants of African slaves in specific areas. A problem with such a sweeping announcement was that the Segovia Highlands of Venezuela never experienced the drastic demographic decline of other Indian populations in the New World. Moreover, European immigrants preferred Mexico or Peru, where gold and silver mines abounded. Although there were major governmental schemes to encourage European immigration, many Indian communities were left alone or slowly became involved with the increasing export-oriented economy of cotton, sugarcane, and sheep.
For those communities who fled up into the hills or deep in the bush, they maintained some form of independence until the early 20th century. However, among those who stayed along the river valleys on their ancestral lands and were forced into the capitalist labor workforce, the earliest stories of learning garrote come to be known. During the midday break, older men would cut the thin, soft stalks off the tops of a sugar cane stalk and use them to teach their sons and nephews garrote. In these stories, we hear of the carrying on of a tradition of cultural resistance to European domination as well as the practical ability to fight off bandits and militia bands led by caudillos from other ranches and plantations.
The Influences of the Caudillo System on garrote
Caudillismo was a common political system in Latin America after the post-liberation era. From the time of independence to the early 20th century, the Venezuelan army consisted of only a few thousand men guarding its ports and borders. The fighting forces that decided who would sit at the president’s desk and divide up the nation’s wealth were made up of local landowners or businessmen who called upon their relatives and hired foremen. In turn, they would mobilize their relatives and workers and, march on their boss’s political enemies and attempt to usurp the office of the presidency. Bands of civilians levees armed with an assortment of hunting rifles, single-shot Mausers, machetes, and lances fought, robbed, looted, and died throughout the Segovia highlands and nearby mountains until 1929. Among those farmers and rural laborers serving in these militias, it was said that during downtimes, men would be taught or practice the saber, machete, and the garrote. When reading these accounts, keep in mind that single-shot rifles were in short supply and that close-quarter combat was a real possibility in any conflict until the early 20th century. In addition, garrote was taught to recruits to instill a spirit of aggression so that they would seek to close in with the enemy and finish the encounter with cold steel. In reading these accounts, the question must arise: why are these bladed fighting systems referred to as stick fighting? To answer that, we must go back further in time.
Silvio Alvarado (in the photo) and his cousin, Natividad Póstal, were colleagues at the time of Master Ismael. He’s still in the bodega the two ran for decades. If anyone shows up, he is always welcoming and friendly and is willing to answer any questions you may have about garrote.
Image: Michael Ryan.
European and African roots of garrote around Barquisimeto
Chroniclers of events in the Segovia Highlands around this time were careful to distinguish between the saber, the machete, and the garrote/ stick, suggesting that these weapons were still seen as two distinct forms of armed combat. One armed tradition involved a military single-edged cutting and slashing sword with Spanish and possibly some British influences. The other was a civilian-oriented stick and machete fighting tradition with roots going back to the elite Western European civilian combative fighting arts and the herding cultures of Southern Spain and the Canary Islands. Over time the sword and fighting stick were co-opted by local indigenous and mixed-blood communities as part of their combative repetoire. The evidence supporting a Canarian influence in Venezuela includes the existence of a strong stick-fighting culture in the Canary Islands today and the oral tales and documents of many well-known Venezuelan garroteros throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries who claimed descent or whose families emigrated from the Canary Islands.
With regards to European influences, beginning around the 16th century in Western Europe, urban merchants and noblemen began to set aside carrying military weapons such as halberds, billhooks, and two-handed swords when traveling in public. Instead, they began to favor lighter, shorter weapons such as rapiers, short swords, and later wooden walking sticks or cane-swords. Being of lighter weight and having no military use, these weapons could serve as a sign of their owners’ status as gentlemen at a time when endemic warfare had declined and the dangers of inter-urban travel had diminished. When these men came to Venezuela or Venezuelans traveled to Europe for an education, they brought back to Venezuela ideas, behaviors, and technologies as ways to set themselves apart from the rest of the population, including the idea of heavy walking sticks that a gentleman could use as a weapon. By the early 19th century at some later date, the walking stick and short sword were co-opted by the Indian, African, and poor European populations who began to carry them while in public and to increasingly blend them with their forms of combat and use them to fight against neighbors trying to pilfer their herds or steal their crops, disrespect them at a party or in the street or just as a way to pass the time between friends. The act of a non-elite or non-European man carrying a garrote proclaiming to all that they, too, were men of respect and honor equal to any wealthy, noble, or white European must have served as a bold challenge to the repressive racist social system at the time and must have pushed tested the tolerance of many an elite European coming across such a man.
The regional isolation of Venezuela played an important part in shaping its history. Towering mountain ranges, endless savannahs that flooded six months out of the year, and thousands of square miles of jungle ensured that long-distance travel was difficult and expensive. Throughout much of the history of Venezuela, trade and transportation up through the early 20th century in and around Barquisimeto were done by mules and mule trains. This proved to be another avenue for the development of garrote in Barquisimeto. For example, during the mid-20th century, Pedro Caudevilla regularly led a mule team that brought salt up from the coast to Barquisimeto. The late garrotero Félix García would tell his students that Pedro picked up the Palo Sangriento style of garrote in the village of Boro Mamonal in the Tocuyo Valley before bringing his art to the city of Barquisimeto. Supporting this claim, the local investigator Argimiro Gonzalez recently met a man from Boro Mamonal who still practiced a similar form of garrote.
A continuous rural-to-urban migration of peoples that began in the late 19th century in Venezuela and continues up through today has made it the largest city in the area. By the 1930s, influenced by the rise of Socialism in Europe and North America, the expanding working class began unionizing and then conducting labor strikes for better working conditions. Among these small independent tradesmen and laborers at this time were many garroteros who learned their art in small towns and who, in turn, trained the younger generation how to fight groups of strikebreakers and the police. Actually, the police served as another site for the refining and transmission of garrote. Due to the Federal government’s mistrust of local uprisings, local police forces were issued machetes instead of firearms until the 1950s. One of the most well-known policemen in Barquisimeto of this time was Ishmael Colmenares, who also possessed a reputation as one of the best garroteros in the city, able to deal with any labor violence and the wildest of the guapos.
Among those older men I talked to, the era of their youth was remembered as the time of the guapos. The term guapo refers to those young men found in every generation all around the world who roam the streets, alleys, parks, and drinking establishments seeking to show off their skills and sense of derring-do and test themselves against others like them in a diverse array of violent or risky encounters. garrote was not only the purview of labor strikes or wild and crazy young men. It was also treated as serious dueling art done among experts. Other sources that go back only as far as the 1930s recount how, in the city of Barquisimeto at the time, many well-known and respected garroteros such as Asunción Álvarez, Baudilio Ortiz, Pedro José Jiménez, and Tomás Ortiz would regularly give public demonstrations of garrote to appreciative audiences. Then, when engaged in more serious endeavors such as training or dueling with each other, they would retreat to more private areas.
By the beginning of the 1950s, the ability of the government to enforce its rule over the peripheral areas of Venezuela and ban the public display of weapons contributed to the decline of the art. By this time, the policeman Ishmael Colmenares had established a semi-private school in the neighborhood of Los Positos to keep the art alive. The late garrotero Natividad Apóstal recounts how, after he had finished his shift as a policeman, Ishmael would hold a class behind the stable in the back of his house with only one lantern to light up the area. Natividad explained it was to force students not to rely on their vision but to cultivate their other senses. Additionally, there was a need to discourage the unwelcoming gaze of the curious.
As noted earlier, due to the lack of firearms, policemen in Barquisimeto were regularly issued 36-inch-long machetes to maintain law and order. With this as their only weapon, different parts of the machete could be used to inflict increasingly severe forms of pain to subdue an offender. A committed slap with the flat part of the blade or a palazzo could inflict a painful strike, leading him to reconsider the officer’s instructions. Escalating from here was the back unsharpened edge of the machete or the butt handle, which could induce concussions or break bones. Finally, if circumstances warrant it, the cutting edge of the machete could be brought into play. Another well-known school, called Palo Sangriento or Bloody Stick, existed in a cobbler’s shop led by Felix Garcia, who, as an aside, kept his tuition fee the same from the 1940s until he shut it down due to old age in the early 1990s. What is interesting about these two schools of garrote is how they taught both the walking stick, the machete, and the knife as part of their curriculum. What this shows is that by the mid-20th century, saber and machete fencing and stick fencing, once considered separate arts in the 19th century, were now taught together while maintaining the differences between fencing with a cutting versus a percussive weapon.
Despite the changing conditions discouraging the practice of garrote, there are still a number of families in the city’s working-class neighborhoods far away from the wealthy areas who see garrote as part of their heritage as a Venezuelan and as a family legacy. Something that can provide a practitioner with a set of practical ethics and self-defense moves to keep someone alive and fighting in what can be a volatile and sometimes treacherous world. As long as there is a Venezuela, there will be garrote.
Michael J. Ryan. is a visiting research professor in the Anthropology department at Binghamton University, New York, United States.
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