Abstract

This article explores the situation faced by the so-called royalists during the Independence in New Granada and their language of love and subordination to the king, through which they ratified their membership in the Spanish political community, even having been born in America. The king was not a distant symbol, he was a presence felt and lived by his American vassals. The wars of Independence did not confront, as traditional historiography has argued, Creoles and peninsular people, but members of the same political body, who, because they remained loyal to the crown or were born in the peninsula, were turned into enemies to be exterminated, such as as provided in the War to Death Decree of 1813, issued by Simón Bolívar.