Socioeconomic Causes

The main grievances behind the uprisings, as well as the numerous local conflicts and riots that preceded them, correspond to important government policies and systemic factors. Starting in the mid-18th century, the ministers of King Carlos III carried out an ambitious program, the so-called Bourbon Reforms, with the goal of converting their overseas kingdoms into full colonial possessions. They implemented a series of measures that resulted in the growing discontent of broad portions of the population. These measures included increased Indian tribute quotas and alcabalas (sales taxes), as well as the establishment of custom houses to ensure their collection, a tax on liquor, the establishment of a monopoly on the retail sale of tobacco, and other taxes that affected the indigenous communities as well as other social groups (craftsmen, merchants, small landowners, and mestizo and creole tenants). Similarly, the repartimiento forzoso de mercancías, or forced distribution of goods, experienced a sustained expansion after its legalization in 1756. This was a commercial monopoly that forced the indigenous peoples to buy goods (mules, iron, rope, coca, and other items) from the chief Spanish provincial magistrates (corregidores) at higher-than-market-value prices. Demands for the abolition of this system grew increasingly loud: legal protests, riots, and finally the great pan-Andean rebellion, for which this unjust system was the primary impetus. Furthermore, the caciques, who acted as intermediaries in the distribution and collection of goods, were subject to immense pressures from both sides of the system, the provincial Spanish governors and the indigenous communities. In extensive regions of Alto Peru and El Collao (the southern Peruvian provinces bordering Lake Titicaca), the legitimacy of caciques, both those designated directly by the corregidores and those who had hereditary rights, was harshly questioned by the members of their communities. Additionally, the imperial administration’s efforts to curb church taxes created a profound rift in the rural structures of government. Andean peasants knew very well how to take advantage of this conflict of interests in order to fight back against the extravagant cost of the sacraments, the celebrations of patron saints, and the parish offerings (called “ricuchicus”). Thus, the authority and income of the parish priests, mostly of American origin, was endangered by the combined pressure of the indigenous population, the royal magistrates, and the unequal competition for peasant surpluses caused by the forced distribution of goods. The victims of cross-claims themselves, the clergy would often incite indigenous dissent in order to undermine the power of the state officials or caciques.²

Apart from the impact of the so-called Bourbon reforms, other economic phenomena would help erode the living standards of large portions of the population. During the 18th century, there was a marked decline in the prices of the agricultural products that the indigenous sold in the cities so they could pay tributes, repartos (forced distribution of goods), and aranceles eclesiásticos (church fees). The portion of the harvests they were able to save to feed themselves grew smaller every year. The slow but sustained demographic growth made the community lands seem more and more insufficient with each new season, and the land disputes with landowners, noble Andean families, and bordering communities began to mount. As has already been stated, the center of the rebellion was also the core area of the “mita potosina,” where members of the Andean communities worked as forced labor in the Potosí mines.

By the time that Túpac Amaru had proclaimed himself the new Inca king, the great mining center was embarking on a new cycle of growth. Its driving force was not the introduction of technological innovations or improvements in the provision of mercury and other supplies (as was occurring with the Mexican mining industry at the same time), but rather more brutal and sophisticated forms of forced labor. In the Cuzco area, the transfer of Upper Peru to the jurisdiction of newly created Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata in 1776 and the subsequent linkage between the silver mines and the Atlantic Ocean disrupted the traditional trade routes that had connected Lima to the sierras of southern Peru and Potosí. Channeling the import and export trades through the port of Buenos Aires meant that the goods produced in Cuzco (sugar, coca, textiles) did increasingly worse in the Andean markets. The growing antagonism between chorrillos (small-scale textile mills attached to community lands controlled by the Indians themselves) and obrajes (textile mills usually attached to Spanish haciendas that employed mostly semislave labor) was one of the results. It is not surprising that some of Túpac Amaru’s first measures were to abolish the forced distribution of goods and the mita, as well as to “destroy the obrajes.”³

There were many shared causes of the widespread uprisings of 1780–1782, but they were not uniform in intensity. The wave of political unrest in the heart of the Andean territory had very different forms in each of the four main centers of rebel activity: Cuzco, Chayanta, La Paz, and Oruro. Modern historiography has rejected early interpretations based on a Cuzco-centric account of this event. Although Túpac Amaru eventually became the rebellion’s most recognizable symbol, it was not a homogenous movement, but rather a concurrence of several uprisings, each with its own history and dynamic. The Aymara communities of the La Paz plateau, the inhabitants of Cuzco and the highlands of Collao, the indigenous who inhabited the valleys and punas of the region of Charcas and Potosí, and the residents of the village of Oruro all traveled different paths to arrive at insurrection in 1780. The 1780 rebellion represented different things for each of them.

The Rebellion Led by Túpac Amaru

In the south of colonial Peru during the decades leading up to the great rebellion, the relationship between indigenous and Cuzco society had two distinctive features. The first was the growing visibility of Inca images and Andean cultural motifs, in both popular and elite artistic expressions and in public ceremonies, a phenomenon known as the Inca cultural renaissance. The colonial regime worked to keep the memories of the precolonial past alive, conceding preeminence to the Inca aristocracy and allowing “Inca tradition” to be taught in the schools for caciques—such as the one where Túpac Amaru himself studied, San Francisco de Borja, in Cuzco, where the walls were covered with Inca images.⁴ Second, the indigenous aristocracy enjoyed an elevated social status among both Cuzco white settlers and the rural communities. The majority of the Andean lords were bilingual mestizos who knew how to read and write and had forged well-established, stable social and kinship networks with the regional elite. Some caciques owned haciendas and mines, and they participated in commercial enterprises with Hispanic officials and entrepreneurs as business associates rather than simply as agents.⁵ Members of several prestigious indigenous noble families even became priests, one of the most prominent symbols of assimilation and economic success.⁶ It is no wonder that the historian Alberto Flores Galindo argues that in the 18th century “a Cuzco noble was considered to be as important as a Hispanic noble.”⁷ A study of marriage practices among the native elite of Cuzco has concluded that “the indigenous nobility were seen as the zenith of indigenous society, but the legal barrier that separated them from creole Peru was actually more porous at the personal and familial levels than the social borders that the nobility erected between themselves and commoner Indians.”⁸ Similarly, the descendants of the ancient nobility maintained control over the majority of the native chiefdoms, and, in marked contrast to the rest of the Andean territories, their authority did not appear to be seriously questioned by the indigenous communities, judging by the scarcity of lawsuits and collective protests against them.⁹ In fact, this ascendancy survived the collapse of the local governmental institutions: in contrast to other centers of rebel activity, the native peoples near Cuzco tended to tended to abide by their caciques’ decision either to support or to oppose the insurrection. Overall, the indigenous nobility enjoyed a social prestige that was unheard of in other Andean territories.

The ideology behind the Túpac Amaru uprisings reflected the tensions and the ambiguities derived from the conjunction of Inca nationalism, the complete assimilation of the indigenous nobility into Cuzco’s colonial society, and the mobilization of the masses. On one hand, Túpac Amaru saw himself, and was seen by his followers, as the new Inca king. This conception of Inca restoration may have been imbued with millennial and messianic beliefs, including cyclical perspectives on history, prophecies of imminent cosmological and social cataclysms, and myths concerning the resurrection of the last Inca.¹⁰ Túpac Amaru was able to translate his political aspirations into the old Hispanic language of “pactismo” (“contracts”), restructuring the balance between the king and the political entities within the monarchy. It is debatable whether or not this appeal to tradition was motivated by a genuine desire to re-establish the colonial pact in more autonomic terms, or to foster a protonational Peruvian project. In either case, Túpac Amaru did not define his political community as merely indigenous, but rather as a plural entity, made up of diverse American social groups. The spontaneous, albeit short-lived, support of several creole and mestizo groups for an uprising of such magnitude suggests that the invocation of the Inca legacy, or the symbolism that the image of Túpac Amaru projected, constituted a language that they could understand and to some extent even share. Of course, this did not mean that these different constituencies would see the goals of the uprising in the same way. While the tupamarista leadership had hoped that the nonindigenous inhabitants of Peru would accept the new power dynamics that emerged with the Inca political resurgence, the Hispanic population that decided to join the movement used the protest to end the Bourbon economic reforms and their systematic discrimination against those in senior positions in the colonial administration, the army, and the church. It did not take them long to recognize the futility of the enterprise. On the other hand, the number of lower-class indigenous communities that supported the uprising tended to have different attitude toward their participation than their leaders. The indigenous masses saw the rebellion as an opportunity to remedy longstanding economic grievances against the colonial administrators, the haciendas, the mills, and the nonindigenous elites in general. The collective mobilization was structured according to traditional communal hierarchies, but from the perspective of the rural communities, the distinction between Europeans and creoles was by and large meaningless.

The Rebellion in Cuzco

The evolution of the rebellion brought to the surface with dramatic clarity the differences, and in several cases the antagonisms, between the ideological motivations of the peoples involved. Its initial stages centered on the capture and the public execution of the corregidor of Canas and Canchis province, Antonio de Arriaga, in the town of Tinta on November 4, 1780. Túpac Amaru brought together a large number of Indians from across the region. It has been calculated that around 85 percent of the insurgent troops from Cuzco came from this province or from Quispicanchis, in the valley of Vilcanota. Likewise, the new Inca appeared to attract the support or at least the tentative backing of other sectors within the local society. He combined a categorical rejection of the repartimientos de mercancías enforced by the provincial magistrates, the mita potosina, the textile mills, and the sales taxes, with continuous calls for the unity of all “Peruvians” (native communities, mestizos, creoles), a fervent profession of his Catholic faith, and an insistent, if somewhat abstract, proclamation of loyalty to the Spanish crown. He even attempted to suggest that the dismantling of the traditional structures of colonial power underway was being carried out by direct royal orders. He called bad colonial governance into question, not the fact that they were subject to the king. Nevertheless, at the first direct encounter with Cuzco’s military forces sent to stop the march of the insurgent army, his desire to lead a multiethnic coalition came to a dramatic halt.¹¹

In the course of a battle in the town of Sangarará on November 17, the church where the militias had sought refuge began to burn. It is unclear if the fire was intentional or accidental. Hundreds of soldiers perished when the ceiling and walls of the building collapsed; many others were massacred with stones and spears when they tried to flee. Less than two weeks after the execution of Arriaga, the events at Sangarará, became the emblem for what was at stake for the Hispanic residents of Cuzco: indigenous Americans against whites, apostates against Christians. Túpac Amaru’s strenuous efforts to avoid this were of little use. On the day of the massacre, the bishop of Cuzco, Juan Manuel Moscoso y Peralta, excommunicated Túpac Amaru, declaring him a “traitor to the King” and a “usurper of the royal rights.” Those who gave him aid and support would also be excommunicated. This proclamation is particularly significant in light of the relationship between Moscoso and Arriaga before the rebellion. In a typical example of the growing tensions between the civil and ecclesiastical authorities, Moscoso had been involved in vicious confrontations with corregidor Arriaga over power and economic matters. Nevertheless, it only took a few days for the magnitude and the nature of the Andean uprising to bring the usual infighting between the colonial elites to a halt.

In this sense, Charles Walker has demonstrated, the rebellion in Cuzco quickly evolved into a primarily indigenous phenomenon.¹² While some creoles became involved with the uprisings, and a few rose to leadership roles, overall their participation was rare in quantitative terms and their motivations idiosyncratic. Many had previously had close personal ties to Túpac Amaru—as was the case with Antonio Casterlo, a resident of the towns of Sicuani and Tungasuca, who commanded a column of rebels—while others had been taken prisoner during the first weeks and were later persuaded or forced to collaborate. It would be wrong to consider these cases as representative of the attitudes of the creoles as a social group, as was the case, for example, with the contemporaneous “revolution of the comuneros” in New Granada or the Túpac Amaru uprising in the village of Oruro.¹³ In fact, Túpac Amaru himself never trusted his allies, with a few exceptions, and he had good reason for not trusting them: the majority went over to the other side before or during the main military campaign of the insurgents in the area, the siege on the city of Cuzco at the end of December 1780.

Indeed, the march on Cuzco demonstrated with singular clarity the strengths and weaknesses of the rebellion. On one hand, the rebels, after a successful campaign through the provinces of Collao (Lampa, Carabaya, and Azángaro), managed to gather an impressive force of some thirty thousand men camped in the heights of Picchu, on the outskirts of Cuzco. Not since 1536, when Manco Inca’s indigenous army was on the verge of expelling the new Spanish conquistadors from the city, had anything like this been seen. Few residents of Cuzco thought it possible to withstand a direct attack from such a large military force. The attack never materialized, and in less than two weeks, on January 8, 1781, the rebel troops suffered a catastrophic defeat. Some of the causes of this substantial defeat were circumstantial or accidental: the inability to encircle the city because of military setbacks in the border area, the torrential rain, an epidemic of dysentery that spread throughout the Picchu camp, and above all the providential arrival of a regiment sent from Lima. There were other factors corresponding to the social and ideological character of the movement, long in development. Túpac Amaru postponed the attack, waiting for a revolt of the creoles and the popular classes [plebeian groups or lower classes] within the city that never materialized. The lack of cooperation from nonindigenous sectors is also evidenced in the lack of soldiers trained to use firearms. The rebel forces were poorly armed—an obvious disadvantage when confronting the royal army—and few Indians could effectively employ rifles or shotguns; the majority only knew how to wield slingshots, clubs, and spears. In this respect, the services of mestizos and creoles were indispensable. Thus, the limited firepower of the rebels can be interpreted as another indication of the limited participation of nonindigenous persons. In order to manage the artillery, Túpac Amaru had to make use of several of the individuals who had been taken prisoner in the initial days of the uprising. Their nonexistent loyalty was reflected in flagrant acts of sabotage with dire consequences. Apart from that, the main creole contingent, the militias from the town of Sicuani, led by Castelo and his extensive family, deserted without fighting, and once they returned to their hometown they announced the beginning of a counterrebellion. Finally, it is important to note that the noble Inca families of the sacred valley, the most prestigious and prosperous members of the Andean aristocracy, proved reluctant to risk everything for an uprising of indigenous commoners, led by a provincial cacique. Most important is that these royally appointed caciques do not appear to have had less support among the members of their communities than those who joined the rebellion. As Túpac Amaru himself explained, he had been forced to withdraw from Cuzco for lack of soldiers who could use rifles and artillery and “because they put the Indians in the front lines as cannon fodder.”¹⁴

The War in the Highland Provinces of Collao

Although the Cuzco leader never stopped presenting his cause as the fight of all Peruvians against a bad government, the ideology eventually had to be adjusted to the harsh realities of ethnic and class-based antagonisms. As the war grew longer and larger, the political radicalization and the levels of violence became more and more extreme. After the debacle of the siege of Cuzco, especially the arrest and brutal execution of Túpac Amaru, along with his wife and first deputy, Micaela Bastidas, between April and May of 1781, both sides began to massacre one another. The royal army sought to uproot the seeds of the rebellion in the Andean villages, and their commanders did not hesitate to unleash an indiscriminate campaign of terror against all indigenous inhabitants. For their part, the rebels tended to execute anyone who wore traditional Hispanic clothing or who spoke Spanish. Women and children were not necessarily excepted, nor were Indians suspected of collaborating with the enemy. It was more than the unleashing of long-held hatreds or the suspension of moral guidelines that produced an environment in which violence begat violence. What shifted was the ideological core of the struggle, especially as the main focus of the war shifted to the provinces bordering Lake Titicaca after the decline of the rebellion in Cuzco. The rebel command that succeeded Túpac Amaru—his cousin Diego Cristóbal Túpac Amaru, his nephew Andrés Mendigure, his son Mariano, and his brother-in-law Miguel Bastidas—and the highland communities that welcomed them understood that their desires for social transformation entailed a fight to the death with the nonindigenous inhabitants of the area. They acted accordingly. Among other changes, they stopped depending on unlikely external support and adopted the military tactics best suited to their human and technological resources: guerrilla warfare.

The results were felt immediately. The transition from open confrontations to ambushes and surprise attacks by small mobile groups, combined with the widespread support of the communities of Collao, no matter the political leanings of their caciques, and the harsh landscape and climate of the highlands, which the Indians could use to their advantage like no one else, completely changed the struggle. In their campaign for the high provinces, the proud royal troops who had arrived in Cuzco in February under the command of two powerful ministers, Inspector General Antonio de Areche and Field Marshal José del Valle, disbanded at an alarming rate as the royal indigenous troops quickly began to desert and return to their homes. By the end of May 1781 the insurgents achieved their most influential victory in the uprisings in Southern Peru: the occupation of the city of Puno. Soon after, they would also join the siege of La Paz led by Túpac Katari. But first, they proved themselves capable of orchestrating one of the most sophisticated and successful military operations of the rebellion. On the outskirts of Sorata, the capital of the province of Larecaja and the gathering point for creole and mestizo residents to the east of La Paz who were fleeing from Túpac Katari’s forces, Andrés Túpac Amaru built a dam that, once it had accumulated enough water, he destroyed. When the resulting torrent of water flooded the town, the rebel forces entered en masse and seized the church valuables, setting fire to the building, which, like in most places, had been converted into a refuge for the Spanish. In the Plaza de Sorata, anyone considered to be hostile, no matter their origin, age, or gender, had their throat slit. Afterward they marched on the highlands of La Paz.

In short, the death of the new Inca by no means meant the end of the rebellion. On the contrary, as the months went by, it became more and more evident that it was impossible to suppress the uprising with arms alone. The rebellion in the south of Peru quieted down gradually during 1782 and only after a laboriously worked-out peace treaty that created deep divisions between the highest colonial magistrates and took months to enforce. The fact that the armistice extended to the family of Túpac Amaru and their followers was the result of need, not conviction, would soon become evident. By mid-1783, appealing to both real motives (the Amarus never agreed to renounce their illustrious relative) and imaginary ones (the threat of a new uprising), the Peruvian authorities declared that Diego Cristóbal and his family had broken the agreement and ordered their arrest. On July 19, Diego Cristóbal, his mother, and several other collaborators were executed in Cuzco. The most brutal tortures were reserved for Diego Cristóbal Túpac Amaru. Andrés Mendigure and Mariano Túpac Amaru were sent to Spain and died in transit. Even distant relatives who had played no role in the great rebellion were arrested and exiled. The Spanish authorities made it clear that there was no place for figures like the Amarus in the new order of things in the Andean world.

The Katari Brothers’ Rebellion in Chayanta

In the province of Chayanta, as in La Paz and a large part of Alto Perú, the role of the caciques, the implications of state policies, the process of political radicalization, and the meaning of neo-Inca expectations created a distinctive dynamic. Control over the native chiefdoms was the main point of contention during the long process that led up to the outbreak of mass violence. In Andean communities, the powers and sphere of influence of the caciques extended beyond the political and symbolic realms; the welfare—even the survival—of the community depended to a great extent on them. It was the caciques who determined who would work to satisfy the mita and who would sponsor the religious celebrations; they assigned the lands to family units (and the size and characteristics of the plots often determined the tribute quota that they would have to pay); they managed the grain mills, collectively farmed parcels, and other communal economic resources; they arbitrated internal land conflicts between families and ayllus; and they represented their communities in front of magistrates and priests and during border disputes that frequently arose between haciendas and nearby indigenous landholdings. As previously stated, they also worked as agents of the repartimiento de mercancías. Thus, it was not a matter of simply exchanging one cacique for another; a whole world of grievances was at stake. As one may expect, the protests against the caciques shifted to the powerful local groups who supported them or who, at least, did not have the will or the ability to stand up for their common interests. From the beginning, the motivations behind the collective action made for a much less hierarchical, more egalitarian and organized-from-below movement than the uprising in Cuzco.

As the social conflicts revolved around customary modes of exploitation in the rural world, the Bourbon policies functioned as both an object of discontent and a political tool that the indigenous communities could manipulate for their own benefit. The imperial government’s absolutist fight against corruption, tax fraud, excessive ecclesiastical charges, and, more generally, the discretionary power of the colonial officials in the Andean towns equipped the Northern Potosí indigenous with an effective weapon of defense. Thus, during the years leading up to the outbreak of the rebellion, almost all of the communities within the province had been involved in collective protests against the economic and political practices of the provincial magistrates, priests, and caciques, and which combined legal claims with the use of force.

Although the results varied form case to case, on many occasions they earned the solid backing of the audiencia (royal court) in Charcas or the officials in the Potosí hacienda. With that support they grew confident that the actions of their rural overlords were illegal as well as unjust.¹⁵ In the context of this political upheaval, and at an opportune moment, the indigenous community of Macha accused their caciques of having been chosen arbitrarily by the corregidores and demanded that they be replaced by leaders they had elected themselves, in particular an Indian named Tomás Katari. It was this demand, which was analogous to demands of many previous protests, that ended up starting the biggest uprising in the history of the region and that became the inspiration for the rebellions throughout Alto Perú.

Thus, the rebellion in northern Potosí was a gradual process of mass mobilization. The rhetoric of the uprising gradually evolved from the enforcement of the corporate rights of indigenous communities and the proper administration of justice in rural villages to a complete redefinition of the relationship between the king, the local Spanish authorities, and the Andean communities, in accordance with a political idea that Tristan Platt has called “pacto de reciprocidad” (reciprocity pact): in exchange for complying with their obligations to the crown (taxes and the mita), the indigenous communities demanded a guarantee of their economic rights and their right to self-governance.¹⁶ In addition, the northern Potosí community’s attachment to Túpac Amaru had little to do with any desire to restructure the relationship between the Spanish monarchy and the kingdom of Peru as a whole (Indians, mestizos, and creoles). By the end of 1780, when news of Túpac Amaru’s rebellion began to arrive in the region, the colonial authorities had already lost control over the rural villages, and the social unrest was evident in the neighboring provinces. The rebels were not at all concerned with the distinction between Spanish Americans and Spaniards from the Iberian Peninsula. The conflicts expressed a fundamental antagonism between the Andean ayllus and rural power groups rather than between local interests and imperial policies, as was the case in Cuzco. Túpac Amaru occupied the power vacuum left by the crisis of legitimacy of the Spanish government and the complete disintegration of the established social order. The siege of the prestigious city of La Plata in February of 1781 by rebels from numerous indigenous communities of the region was the result of this process of mounting political radicalization.

It is possible to identify three major stages in this process. Between the middle of 1777 and August of 1780, the conflicts were mainly limited to Macha, a community of some 3,500 people, among the most populous in the province. Macha’s persistent struggles to remove their caciques and to have Tomás Katari named chief led to an ever increasing confrontation between the colonial power structures in Alto Peru, which included countless legal appeals in front of the treasury officials at the royal hacienda in Potosí; the royal court in Charcas; and, eventually, the viceroy himself in Buenos Aires, where Katari traveled in 1779 to present his grievances in person. The appeals to the colonial magistrates did not prevent but rather legitimized and fostered the indigenous community’s use of violent tactics. These years were witness to a long series of armed conflicts with the local authorities, which culminated in a massive uprising in the town of Pocoata on August 26, 1780, during the traditional ceremony in which the communities presented the workers from the province chosen to serve the mita in Potosí that year. As a result, several soldiers and Indians perished. The corregidor was captured and later expelled from Chayanta, and the Indian leader was freed from the audiencia’s jail where he was being held.

The second phase of the conflict began with Tomás Katari’s return to the province as the designated cacique of Macha at the beginning of September. At that time, virtually all of the communities in the Andean highlands and valleys of Chayanta rose up in rebellion. The Indians in the neighboring provinces of Paria, Porco, and Yamparaez began making journeys to Macha to ask for advice on how to proceed with their respective corregidores and caciques. At the end of 1780, despite the efforts of Katari to repair relationships with Spanish officials on the basis of the new order of things, the confrontation had reached the point of no return. With the capture and execution of the rebel leader in January of 1781, which coincided with the expansion of the Túpac Amaru uprising in Cuzco and the successful uprising in the neighboring city of Oruro, the rebellion entered its last and most violent chapter. Led by Tomás Katari’s brothers—Dámaso and Nicolas—thousands of Indians attacked several towns in the province, and in February of 1781, together with Indians from several provinces in the region, they undertook a massive siege on the city of La Plata. Even though the rebel forces were defeated with relative swiftness by the urban militias, more extreme collective acts of violence against the Hispanic residents and the clergy were carried out throughout Chayanta after the failure of the siege. The most notorious occurred in the town of San Pedro de Buena Vista, a valley that was home to several Spanish haciendas and nonindigenous residents, and which had seen confrontations the year before. In March, during the second week of Lent, a large group of Indians came to the town, entered the church, and massacred the residents who had sought sanctuary there. Two of the leaders of the attack calculated that between one and two hundred people were executed, while a Spanish officer investigating the events counted 1,037 dead. Women and children of all ages were killed, together with the men; at least five priests perished. The riots in the province only ended between April and May of 1781, when the ringleaders of the movement, including Dámaso and Nicolás Katari, were finally captured and executed.

Túpac Katari and the Siege of La Paz

The case of La Paz presented various contrasts with its counterparts in Chayanta and Cuzco.¹⁷ In the first place, the rebellion led by Túpac Katari was not the result of an autonomous process of collective mobilization, whether a conspiracy turned mass uprising (Cuzco) or a gradual process of radicalization (Chayanta). It arose in the context of open revolutionary unrest both to the south and to the north of Lake Titicaca. The rebel activities began at the start of February 1781, when the mass mobilization in Cuzco, Charcas, and Oruru was already well underway. This does not mean that the region of La Paz had been left out of the wave of indigenous protests and riots before the crisis of 1780. On the contrary, the Aymara communities in the provinces of the La Paz highlands had a history of collective violence without equal, especially against the provincial magistrates (two of whom were killed in Pacajes and Sicasica at the beginning of the 1770s), the illegitimate caciques, and the reparto de mercancías. The city of La Paz itself was the setting for one of the most notorious fiscal revolts against the establishment of a customs house to collect sales taxes. In his studies on the social conflicts in the provinces of Sicasica, Pacajes, Omasuyos, Larecaja, and Chucuito from the 1740s, historian Sinclair Thomson calls attention to a series of extremely radical ideological motifs, manifestations of an “anti-colonial consciousness,” in communal protests at the local level. The author defines these “anti-colonial political options,” which do not appear to be associated with any notion of an Inca restoration, as the “radical elimination of the colonial enemy; regional indigenous autonomy that did not necessarily question the legitimacy of the Spanish Crown; and ethnic integration under Indigenous hegemony.”¹⁸

This experience of confrontation and the egalitarian ideas that informed them explain to a large extent the distinctive meaning that the pan-Andean uprisings held for the Indians of the La Paz highlands. From its beginning, the movement took on unequivocal racial and class undertones. The enemy was referred to with the Aymara word “q’ara,” the term for anyone who was not of indigenous descent. In practice it was not a strictly racial category, as it could indicate mestizos or white people, as well as those who did not dress like indigenous peoples, or simply the enemies of the rebellion, no matter their ethnic origins; it did have very distinct socioeconomic resonances, however. There was no possibility of an alliance with creoles or other social groups to oppose the imperial policies, as was the case in Cuzco, or of re-establishing an ideal reciprocity pact between the ayllus and the state to end the abuses of the local elites, as was the case in Chayanta.

Therefore, even though the revolution arrived in La Paz later than in other parts of the Andes, when it arrived it hit in full fury. By February of 1781, numerous indigenous groups of Sicasica, Yungas, and Pacajes began to rise up in the name of Túpac Amaru against landowners, merchants, state officials, and rural neighbors. The Hispanic groups were forced to abandon the rural areas and move together to various towns with their goods and livestock. We have already mentioned the fate that awaited those who went to Sorata, the capital of Larecaja, at the hands of the forces of Andrés Túpac Amaru. Certainly, the role of the Aymara communities’ invocation of Túpac Amaru’s name was more symbolic than strategic. Rebel actions in La Paz were inspired by openly nativist ideas. For example, during one of the early episodes of the rebellion, an emissary of Túpac Katari proclaimed in front of a crowd of Indians gathered in the small town of Tiquina (Omasuyos) that the sovereign Inca king demanded that the caciques, corregidores, tax collectors, and “any person who is or appears to be a Spaniard,” must “go under the knife,” making no allowances for women, children, or priests.¹⁹ And, indeed, immediately after this, the crowd set upon the town church where the residents has taken refuge and killed them one by one, men killing the men and women killing the women. Despite the appeals of the priest, the crowd would not allow the hundreds of dead bodies to be buried. They said that the Inca king had commanded them to leave the bodies in the open to be devoured by dogs and birds of prey; they were, after all, no better than demons and excommunicated Catholics.

The scale and violence of the uprising forced the military commander of La Paz, Sebastián de Segurola, to head a retaliatory expedition to the provinces of Pacajes and Omasuyos to try and cut the rebellion off at its roots. From the beginning, the royal militias encountered an ominous sign: it was impossible to recruit Indians for the royalist cause. Even in the provinces of Canas and Canchis, the core of Túpac Amaru’s rebellion in Cuzco, there had been communities allied with the colonial authorities.²⁰ Here, hardly anyone would approach the army, and the genuine intentions of those who did were extremely suspicious. Segurola ordered the immediate suppression of all suspects, and hundreds of Indians were slaughtered. In the village of Laja (Omasuyos), as almost all of the inhabitants had fled before the arrival of the soldiers, their houses were burned. A few dozen Indians dug in a nearby hill and put up such a resistance to Segurola’s troops that he was forced to call for reinforcements. This was another ominous sign: for the rebels, the fight was to the death. In this context, then, it is unsurprising that the unprecedented violence of the army, rather than terrorizing the indigenous troops, generated an opposing force of equal strength, which advanced on the great city of La Paz. Segurola was still carrying out his military campaign when the Aymara forces set up camp in El Alto, outside La Paz.

The siege of La Paz, the most emblematic event in the history of indigenous-nonindigenous relations in what is currently Bolivia, was a clear reflection of the deep radicalization of the Andean insurgence. Between March and October of 1781, with the brief interruption of the arrival of a column of the Spanish army, the Aymara communities led by Túpac Katari blocked off communication with the outside world. The rebels managed to prevent all food and supplies from entering the city for 109 consecutive days. The city depended increasingly on occasional and extremely dangerous raids outside of the city for supplies. The rebels calculated, not without reason, that the surrender of the city was a matter of time. As in other places, the rebel forces were made up of thousands of indigenous families from several neighboring provinces. It was not strictly an army but rather a community—many communities—in arms. Katari himself was accompanied by his wife, Bartolina Sisa, and her sister, Gregoria Apaza. For example, during Easter week, a central moment in the Andean festive calendar, they celebrated mass, drank, danced, and carried out a series of communal rituals. The religious functions were led by the Augustinian Matías Borda, a priest who was held captive for several weeks in El Alto, and other members of the clergy who were similarly obliged to offer their spiritual services. The authorities and neighbors of La Paz accused the Indians of falling into old idolatries and atavistic beliefs, but none of that is evident in the surviving testimonies. It would seem that in fact the Aymara limited themselves to carrying out their traditional religious celebrations: a form of Andean Catholicism that combined Christian elements with communal rituals dedicated to local deities and ancestor worship. This is what they had been doing for centuries under the tolerant, resigned, or indifferent gaze of the rural priests, the Hispanic residents, and the colonial government. What the war had altered was the way in which these practices were perceived, not the practices themselves.

The Katari forces combined daily raids of the urban areas with several massive, direct attacks. They even carried out a complicated engineering project, building a dam at the source of the river Choquepayu. The idea was that once it had accumulated enough water, they would destroy the dam, and the waters would lay waste to the city. However, on the night of October 11 the dam was released early, and although the waters destroyed several bridges and houses, causing great panic among the neighbors, the fortified trenches held. Altogether, although all the attempts to take the city by force eventually failed, the siege brought great suffering to the urban population. Thousands of inhabitants died of starvation and disease. Witnesses reported that the people were forced to eat leather, tobacco pouches, cats, mules, and whatever other animals were left, dead or alive. Dogs were particularly sought after: they were fat from eating the piled-up cadavers left out in the open. At least two testimonies make reference to cases of cannibalism. There was not a larger or a more deadly attack on the Hispanic population of Alto Peru, or any other region of the Andes.

On the other hand, it is important to note that in contrast to the Túpac Amaru uprising in Cuzco, the organization and leadership of the La Paz movement did not conform to the traditional power structure of the Andean communities, nor did it adopt the informal and fluid character of the rebellion in Charcas, a social protest turned anticolonial war. Although the caciques did not participate in the organization of the rebel forces (indeed, they were among the main targets) as in Chayanta and the provinces of Collao, the La Paz leadership had a marked militaristic style, at least at the top. Túpac Katari and his assistants exerted strict control over the indigenous troops and had the will (and the power) to discipline both Indians hostile to the movement and competitors for control over the rebel forces, especially the relatives of Túpac Amaru who joined the Katari forces in the second chapter of the siege of La Paz. In contrast to the declarations of the rebel uprising in Cuzco, the Aymara communities carried out a caste war that left little space for creole elites’ future historical constructions of it as a protonationalist movement.

Between February and March of 1781 the rebellion adopted similar characteristics when it expanded to the southern provinces of Lipes, Chichas, Cinti, and the rest of Alto Peru. The valley of Cochabamba illustrates this trend well. Partly reflecting the agricultural tensions brought about by population growth, the indigenous communities of Arque, Tapacari, Sacaba, and Clisa began to occupy haciendas in the area, executing the landowners in the process. Although the rebels acted in the name of the new Inca, the target of their attacks was much larger than the one established in Túpac Amaru’s proclamation. On February 21, for example, the rebel forces occupied the town of Colcha, entered the church, and killed all of the nonindigenous residents that they found there, including women and children. Following a common code of conduct, the dead were left in the church and the central plaza without being buried. Not even the priests were spared. Three of them, and two of their helpers, were executed. One was quartered and another had his tongue torn out. Similar scenes were repeated in the towns of Tarata and Ayopaia, where on February 23 approximately four hundred individuals were massacred. It has been said that after killing them in the choir and the altar, the rebels danced over their bodies and drank their blood. Given that cannibalism is condemned in Andean societies, the ingestion of Spanish, creole, and mestizo blood (a practice that was repeated in different places) can be interpreted, according to Jan Szeminski, as a sign that, in indigenous eyes, the people they ate were bestial, diabolical beings, not humans.²¹ Furthermore, the images and religious objects were taken to the plaza and burned to ashes. The Catholic Church had been, literally and metaphorically, the last refuge of colonialism in the rural villages. The church buildings had hitherto been a sanctuary, and the attachment to Christian tradition proved to be longer-lasting than obedience to a secular power. As the parish priests sided with their enemies and the Indians’ longings for social transformation deepened, the authorities and symbols of the church began to be exposed to brutal attacks. These attacks expressed a rejection of the function of the clergy in the social order, and perhaps a loss of faith in the power of the Christian God.²²

While the regional characteristics varied, it can be argued that what ended up giving the Andean rebellion its distinctively subversive character was the erosion of the notions of ethnocultural superiority, and thus the underlying justification for European domination. The initial socioeconomic and political rebel programs were peripheral—although historically significant in many other senses—to the radical and seditious content of the collective actions. It is not only that the ideas and the violence become more uncompromising and drastic as the rebellion grew; the crucial point is that the indigenous communities subverted the established order no matter their specific motivations or the even the degree of violence they employed. This article closes with the case of Oruro, which is particularly instructive in this regard.

The Tupamarista Creoles of Oruro

Oruro was the only territory under the control of rebel forces in which the creole groups had firm control of the insurgency and where the indigenous communities explicitly supported a coalition with white elites.²³ Led by the Rodríguez brothers, wealthy miners and local landowners, the residents of the city (both patricians and plebeians) joined the indigenous communities to rise up in the name of Túpac Amaru against the royal authorities and Spaniards in general. Unlike in other places, the Indians made a concerted effort to distinguish creoles from Europeans, while the elite of Oruro treated the indigenous communities as formal allies. Despite these auspicious circumstances, these interracial alliances did not last more than a few days. During the second week in February, a crowd of Andean peasants, twice as large as the population of Oruro, entered the mining town peacefully to support what the miners were doing there. Before too long they began to demand the return of the hacienda lands, to force the Hispanic residents to dress as Indians, to ask for the distribution of money deposited in the royal coffers (which mostly came from Indian tribute), and to demand the execution of all Europeans. In response, the creoles demanded their immediate evacuation of the city. They tried to enforce this first by negotiation and, when that failed, by force. After that, the rebellion in this region resembled the rebellion in the rest of the southern Andes. The communities began to assault haciendas and mines and to attack the Hispanic population. The caciques and Indians who collaborated with the creoles were branded as traitors and executed. These assaults extended to all of the towns throughout the region. At the beginning of March there were even two failed attempts to surround and occupy the village of Oruro. One of the indigenous leaders, Santos Mamani from the town of Challapata in the province of Paria, summarized the ideological orientation that the uprising assumed thusly: “The time had come for the relief of Indians and the annihilation of Spaniards and creoles whom they called ‘q’aras,’ which in their language means ‘naked,’ because without paying taxes or laboring they were the owners of what they [the Indians] worked on, under the yoke and burdened with many obligations. They obtained the benefits, while the Indians spent their lives oppressed, knocked about, and in utter misfortune.”²⁴

The creoles of Oruro, for their part, after this brief and torturous experience of alliance with the indigenous communities, joined forces once again with the Europeans and abandoned all support for Túpac Amaru. Thus, the patrician elite discovered that once the established forms of social distinction and deference—which in a colonial society could only be founded in a racial hierarchy—vanished, no interracial cooperation was possible.

To sum up, the rebels throughout the Andes legitimized their collective protests by proclaiming loyalty to the crown, expressing the desire that their corporate rights be recognized, and seeking to build alliances with the creole elite. By de facto defying their subordinated place in the natural order of things, the Indian mobilization eliminated all common ground between colonizers and colonized.

Discussion of the Literature

The first comprehensive studies of the rebellion as a whole include Jorge Cornejo Bouroncle, Túpac Amaru;²⁵ Boleslao Lewin, La rebelión de Túpac Amaru y los orígenes de la emancipación americana; Carlos Daniel Valcárcel, Túpac Amaru, precursor de la independencia;²⁶ and Lillian E. Fisher, The Last Inca Revolt, 1780–1783. With the exception of Fisher’s book, these first works establish a tight link between Túpac Amaru and the subsequent processes of independence in Peru and Bolivia. For modern studies on the socioeconomic causes, political policies, leadership, ideology, and social demographics of the Andean uprisings, see Scarlett O’Phelan Godoy, Un siglo de rebeliones anticoloniales and La gran rebelión en los Andes; Jürgen Golte, Repartos y rebeliones; and Sergio Serulnikov, Revolution in the Andes. Additionally, there are two important compilations of articles: Steve Stern, ed., Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, 18th to 20th Centuries; and John Fisher, Allan Kuethe, and Anthony McFarlane, eds., Reform and Insurrection in Bourbon New Granada and Peru.

In addition to the general literature on the rebellion, there are several studies that focus more closely on the specific regional uprisings. On the movement led by Túpac Amaru and his relatives in Cuzco and Collao, see Alberto Flores Galindo, ed., Túpac Amaru II—1780; Jan Szeminski, La utopía tupamarista; Alberto Flores Galindo, Buscando a un Inca: Identidad y utopía en los Andes; Ward Stavig, The World of Túpac Amaru; and David Garret, Shadows of Empire. A more recent comprehensive monograph on the subject is Charles F. Walker, The Tupac Amaru Rebellion.

About the rebellion in La Paz, see especially Sinclair Thomson, We Alone Will Rule; and María Eugenia Valle de Siles, La rebelión de Túpac Catari, 1781–1782. On the rebellion in the region of Charcas, particularly the province of Chayanta, see Claudio Andrade Padilla, La rebelión de Tomás Katari; Elizabeth Penry, “Transformations in Indigenous Authority and Identity in Resettlement Towns of Colonial Charcas (Alto Peru)”; Sergio Serulnikov, Subverting Colonial Authority; and Nicholas A. Robins, Genocide and Millennialism in Upper Peru.²⁷ About the rebellion in Oruro, see Fernando Cajías de la Vega, Oruro 1781; Oscar Cornblit, Power and Violence in the Colonial City; and Charles F. Walker, The Tupac Amaru Rebellion.

Significant contributions to scholarship on the environmental and economic history of the region include Luis Miguel Glave and María Isabel Remy, Estructura agraria y vida rural en una región andina; Brooke Larson, Colonialism and Agrarian Transformation in Bolivia; Alfredo Moreno Cebrián, El Corregidor de Indios y la economía peruana del siglo XVIII; Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz, Indios y tributos en el Alto Perú; Neus Escandell-Tur, Producción y comercio de tejidos coloniales; Karen Spalding, Huarochirí; Enrique Tandeter, Coacción y Mercado; and Enrique Tandeter and Nathan Wachtel, “Price and Agricultural Production: Potosí and Charcas in the Eighteenth Century.”²⁸

Primary Sources

The primary sources from the uprisings of 1780–1782 are scattered among various archives. The main archives are the Archivo General de Indias (Sevilla), the Archivo General de la Nación de Argentina (Buenos Aires), the Archivo Nacional de Bolivia (Sucre), the Archivo de La Paz, the Archivo de la Biblioteca Central de la Universidad Mayor de San Andrés (La Paz), the Archivo Departamental del Cusco, and the Archivo Histórico Nacional (Madrid). These include an immense body of documents that cover very different aspects of the uprisings: the demands and goals of the insurgent, social demographics, organization and leadership of the uprisings, descriptions of the events from multiple points of view, the legal sentences of the rebels, journals of the Spanish officers on their military campaigns, conflicts between the colonial authorities and countless decrees and proclamations, and public and private correspondence.

Additionally, there is a wealth of published collections. Primary sources on the Túpac Amaru rebellion, including numerous declarations and letters from leaders and members of the rebel movement, can be found in the following volumes: Comisión Nacional del Sesquicentenario de la Independencia del Perú, Colección documental de la independencia del Perú; Comisión Nacional del Bicentenario de la Rebelión Emancipadora de Túpac Amaru, Colección documental del bicentenario de la revolución emancipadora de Túpac Amaru; Boleslao Lewin, La rebelión de Túpac Amaru y los orígenes de la emancipación americana; Pedro De Angelis, Colección de obras y documentos relativos a la historia antigua y moderna de las provincias del Río de la Plata; Manuel Vicente de Ballivian y Roxas, Archivo Boliviano; and Andrés Lamas, Colección de Memorias y Documentos para la Historia y Geografía de los Pueblos del Río de la Plata.²⁹

An important collection of primary sources in English, with an introduction that presents a synthesis of the uprising, is Ward Stavig and Ella Schmidt, eds., The Tupac Amaru and Katarista Rebellions.