Coartación was a system of self-paid manumission in colonial Latin American slave societies, during the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. It enabled slaves to make a down payment and to set the price for their freedom, conferring on them the status of coartado, which brought extra rights and privileges to the slave. The term originally comes from the Spanish word "coartar" as meaning “to cut off” or “limit” how they would set the price for freedom and cut it off from the (rising) market price so that the master could not ask for a higher price. But by the eighteenth century, it had become "coartación" as meaning "hindrance" or "restriction" in reference to the action of restricting the slave master's power.