Pedrosa y Guerrero, Antonio De La (c. 1660–)

Antonio De La Pedrosa y Guerrero (b. ca. 1660; active late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries), president of the Audiencia of Santa Fe de Bogotá (1718–1719). Pedrosa's public career in New Granada began in the mid-1680s when he served as the fiscal protector de indios, an official charged with the oversight of Indian policy, in the Audiencia of Santa Fe. He then rose to high-level metropolitan posts. Pedrosa's chief fame, however, rests on his role as the official sent to New Granada to establish the machinery of viceregal government that followed the royal decision in April 1717 to create a third Spanish American viceroyalty.

Acting with the authority of a viceroy and even called viceroy, Pedrosa largely concerned himself in 1718 and 1719 with administrative affairs, including the decision to establish the viceregal capital in Santa Fe instead of Cartagena, and policy regarding contraband trade. The frugal president clashed with the ostentatious first viceroy, Jorge de Villalonga (1719–1724), and the two remained political enemies even after Pedrosa returned to Spain in 1720.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Two essential, well-reasoned analyses of the history of the creation of the viceroyalty of New Granada are María Teresa Garrido Conde, La primera creación del virreinato de Nueva Granada (1717–1723) (1965); and Sergio Elías Ortiz, Nuevo Reino de Granada: Real Audiencias y presidentes, pt. 3, Presidentes de Capa y Espada (1654–1719) (1966), which was published as part of vol. 4 of the Historia extensa de Colombia (1970). See also the relevant discussion in volume 1 of the Manual de historia de Colombia, edited by J. G. Cobo Borda and Santiago Mutis Duran, 3rd ed. (1984).

Additional Bibliography

Grahn, Lance. Political Corruption and Reform in Cartagena Province, 1700–1740. Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1993.

Peñas Galindo and David Ernesto. La independencia y la mafia colonial: comerciantes, contrabandistas, y traidores. Bogotá, Colombia: Ediciones Tercer Mundo, 1981.

                                     Lance R. Grahn