The Death of Lope de Aguirre
Surrounded and facing capture, Aguirre decided to kill his daughter, so that she would be spared the horrors that awaited her as the daughter of a penniless traitor to the crown. When another woman grappled with him for his harquebus, he dropped it and stabbed Elvira to death with a dagger. Spanish troops, reinforced by his own men, quickly cornered him. He was shot before being chopped into pieces. Different pieces of Aguirre were sent to surrounding towns.
Lope de Aguirre’s Legacy
Although Ursúa’s El Dorado expedition was destined to fail, it may not have been an utter fiasco if not for Aguirre and his madness. It is estimated that Lope either killed or ordered the death of 72 of the original Spanish explorers, including a handful of women.
Lope de Aguirre did not manage to overthrow Spanish rule in the Americas, but he did leave an interesting legacy. Aguirre was neither the first nor the only conquistador to go rogue and attempt to deprive the Spanish crown of the royal fifth (one-fifth of all spoils from the New World was always reserved for the crown). Cristóbal de Olid had nearly carved a kingdom for himself out of Honduras in 1523-1524. Actions of conquistadores like these caused the crown to keep a closer watch on its subjects in the New World.
Lope de Aguirre’s most visible legacy may be in the world of literature and film. Many writers and directors have found inspiration in the tale of a madman leading a troop of greedy, hungry men through dense jungles in an attempt to overthrow a king. There have been a handful of books written about Aguirre, among them Abel Posse’s Daimón (1978) and Miguel Otero Silva’s Lope de Aguirre, príncipe de la libertad (1979). There have been three attempts to make films about Aguirre’s El Dorado expedition. The best by far is the 1972 German effort Aguirre, Wrath of God, starring Klaus Kinski as Lope de Aguirre and directed by Werner Hertzog. There is also the 1988 El Dorado, a Spanish film by Carlos Saura. More recently, the low budget Las Lágrimas de Dios (The Tears of God) was produced in 2007, directed by and starring Andy Rakich.
Source: Colonial Latin America, by Mark A. Burkholder and Lyman L. Johnson.
