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NY Review, OCTOBER 23, 2014 ISSUE
The Huge, Ignored Uprising in the Andes
J.H. Elliott
The Tupac Amaru Rebellion
by Charles F. Walker
Belknap Press/ Harvard University Press, 347 pp., $29.95
Between 1780 and 1782, when the rebellion of the British colonists in
North America was reaching its climax, a still more savage drama was
being played out in South America. The Andes were in revolt, and Spain,
like Britain, was faced with the prospect of losing one of its most
prized overseas possessions. Since the overthrow of the Inca empire in
the 1530s and the discovery of the silver mountain of Potosí in the high
Andes in 1545, the viceroyalty of Peru had generated a substantial part
of the wealth that enabled Spain to create and maintain its “empire of
the Indies” and its position as a leading European power. Now suddenly
in 1780 Spain saw its control of Peru placed in jeopardy by a minor
Indian nobleman, José Gabriel Condorcanqui, who laid claim to the royal
blood of the Incas as a direct descendant of the last Inca ruler, Tupac
Amaru, captured and executed by the Spaniards in 1572.
The rebellion of Tupac Amaru II, as Condorcanqui came to style himself,
was the largest and most dangerous rebellion faced by the Spanish crown
in its American empire before the great upheavals of the early
nineteenth century that culminated in its loss. Although there had been
innumerable disturbances and uprisings over the course of some two and a
half centuries of Spanish imperial rule, these had for the most part
been fairly small-scale and localized, and were suppressed with relative
ease. This was partly because of the coercive power at the disposal of
the imperial authorities once they chose to deploy it, but much of the
relative tranquility of the new multi-ethnic societies that emerged in
the wake of conquest can be attributed to the system of government that
evolved as Spain’s Habsburg rulers imposed elaborate judicial and
administrative structures on the conquered territories.
Under this system, Spaniards and creoles (their American-born
descendants), the indigenous peoples (all subsumed under the name of
“Indians”), and a growing population of mestizos, of mixed Indian and
European ancestry, with the further addition of African blood as
increasing numbers of slaves were imported, were all nominally welded
into one organic whole, whether in the viceroyalty of New Spain (Mexico)
or in that of Peru. Each was conceived as a Christian commonwealth ruled
by a distant but allegedly beneficent monarch and watched over by a
ubiquitous church. Within this hierarchically organized society each
section of the community theoretically possessed its own allotted space.
A native elite of caciques, or kurakas as they were known in Peru,
served as intermediaries between the royal authorities and the
indigenous population; and every individual or community had the right
of appeal up the bureaucratic chain to the king himself. This system
left room for maneuver both to the rulers and the ruled.
How, then, did it come about that the system failed at the end of the
1770s, and that Spain, ruled by the Bourbons since the turn of the
century, found itself confronted by a mass uprising that threatened the
loss of vast areas of Peru? This is a question that has exercised
generations of historians, and the literature on the rebellion of Tupac
Amaru II is enormous. Some of these historians have focused on the
charismatic figure of José Gabriel himself, and on the grievances that
led him to raise the standard of rebellion. Others, particularly in
recent years, have sought to relate him and his cause to the unique
characteristics of Andean society and to the changes it was undergoing
in the eighteenth century, in part resulting from the administrative and
economic reforms introduced by the new Bourbon dynasty.
There is certainly no lack of documents on which historians can draw.
The judicial inquiries and court cases that followed the capture of the
leaders and the collapse of the revolt generated a vast amount of
documentation, much of it preserved in the Archive of the Indies in
Seville; and between 1980 and 1982 seven volumes of documents on the
rebellion were published in Peru to celebrate the second centenary of
the uprising. Yet in spite of this mass of material, many puzzles
remain, and it is with these puzzles that Charles F. Walker has grappled
in the first extended survey of the causes and the course of the Tupac
Amaru rebellion to appear in English since 1966.1
Walker, a professor of history at the University of California, Davis,
is the author of two previous books on late colonial Peru: one, the more
recent, was devoted to the middle years of the eighteenth century, and
the other ran from the Tupac Amaru rebellion to the somewhat precarious
establishment of an independent Peruvian republic in the nineteenth
century.2 Although the first two chapters of the latter, Smoldering
Ashes, are devoted to the rebellion and its background, most of it deals
with the subsequent period as the embers of the conflagration died down,
to be swallowed up in a still-greater conflagration as the viceroyalty
found itself embroiled in the revolutionary Spanish-American wars of
independence. With the Tupac Amaru rebellion as a potential point of
transition between late-colonial and republican Peru, it must have
seemed logical to link the two books with a close study of the violent
events that brought death and tragedy to tens of thousands of
inhabitants of the Andes in the 1780s.
The result is a lucid and accessible survey, in which Walker skillfully
blends narrative with explanation to construct a harrowing story of
violence and atrocities on an enormous scale. The narrative is well
paced and efficiently written, although there are occasional stylistic
infelicities, as when he writes that Tupac Amaru’s supporters “sought to
right an out-of-sync system,” or tells us that the Spanish visitor
general, José Antonio de Areche, “vented” the words that he goes on to
quote. Some of his set pieces, in particular those describing the
hideous deaths inflicted on Tupac Amaru and his wife, family, and
followers, are painfully vivid, and he makes judicious use of his
sources, pointing out, for instance, the need for careful reading of
witness statements at judicial inquiries, as when an illiterate Indian
repeats almost verbatim the words spoken by the judge on the previous day.
He is good, too, at evoking the setting—the impossible geography of the
Andes, with their towering mountain ranges, craggy passes, and
precipitous tracks; the extremes of cold and wetness; the abrupt changes
of altitude, rising to 12,000 feet or more above sea level, that made
travelers from the coastal regions breathless and sick, and whose
effects had to be counteracted by constant chewing on coca leaves, the
remedy used by the peoples of the Andes themselves.
All this is well described, and will give Anglophone readers a
perceptive and reliable account of the terrible events that occurred far
away from what they naturally regard as the principal center of action
at that time, the British North American colonies, a mere 322,000 square
miles in size, as compared with an Andean surface area approaching two
million.3 Walker’s narrative, however, does not substantially alter the
general picture that has emerged from work published in recent decades,
although his careful reading of the documents has allowed him to add
fresh details and insights, in particular about the active participation
in the revolt of Micaela Bastidas, Tupac Amaru’s wife, and about the
extent to which the rebellion did or did not enjoy the support of the
church and the parish priests.
Essentially Walker’s book can be regarded as a valuable synthesis of the
current state of knowledge about the uprising and its origins. In spite
of all the efforts of historians and anthropologists, it may not be
possible to get much further, especially as Andean memories and belief
systems, a rich source alongside written documents, have already been
mined to good effect.4 Otherwise there is little beyond the records
generated by the imperial regime and its adherents to allow entry into
the inner lives of the eighteenth-century peoples of the Andes.
Those peoples were very far from constituting a composite identity. Many
were peasants, but many others were town-dwellers, and many, too,
including in all probability Tupac Amaru himself, had European blood in
their veins. There were numerous divisions and fissures in Andean
society, and not the least of these were ethnic and linguistic
divisions, most notably between the Quechua-speaking peoples of the
Cuzco region in southern Peru and the Aymara speakers of the Lake
Titicaca region and Upper Peru (today’s Bolivia). The Aymaras had been
incorporated by force into the Inca empire, and persisting tensions
between them and the Quechuas were critical to the character and
development of the Andean rebellion.
As Walker makes clear, the story of the rebellion has tended to be told
from the standpoint of the former Inca capital Cuzco, a city and region
that have been extensively studied. The problem for him, as for all
historians of the uprising—or, more correctly, uprisings—is how to
combine an account of the events in the Cuzco region with those
unfolding on what he calls “the other side” of Lake Titicaca. The
differences, however, are crucial to the understanding of the story.
The rise and fall of Tupac Amaru take up only the first, though the
major, part of the book. We then move to the other side of Lake Titicaca
to follow the Aymara uprising, which intermittently joined forces with
that of Tupac Amaru and his followers. This sectional division, although
no doubt necessary for the construction of a coherent narrative, tends
to suggest a chronological and geographical sequence, with rebellion
moving southward from Cuzco to the region of La Paz, some 325 miles
away. In fact the chronology was if anything the other way around. Tomás
Katari, an Aymara, and, like Tupac Amarua, a kuraka, made his first open
moves in defense of the oppressed Indian communities of Upper Peru in
1777, a year rumored to promise the cataclysmic overthrow of an unjust
world order. Tupac Amaru may by this time have been plotting, but he
only launched his rebellion in November 1780, three months after Katari
had launched a rebellion of his own.
Tomás Katari fell into the hands of the Spanish authorities, who
executed him in January 1781, but the rebellion continued under the
direction first of his brothers and then, after they too had been
captured and executed, of a poor Indian with little or no Spanish, the
charismatic Julián Apaza. The new leader assumed the name of Tupac
Katari in honor both of the Kataris and of Tupac Amaru himself, who had
suffered an agonizing death, dragged apart by four horses, in Cuzco’s
principal plaza on May 18, 1781. The katarista movement had a momentum
of its own, and the growing estrangement between the kataristas and the
tupamaristas, now led by Tupac Amaru’s cousin, Diego Cristóbal, would
help to seal the fate of both.
The two movements, which Walker briefly compares, differed in important
respects—for instance, the “glorified image” of the Inca past was far
more important to the tupamaristas—but both aspired to relieve the
Andean communities of the oppressive burdens that made a misery of their
lives. Many of those burdens, including the mita, or forced labor
service on rural haciendas, in textile workshops, and, most notoriously,
in the silver and mercury mines, had existed in some form or other since
the later sixteenth century, and were a long-standing source of grievance.
For various reasons, however, the burdens became even more oppressive in
the years leading up to 1780. This was partly the consequence of a
growing pressure on local resources, resulting from the gradual recovery
of population levels after the cataclysmic losses of the post-conquest
period—losses brought about by the upheavals of conquest and by the
exposure of previously isolated populations to an array of European
diseases. Conditions were aggravated, however, by new fiscal measures
introduced by the Spanish Bourbons in an attempt to maximize revenues
and “rationalize” the administration and the economy, as well as by an
endemic corruption that affected every branch of the viceregal state.
In addition to the payment of tribute, Indian peasants were forced to
buy often unwanted commodities, including locally produced textiles, at
extortionate prices under a system known as the reparto de mercancías.
Extortions were made all the worse by pressure from kurakas and other
local officials who were themselves under pressure from the viceregal
authorities for higher returns, while at the same time expecting their
own share of the spoils. Inevitably there were many local variations in
the degree of pressure and of resentment, but both Tomás Katari and
Tupac Amaru could be sure of a wide response over a vast region when
they proclaimed their intention to abolish the mita, the reparto, and
sales taxes and customs houses.
In company with other historians Walker describes the consequent
uprisings as “anti-colonial,” but in my view the blanket word
“colonial,” which trips so lightly off modern tongues, tends to conceal
as much as it reveals. In many parts of Peru the distinctions between
colonists and colonized had become blurred over time, and the Katari and
Tupac Amaru rebellions were highly complex movements engulfing societies
that were themselves variegated and complex in composition and
structure, and are too easily dismissed as straightforwardly “colonial.”
Peru itself was a kingdom among the composite of kingdoms and lesser
territories that made up Spain’s monarchy and empire. In 1776, four
years before the rebellions, what had hitherto been a single viceroyalty
with its capital in Lima was broken up, with the Bolivian altiplano
removed from Lima’s jurisdiction and incorporated into a new
viceroyalty, La Plata, with its capital in Buenos Aires. The separation
of Cuzco, the ancient capital of the Incas, from Potosí and the Lake
Titicaca basin led to major economic and social disruptions that
weakened the Peruvian viceroyalty, as silver and trade were diverted
away from Cuzco, Lima, and the Pacific coast to Buenos Aires and the
Spanish Atlantic.
Tupac Amaru and Tomás Katari now belonged to different jurisdictions. In
1777 Tupac Amaru went to Lima, partly to fight for legal recognition of
his entitlement to a marquisate as the legitimate descendant of Tupac
Amaru I, but also to plead on behalf of his people. Katari, for his
part, traveled a year later to Buenos Aires with the same purpose in
mind. Both returned home bitterly disappointed by their lack of success.
As kurakas, and simultaneously as landholders, merchants, and muleteers,
both were fully incorporated members, if modest ones, of the viceregal
society to whose rulers they looked for redress.
Modesty, however, was not a quality that can be claimed for Tupac Amaru.
The son of a local kuraka, he lived on the fringes of the mixed
indigenous, creole, and mestizo elite of Cuzco, which proudly maintained
Inca traditions and wore Inca dress. Like many members of that Inca
nobility he was educated in the Jesuit college to which kurakas were
accustomed to send their sons, and by the time he returned from his year
in Lima he was both well informed and well read. His claims to be the
heir of the first Tupac Amaru, however, jarred the Cuzco elite, and they
stood aside when he announced his leadership of a revolt whose primary
aim was to stamp out injustice throughout Peru.
Although later hailed as the precursor of Peruvian independence, Tupac
Amaru’s was not a separatist movement. On the contrary, although he
began his revolt with the judicial execution of a highly unpopular
district governor—an execution vividly described in the opening pages of
Walker’s book—he followed convention in looking to the king of Spain,
Charles III, to punish and dismiss corrupt and evil officials, and he
always claimed to be acting on the king’s behalf.
From the start he was keen to hold together creoles, mestizos, and
pure-blood Indians, in the full awareness that unity was essential to
his movement’s success. As a merchant and muleteer, constantly traveling
the Andes, he had an extensive network of contacts; and, as a Spanish
and Quechua speaker, he was ideally placed to cross social and ethnic,
as well as geographical, boundaries. He could draw, too, on the strength
of his family and kinship connections, and on the intelligence and
impressive organizational skills of his wife, Micaela Bastidas, a
fervently devout woman and a full partner in his leadership of the
revolt, who, as Walker tells us in some of the most novel pages of his
book, would encourage and cajole his Indian followers, plan military
operations, and keep lines of communication open with parish priests.
As the self-proclaimed heir of the last Inca ruler, and steeped in the
history of his people, as told in the famous Royal Commentaries of the
early-seventeenth-century mestizo chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega, his
message was one that resonated powerfully across Andean society,
blending as it did Andean notions of the well-ordered cosmos with
messianic and utopian overtones that appear to have drawn on both
European and Andean sources. His royal blood, too, gave him immense
prestige in Indian communities, and many believed the claims of his
followers that he was immortal and able to resurrect the dead. His
message, however, was one that seems to have had an effect on different
sectors of Andean society in different ways.
Walker has had no more success than earlier historians in determining
his exact intentions, and the apparent confusion of so many of his
statements suggests that he may well have tailored them to the specific
audiences he wished to reach. His claims to be acting under direct
orders from the king of Spain sat uneasily with his royal claims as an
Inca, but it is possible that he thought of a dual kingship and saw no
incompatibility in his stance. He told the people of Cuzco to “desert
the Spaniards and free the slaves,” which Walker thinks refers to the
African slaves largely concentrated in the coastal regions, but which I
suspect is a more generalized reference to all the oppressed,
irrespective of the exact form of bondage under which they labored.
Yet while preaching an uprising of the oppressed against their masters,
he was desperate to keep people of Spanish descent, as well as the
mestizos, as allies. Nor was he in any sense an enemy of the religion
imposed by the conquerors on Peru. Many parish priests were hated by
many Indian communities for their extortionate and grasping ways, but he
firmly rejected appeals to abolish the priesthood and even insisted that
the tithes required by the church would continue to be paid in the more
just society that would soon be established. His excommunication and
that of his followers by the bishop of Cuzco came as a sudden and
potentially devastating reversal, but he claimed that as an Indian he
could not be excommunicated, and that anyhow he was a model Christian,
regularly attending mass.
Not surprisingly, he failed to hold together the different ethnic and
social groups that he hoped to unite, but there was disunity also among
those who opposed him. There was no standing army in the viceroyalty, it
took time to assemble local militias, and his insurgency, although it
failed to capture Cuzco, spread fast over large areas of territory. As
Walker shows, Tupac Amaru, whose troops were for the most part armed
only with lances, knives, slings, and rocks thrown down from the
heights, waged an effective guerrilla campaign.
Every act of violence, however, was met with more violence. In spite of
its leader’s appeals for restraint, the most horrific atrocities were
committed by all sides, and, not surprisingly, property owners and
members of the elite, especially creoles or those of mixed race, took
fright. As the insurrection moved south to more purely Indian areas, and
Tupac Amaru’s restraining hand was removed once he had been captured and
killed, the violence grew still more intense. Indians accused Spaniards
of being heretics and bad Christians, and turned their fury on those
with “white” skins.
This was particularly true of Tupac Katari’s followers in the
Aymara-speaking region, who twice subjected the city of La Paz to
prolonged sieges, and carried the revolt into Chile and what is now
northern Argentina. Insurrections that had been launched with the aim of
creating a just social order took on the character of a caste war, in
the sense that ethnicity as well as hierarchy and social status
increasingly came to define the “enemy.” Meanwhile, on the opposing side
the same process was at work in reverse among the forces of the viceroyalty.
Repression when it came was savage and prolonged. Captured rebels were
given farcical trials and, after gruesome deaths, their body parts were
liberally distributed through the towns and communities of the Andes.
Breaking with traditional policies designed to preserve a space for the
“republic of the Indians,” Visitor General Areche sought to carry out a
policy of what Walker calls “cultural genocide,” prohibiting the
representation of Inca dramas and the wearing of Inca dress, destroying
the portraits of Inca ancestors, banning the reading of Garcilaso de la
Vega’s allegedly inflammatory Royal Commentaries, and forcing the use of
Spanish on Quechua speakers. The full implementation of these draconian
measures, which were opposed by other officials and failed to gain any
meaningful support from Madrid, was in any case well beyond the very
limited administrative and military resources at the disposal of the
viceregal state.
The brutality of the repression, however, could not be expunged from the
collective memory of the Andean peoples, for all the attempts of the
viceregal authorities to cast a blanket of silence over the rebellion.
An embittered indigenous population was driven in on itself, while
creoles and mestizos, similarly traumatized by the events of 1780–1782,
hesitated in the period of the wars of independence to imitate the
example of other parts of Spanish America and break their ties with
Spain. Independence did not look a very attractive proposition when the
prospect of a return to anarchy and a new reign of terror stared them in
the face.
The rebellions of Tupac Amaru II and of Tomás Katari, then, would cast a
long shadow over nineteenth- and twentieth-century Bolivia and Peru.
While elites tried to keep their Indian populations on the margins of
political and social life and if anything strengthened their hold over
the peasantry in the post-independence period, the indigenous
communities nurtured their memories of the eighteenth-century rebellions
and kept alive their dreams. The indigenista movements of the twentieth
century, which aspired to realize those dreams, would in due course
result, in 2006, in the installation of Evo Morales in the presidential
palace in La Paz as the first leader from the indigenous population to
be democratically elected president of Bolivia. In Peru, ironically, it
was the military regime of General Velasco Alvarado of 1968–1975 that
elevated Tupac Amaru II into a national symbol as the precursor of its
agrarian reform program and as the heroic defender of indigenous rights,
while in 1980 adherents of Peru’s Shining Path unleashed the terror that
they hoped would bring utopia to the Andes. Tupac Amaru’s rebellion may
not have the high historical profile of the contemporaneous American and
French Revolutions, but it lit a fuse that continues to burn.
1 See Lillian Estelle Fisher, The Last Inca Revolt, 1780–1783
(University of Oklahoma Press, 1966). Walker’s book does not include a
bibliography, but bibliographical references can be found in his
endnotes, notably those on pp. 284–285. The essays by various hands in
Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World,
18th to 20th Centuries, edited by Steve J. Stern (University of
Wisconsin Press, 1987), remain a particularly valuable source of
information and ideas. ↩
2 Charles F. Walker, Shaky Colonialism: The 1746 Earthquake-Tsunami in
Lima, Peru, and Its Long Aftermath (Duke University Press, 2008), and
Smoldering Ashes: Cuzco and the Creation of Republican Peru, 1780–1840
(Duke University Press, 1999). ↩
3 See Magnus Mörner, The Andean Past: Land, Societies, and Conflicts
(Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 6, gives the Andean land surface
area as 2.7 million square kilometers. ↩
4 Notably by Alberto Flores Galindo, Buscando un inca: identidad y
utopía en los Andes: ensayo (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1986);
translated as In Search of an Inca: Identity and Utopia in the Andes
(Cambridge University Press, 2010). ↩
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