| Sumario: | On 7 January 1780, officials of the audiencia of Quito gathered in the court's main salon for the first meeting of the new year. President don Joseph García de León y Pizarro addressed the ministers and their functionaries to explain his vision of sovereignty, the state, and juridical rule. He valued the speech so much that he ordered the city's printer to publish the text as a pamphlet, the Discurso elocuente pronunciado en la renovación del Tribunal de la Real Audiencia. This article accepts García de León's assertion of the speech's importance. It provides a symptomatic reading of the pamphlet, attentive to its evocative and metaphorical language of violence and monstrosity in a demand for obedience in the judicial bureaucracy and argues that García de León's admonition to obedience inadvertently revealed the erosion of the pillars of a symbolic order that structured colonial rule for generations.
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