Restorative justice as a liberation procedure from black slavery in Epifanio de Moirans

Abstract

This text seeks to articulate one of the aporias which marked the life of the colonial societies of Spanish America, that is, the trafficking and slavery of black people brought from the African continent. Faced with this situation, this study approaches one of the first theoretical antislavery proposals, which was advocated by the Capuchin friar Epifanio de Moirans OFMCap (1644-1689). His work Servi liberi seu naturalis mancipiorum libertatis iusta defensio in 1682. This proposal talks about, among other things, the just procedures for liberation from slavery, through the restitution of goods to the people who were victims of these unjust practices in the colonial times. For this we follow the itinerary of analysis of the provocative inquisition initiated against the slaveholder mentalities. The ethical demand here is for the fulfillment of the imperative of restitution of the goods to the enslaved people. This objectified the restorative act of the value of their slave work. Following this, we seek to reconstruct how the conception of a theory of restorative justice could have been implemented, having to deal with the tension of continuous dubiety in the unjust reception of people for slave trafficking. Finally, we deal with the contestatory proposition of the French Capuchin friar in the sense of instituting a procedure for the restitution of the material goods as something doable. Thus, the goal was full reimbursement for the damages caused by the infamous and unjust legal practice of black slavery in the colonial Iberian-American context.