Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830
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Smarting from his own personal experiences of Spanish injustice in Lima and his native Tinta, and fired by his reading of Garcilaso's evocation of the lost golden world of the Incas, Candorcanqui became a man with a mission. In November 1780, under the name of Tupac Amaru II, he called out the Andean peasantry in rebellion, and found a suitable symbolic victim in the oppressive corregidor of Tinta, Antonio de Arriaga, whom he seized and executed.
In proclaiming revolt, Tupac Amaru tapped into a rich vein of cultural pride and collective Andean consciousness, which looked for the creation, or re-creation, of a utopian social order under Inca rule. Prophecies clustered around the mystical numerals of the year 1777, creating expectations of the return of the Inca to restore order and harmony to a world purged of Spaniards.''' The outbreak of Pontiac's rebellion in North America had occurred in a similar climate of prediction and expectation, as the Delaware prophet Neolin urged his fellow Indians to turn their backs on the world of the whites. At the same time, Neolin's antiEuropean message, like the message now spreading through the Andes, bore the strong imprint of European religion. Its resort to Christian notions of sin, heaven and hell betrayed the growing religious syncretism of the Delaware Indians, a people whose exposure to Christianity did not begin to equal in length and intensity that of the population of the Andes, where the Catholic priest occupied a dominant position in village life, and extensive campaigns had been undertaken for the extirpation of idolatry..153
Parish priests in the Andes, resentful of Bourbon reforms which reduced their perquisites, patronage and prestige, had good reason to sympathize with the sense of injustice felt by their local communities. They lived among their Indian parishioners, they often spoke their language, and they had become integral to the new ritual and ceremonial system that had developed in the communities after the arrival of Christianity. At the same time, however, their extortion of money from their parishioners had made many of them hated. 114 This made them deeply ambiguous figures. Both the depth of their unpopularity and their essential role, in the eyes of their parishioners, as participants in a cosmic system that combined a continuing belief in the ancient supernatural forces of the Andean world with the rituals and belief systems of Spanish Catholicism, were tellingly revealed in an exchange that occurred in the village square of Livitaca between Tupac Amaru and the town's inhabitants, shortly after the outbreak of revolt. On arriving in the square he was greeted with the words: `You are our God and Lord and we beseech you that there should be no priests to importune us.' He replied that this was not possible because then there would be `nobody to attend to them at the moment of death'. X55
Tupac Amaru, like Pontiac, found himself juggling with a variety of discordant elements in his efforts to extend the appeal of his movement. Unlike Pontiac, however, he was having to appeal not only to different Indian groupings, but also to a non-indigenous population of creoles and mestizos. The resulting eclecticism, which no doubt also reflected his efforts to combine the disparate elements of his own cultural background, makes his ultimate objectives far from clear. If he claimed for himself the royal status of Inca, he appears to have envisaged a Peru cleared of peninsular Spaniards, but still owing allegiance to the Spanish crown. Whether this was merely tactical, however, or was an integral part of his policy remains uncertain, since different manifestos sent out different mes- sages.156 If his movement was anti-European and anti-Spanish, he was also anxious to include not only the mestizos but also the creoles, for they too, like the Indians, suffered from what he called `the perverse impositions and threats made by the kingdom of Europe' - a formulation that hardly reflects a very clear notion of political geography. 117 Although his rebellion was suffused with Andean concepts of Inca revivalism, these had acquired such a strongly Christian colouring that he proposed to govern Peru with the help of the Bishop of Cuzco.'5'
As a cacique in the Vilcanota valley who owned a string of mule trains, Tupac Amaru had a wide range of local contacts, and was well placed to mobilize the support of fellow caciques in order to raise the indigenous population in revolt across the Cuzco region.159 His rebellion could also draw on the support, often tentative and opportunistic, of creoles and mestizos whose lives had felt the impact of the Bourbon reform programme. Yet it was a disparate coalition to hold together, and it never coalesced into a genuinely multi-ethnic movement against the viceregal government. In particular, Tupac Amaru signally failed to carry with him the old Inca nobility of Cuzco, to which the rebels laid siege at the end of December 1780. Charles V had issued Spanish patents of hereditary nobility to the Inca nobles in the 1540s, and through skilful exploitation of the Spanish system of government in the Andes by means of indirect rule, together with persistent recourse to the courts of law, the Indian nobility of Cuzco and its environs had established themselves in the top flight of Cuzco's social hierarchy. While periodically intermarrying with the creole elite (fig. 40), these nobles retained a powerful sense of their historic position as descendants of the natural lords of the Peru of the Incas. They looked down on Tupac Amaru as a mere rural curaca whose claims to Inca kingship they totally rejected, and while they shared his general aspirations for the Andean community as a whole, their historical experience led them to place a strong faith in the legal and bargaining processes inherent in the Spanish imperial system, and in the King of Spain as a just ruler who would right their wrongs.160
Timely reinforcements from Lima enabled Cuzco to withstand the attack of the insurgent forces, and as Tupac Amaru broke off the siege to campaign to the north and east of Cuzco, the cracks in his coalition began to appear. Humiliated by the failure of the siege of Cuzco, and enraged by what he regarded as the treachery of creoles and mestizos who had been unwilling to support him, Tupac Amaru seems to have abandoned his policy of protecting his non-Indian supporters, and gave orders for the summary execution of peninsular Spaniards, creoles and mestizos, as well as of corrupt native lords. Only priests were to be spared, to play their part in the new, purified society that was to rise from the ashes of the old. Not surprisingly, any remaining creole supporters were alienated by the savagery of peasants who looted and destroyed haciendas and textile workshops and took ferocious revenge on corregidores and curacas. This had ceased to be a generalized uprising against an oppressive imperial government, and was fast turning into a bloody racial conflict.161
Following the raising of the siege of Cuzco, royalist forces, consisting of regular soldiers, militias and loyalist Indians, went in pursuit of Tupac Amaru, and captured him in early April 1781, along with his wife and a number of his closest companions. While the revolt continued to spread, he was tried on charges of rebellion and other crimes. He was then sentenced by an implacable Areche to witness the execution of his wife and son and the other rebels taken prisoner, before being drawn and quartered in the great plaza of Cuzco. The horrific public spectacle was carefully calculated to symbolize the death of Inca kingship.
The effect of Tupac Amaru's gruesome death was to strengthen his surviving commanders in their desire for revenge, and intensify the savagery of a war which raged over a vast mountainous region for a further two years. The centre of gravity of the rebellion moved to the Lake Titicaca region and Upper Peru, where the Aymaras, who had recently seen their messianic leader, Tomas Katari, assassinated, joined forces with the Quechua-speaking rebels from the Cuzco region to lay siege to La Paz in the summer of 1781. But the traditional antagonisms between Quechuas and Aymaras made this an uneasy alliance, and royalist troops succeeded in raising the siege of La Paz, as they had raised that of Cuzco a few months earlier. By the time the war ended in 1783 with the victory of the royalist forces, as many as 100,000 Indians and 10,000 Spaniards are alleged to have lost their lives, out of a total population in the rebel territories of some 1,200,000.162
The attempt to restore a lost order had failed, leaving behind a traumatized people with memories, dreams and expectations which would permeate all the subsequent history of colonial, and post-co
lonial, Peru. The failure had as much to do with internal divisions - between Indian and creole, and Indian and Indian - as with the military force which the viceregal regime was eventually able to put into the field. Those divisions in turn reflected contradictions over the nature of the order that was to be restored. Was this once again to be a world without Spaniards, as many of the insurgents demanded, or was it to be one - as Tupac Amaru himself may initially have intended - in which the restored Incas headed a united nation of Indians, mestizos and creoles, and ushered in a new era of justice and harmony, in which Andean and Hispanic religion and culture were somehow fused? This was the kind of vision, at once uplifting and diffuse, that the intoxicating brew of Garcilaso's Royal Commentaries could so easily inspire.
Significantly, one of Areche's first actions after the trial and execution of Tupac Amaru was to ban the Royal Commentaries. He also prohibited the wearing of Inca royal dress, abolished the hereditary position of cacique, placed restrictions on the use of the Quechua language, and forbade the depiction of Inca rulers, whether in paintings or on the stage. 163 This amounted to a systematic attempt to eradicate the Inca revivalism always latent in the collective consciousness of the Andean world - a revivalism that had given at least a momentary cohesion to a vast movement of protest against the iniquities of the viceregal regime. But the contrast between Areche's savage punishment of Indian rebels and the relative leniency accorded to rebellious creoles suggests a policy designed to minimize the degree of creole complicity, and place the burden of responsibility for the rebellion squarely on the backs of the indigenous population and a number of mestizos, in an effort to play on ethnic divisions and win back the loyalty of creoles alienated from the crown by the recent reforms.164
In any comparison with the revolt of the white population of the British colonies, the multi-ethnic character of the Tupac Amaru rebellion in its opening stages would appear to have been a fatal obstacle to success because of the inherent tendency to racial tension. But that it need not necessarily have been so is suggested by the simultaneous development of regional rebellion in the neighbouring viceroyalty of New Granada. 161 The visitor-general Gutierrez de Pifieres, like his opposite number Antonio de Areche in Peru, had introduced a number of deeply unpopular administrative and fiscal changes. These were intended to curb the massive contraband trade along New Granada's northern coastline and thus to increase viceregal revenues. The reforms included the elimination of creole judges from the Audiencia of Santa Fe de Bogota, the reorganization of the monopolies on brandy and tobacco, and a revised system for the more effective collection of sales taxes. In addition, in 1780 a `voluntary' donation was demanded of every adult male to pay for the war with England. 116
The first major disturbances provoked by these reforms broke out in March 1781 in Socorro, a town 200 kilometres north of Santa Fe, which had only secured municipal status a decade earlier, and was located in a tobacco- and cottongrowing region particularly affected by the new fiscal measures. Following a succession of riots, a group of prominent citizens were persuaded to take over the leadership of a movement of popular protest with which they more or less actively sympathized. One of their number, Juan Francisco Berbeo, a middling landowner of good family and connections, emerged as the leader of what was rapidly to become a large-scale regional rebellion.
Berbeo and his colleagues succeeded in forging a coalition between patricians and plebeians in their native town, and subsequently in keeping control of an insurrection that soon spread beyond Socorro and its immediate hinterland, a countryside settled by small-scale peasant farmers. New Granada was a land of numerous small communities living in geographical isolation, but other towns adhered to the uprising in Socorro, and new recruits, including Indian villagers distressed by recent resettlement policies, flocked to join the rebellion after the rebels roundly defeated a small government force belatedly sent to crush them. Encouraged by its victory and by the news of the great revolt in Peru'167 the Comunero army led by Berbeo, who, like George Washington, had learnt the art of soldiering in Indian frontier warfare, prepared to march on Bogota. Its rallying call was the traditional Hispanic cry of `Long live the king and down with bad government', while the central demand of what had now become a combined uprising of creoles, mestizos and Indians was for a return to the old ways in the name of el coma n, `the common good'.168
In Peru the authorities had been able to produce an effective military response after a hesitant start, but the viceregal administration in Bogota was ill-prepared to move against the rebels. When the revolt broke out there were only 75 professional soldiers in the capital, and the viceroy himself was in Cartagena, six weeks' travelling time from Bogota '161 preparing the port's defences against a possible English attack.170 With a rebel army 20,000 strong assembled at Zipaquira, the administration had no choice but to negotiate.
The peace commissioners headed by the Archbishop of Santa Fe de Bogota, Antonio de Caballero y Gongora, found themselves presented by the rebels with a set of 35 demands designed to deal with a range of abuses.171 These included the abolition of the new taxes and monopolies and the expulsion of the visitorgeneral, Gutierrez de Pifleres. The articles addressed, too, the complaints of the Indians about the tribute tax, clerical exactions and the resettlement policy. The rebels, however, were interested in more than the remedy of current fiscal grievances, of whatever ethnic group. In demanding what would effectively be a creole monopoly of offices, the elimination of the office of visitor-general, and the almost complete removal of peninsular Spaniards from the viceroyalty, they were insisting on a general reordering of government which would have made New Granada virtually autonomous under the rule of a distant crown.
However unpalatable these demands to the viceregal administration, in the circumstances it was in no position to reject them. On 8 June 1781 the peace commissioners accepted the Pact of Zipaquira, although the authorities in Bogota had secretly decided in advance that they were not bound to abide by the conditions of an agreement reached under duress. The terms still had to be approved by the crown, but most of the Comunero rebels dispersed after the commissioners swore an oath to accept the Pact. Sporadic resistance persisted, however, and one of Berbeo's commanders who refused to lay down his arms was later tried and sentenced, like Tupac Amaru, to death by dismemberment. The viceroy, however, issued a general pardon on Caballero y Gongora's advice, and confirmed the principal fiscal concessions made by the commissioners.
When the archbishop himself succeeded to the post of viceroy in the summer of 1782, he embarked on a policy of reconciliation with the creoles, in which he encouraged them to turn their attention to the promotion of economic improvement under the benevolent leadership of the crown. Yet this was a crown as insistent as ever on the unconditional acceptance of its authority by its loyal subjects, and great care was taken by Caballero and his successors to ensure that, in the military reorganization that followed in the wake of the revolt, the principal positions of command should all be held by peninsular Spaniards.172
The rebellion of the Comuneros, like that of Tupac Amaru, was a revolt aimed at restoring a political order overturned by ill-advised and intrusive Bourbon reforms. In this sense, the aims of the rebels were similar to those of the rebels in the British colonies who wished to return to the world of 1763. The Comuneros at least, and probably also the Tupamaristas, for all the opacity of their leader's intentions, had no desire for a rupture with the crown, any more than the North American Patriots at the start of their rebellion. Exasperated by the activities and exactions of officials sent out to govern them from the metropolis, they did, however, want to secure a degree of control over their own affairs that would effectively ensure equality of status with peninsular Spain. For the British colonies, shaped by parliamentary tradition, equality of status with the mother country was conceived in terms of legislative autonomy in all matters of internal government. For the creoles of the bureaucratized world of Spanish America it was essentially administrative
, and would be ensured by the appointment of locals, rather than peninsular Spaniards, to administrative and judicial posts.173
In both instances, however, what seemed to colonial elites like the realignment of a disturbed balance in the name of justice and equity appeared to the metropolitan centre to be a demand at pistol point for unacceptable change. To accede to such a demand would be to surrender imperial authority, and turn colonial subjects into the masters of their lands. At all costs, authority had to be upheld, and by force if need be. But where the British crown failed to reimpose its authority, in spite of the deployment of an army that at one moment was 50,000 strong,174 the Spanish crown succeeded in containing the crisis, even in New Granada where it lacked the military capability to take on the rebels.
Part of the explanation for the different outcomes is to be found in contingent circumstances. Of these the most important was the success of the North American rebels in securing the military and naval participation of France and Spain in their struggle. Although prophecies might circulate in the Andes about the restoration of Inca rule with the help of the English, there was not the remotest possibility at this juncture of English, or any other external support. Even if foreign powers had been willing and ready to help, logistics would have constituted an insuperable deterrent. The Spanish American rebellions occurred in regions remote from the seaboard, and isolated from each other by an implacable geography. North America itself was a world away and the English colonists were otherwise engaged. Even if the Comuneros drew inspiration from Tupac Amaru's uprising, that too was of no practical consequence for their own struggle. The viceroyalty of New Granada by itself was so fractured by geography that it took all Berbeo's political skills to prevent the resulting inter-regional and municipal rivalries from wrecking his coalition as he faced the decision as to whether to march on Bogota .171