The Plebeian Republic: The Huanta Rebellion and the Making of the Peruvian State, 1820–1850

349 Pages·2005·4.079 MB·English

by  Cecilia Méndez

Illustrations
4 The old town-casa hacienda of Uchuraccay, ca. 1998
4 Villagers assembling in the new town of Uchuraccay, ca. 1998
15 Ecological niches of the Peruvian Andes
26 Luricocha, the second most important town in the Huanta valley, ca. 1997
32 Simón Bolívar, as rendered by José Gil de Castro
46 Old church in Chaca, ca. 1994
46 The town of Tambo, ca. 1997
101 King Fernando VII, by José Gil de Castro
124 The casa-hacienda of Chaca, ca. 1994
124 The town of Chaca, ca. 1999
125 Fernando Pariona, justice of the peace of Chaca, ca. 1999
131 On the road from Huanta to Secce, ca. 1994
133 The church of Secce, ca. 1994
133 Huaillay, once a rebel headquarters, ca. 1997
136 Abandoned house, ca. 1998, at a location near Uchuraccay believed to be
Luis Pampa
147 Nineteenth-century lithograph of an ‘‘indian muleteer’’
151 Muleteers with the Peruvian flag and a dismounted carriage
193 General Agustín Gamarra, by an unknown artist
198 Abandoned house in Luricocha, ca. 1994
209 General Andrés de Santa Cruz, by Francis Martin Drexel
212 ‘‘Rabonas doing the laundry’’
213 Soldier and rabona
219 General Andrés de Santa Cruz in old age, by an unknown artist
230 The approach to Iquicha from Uchuraccay, 1999
230 Iquicha, 1999, showing the remains of the town’s church, burned
during the Shining Path war
maps
17 ∞. Peru in 1827
67 ≤. Area of the monarchist rebellion
120 ≥. Patriot and royalist towns
121 ∂. Haciendas and pueblos in Huanta
129 ∑. Ecology of the rebellion and main headquarters
135 ∏. Rebel towns and headquarters
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Acknowledgments
In Peru in the eighties, violent death became a routine event as Sendero
Luminoso’s insurgency acquired greater proportions. During the early stages
of the war, however, other than experiencing frequent power outages, we
Limeños did not feel much a√ected. The death toll then was worst in the south-
central departments of the highlands, most prominently in Ayacucho. It was
during these early years of the war, in the early to mid-eighties, that I completed
my university education in Lima and became a historian. But it was not until I
moved to Ayacucho between 1986 and 1987 that the reality of the violence
began to have a major impact on my work—this book attests to what extent.
On my subsequent trips to the highlands of Huanta in the early to late
nineties I continued to nurture the dialogue between past and present that I
have sought deliberately to keep alive during the lengthy process of writing
this book. Present-day Huanta’s war-torn agrarian landscape has informed my
representation of Huanta’s nineteenth-century rural landscape. My conversa-
tions with villagers and communal authorities, and the simple observation of
the geography and facts of life in the punas, the highest ecological niche where
humans settle in the Andes, rendered meaningful often di≈cult and decontex-
tualized archival data.
Although the events this book deals with are not directly connected to Peru’s
recent wave of violence, my motivations were. Writing about a nineteenth-
century uprising in Ayacucho was probably my way of coming to terms with a
present which I did not feel prepared to deal with in more direct ways—or
could not otherwise grasp as rationally. To say it more optimistically (and
‘‘professionally’’), as a historian I felt driven to dig up the past in search of
answers to the present. Be that as it may, the feelings of fear and confusion that
prompted me to write about Ayacucho in the first place did not dissipate after I
had left the scene of the war to become established in purportedly safer places,
and for this reason bringing this book to completion felt at times beyond my
strength. Luckily, I have counted on the support of many people, and thus my
list of acknowledgments, though necessarily incomplete, is lengthy.
I should like to thank in the first place my friends and colleagues in Ayacucho,
Delia Martínez, Jaime Urrutia, Denise Pozzi-Escot, Alicia Echecopar, Juan
Granda, Enrique Gonzales Carré, and Teresa Carrasco, with whom I shared not
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xiv acknowledgments
only my very first concerns about the history of Huanta back in 1986–87, but a
very important stage in my life as well. The same goes for my students at the
Universidad Nacional de San Cristóbal de Huamanga. More directly related to
this research, I wish to thank Víctor Solier for his e√ective research assistance in
the Archivo de Huamanga and Mauro Vega and Marcela Llosa for the same in
the archives of Lima. I am most grateful to Je√rey Gamarra and Luli Abarca,
who were always ready to shelter me during the worst moments of my trips to
Ayacucho, and to José Coronel for being such a generous colleague and hospita-
ble host. The Centro de Investigación y Promoción para el Desarrollo y la Paz
en Ayacucho (IPAZ), directed by Je√rey Gamarra, provided the necessary
environment and logistics for two trips to the Huanta communities in 1994 and
1997, respectively. Renée Palomino of the Asociación Yactan Chicta Qatari
Chisu generously volunteered to be my guide and interpreter during a crucial
trip to Uchuraccay and other puna communities in 1998. On that same trip, fate
led me to Ms. Julia viuda de Argumedo, who generously shared delicate
information about the times of violence and about life in Chacabamba. The
comuneros (community peasants), authorities, and ronderos (peasant patrollers)
of Cunya, Uchuraccay, Chaca, Ccarhauhurán, Secce, Iquicha, and Huaychao
patiently endured all my intrusions. I am also grateful to Leoncio Cárdenas and
Arturo Tineo for allowing me to work in their archives in Huanta and Hua-
manga, respectively, and to Ponciano del Pino for sharing his knowledge about
the location of documents in Huanta. Philip Bennett provided me with a
transcript that became crucial in the early stage of my investigation, and Delia
Martinez helped translate the Quechan segments in it.
At the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where the first drafts of this
book were written, I wish to thank my professors Brooke Larson and Barbara
Weinstein for their exemplary dedication to their students, their critical advice,
constant support, and lasting faith in my work. Larson’s seminars, in particular,
provided solid theoretical foundations from which I still profit, as well as priceless
advice in the ‘‘art’’ of writing grant proposals. Weinstein’s classes exposed me to
the most vital North American scholarship on Latin America. Also at Stony
Brook, Gary Marker and Fred Weinstein introduced me to a non–Latin American
literature that proved to be crucial. In New York City, Deborah Poole’s anthropo-
logically informed advice was eye-opening. From among my friends at Stony
Brook I wish to thank in particular Eleonora Falco, Isabel Soveral, Iván Almeida,
Eduardo Prado, Ariel de la Fuenta, María Cecilía Cangiano, Silvana Palermo, and
Sergio Serulnikov for many significant moments.
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acknowledgments xv
In Lima, where I learned the historian’s craft and where part of me still lives,
a stimulating group of friends and colleagues made my research a truly un-
predictable intellectual adventure and a real pleasure. I thank, in particular,
Betford Betalleluz, Juan Carlos Estenssoro, Susana Aldana, Gabriela Ramos,
Alfredo Tapia, Cecilia Monteagudo, Jesús Cosmalón, Ricardo Portocarrero,
Natalia Majluf, and Beatriz Garland. Pedro Guíbovich and Luis Eduardo
Wu√arden proved helpful with their erudition at di√erent moments, and
Víctor Peralta and Marta Irurozqui made me feel at home everywhere. Jaime
Antezana introduced me to the Iquichanos in Huachipa. Maruja Martínez (no
longer with us) opened the doors of SUR, Casa de Estudios de Socialismo,
where I presented several advances of this research. Carlos Iván Degregori,
Carlos Contreras, and Cecilia Blondet did as much at the Instituto de Estudios
Peruanos. Nicanor Domínguez created the earliest versions of the maps that
appear in this book, which were subsequently digitalized by Óscar Multi-
servicios Gráficos in Lima, and then painstakingly redrawn by Natalie Hane-
mann, who produced the final digital versions. Luis Paredes generously pro-
vided me with rare maps that shed valuable information on Iquicha.
This project benefited from several grants which provided financial aid
for both the research and writing stages. Support was forthcoming from
the Social Science Research Council of New York, The Wenner-Gren Founda-
tion for Anthropological Research, The Harry Frank Guggenheim Founda-
tion, the Mildred and Herbert Weisinger Dissertation Fellowship, and the Beca
de Hispanistas Extranjeros granted by the Ministry of Foreign A√airs of Spain,
thanks to which I was able to expand my research in the Archivo de Indias in
Sevilla and in the libraries of Madrid in the spring of 1994. The hospitality of
Fermín del Pino in Madrid and that of Raúl Navarro in Sevilla was especially
encouraging on that occasion as was the friendship of Eduardo Flores Clair.
Another important stage in the production of this book took place at Yale
University, thanks to a postdoctoral fellowship provided by the Program in
Agrarian Studies. My special thanks to James Scott, the program director, for
his painstaking comments on an early draft of this book; to Larry Lohmann, Tom
Abercrombie, Enrique Mayer, and Bill Christian for stimulating discussions; and
to Kay Mansfield for being so welcoming. While I was at Yale the manuscript
also profited from long-distance comments by Orin Starn and John Lynch.
Most of the early chapters of this book were originally drafted in Spanish and
then translated into English by Renzo Llorente. I subsequently rewrote the
entire manuscript in English, in which process I was assisted by several gradu-
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xvi acknowledgments
ate students from the University of California in Santa Barbara: Alistair Hatting
and Hugo Hernández provided stylistic and copyediting help on early versions;
David Torres-Rou√ and Steven Pent did as much in the close-to-final and final
versions, respectively. A sketchy Spanish version of chapter 6 was published as
‘‘Pactos sin tributo: caudillos y campesinos en el nacimiento de la república,’’ in
Rossana Barragán et al., El Siglo xix en Bolivia y América Latina (La Paz: ifea,
1997). Chapter 6 also includes material that appeared in ‘‘The Power of Naming,
or the Construction of Ethnic and National Identities in Peru: Myth, History
and the Iquichanos,’’ Past and Present, 171, May 2001: 127–60.
This book reached completion at the University of California in Santa Bar-
bara, where I have been teaching since 1997. The University provided addi-
tional funds for new trips to Ayacucho and teaching release time that was
crucial for the completion of this project. I was also lucky to count on the
supportive environment provided by my colleagues in the History Depart-
ment, Alice O’Connor, Mary Furner, Erika Rappaport, Stephan Miescher,
John Lee, Adrienne Edgar, Hilary Bernstein, David Rock, Sarah Cline, Frank
Dutra, and Gabriela Soto Laveaga, among many others. Also while in Santa
Barbara, I profited from long-distance comments by, and fruitful intellectual
exchange with, Karen Spalding (who eventually disclosed her identity as one
of Duke’s ‘‘anonymous readers’’) and David Cahill. My ‘‘long-distance’’ friends
Brett Troyan and Carmen McEvoy added their quota of hope to my work on
more than one critical occasion, for which I am very grateful. Valerie Mill-
holland, at Duke University Press, has been an editor nonpareil, always keep-
ing the faith I myself lacked in my capacity to meet deadlines. Steven Pent
displayed his usual thoroughness in preparing an index that surpassed my
expectations both in detail and conceptual depth.
Without the unconditional support of my parents, siblings, and extended
family in Peru this project would have been more di≈cult to pursue. I am very
grateful to them. This book is dedicated to my brother José Méndez and to my
psychoanalyst, Shauna Kloomok, whose a√ection and intellectual companion-
ship have helped me grow in ways I would have never foreseen, rendering the
final stage of production of this book, if not easier, by all means more mean-
ingful. Last but not least, at the very moment when the copy-edited version of
the manuscript reached my hands for revision, I met James McKernan, whose
company, a√ection, and unmatched culinary talents brought unexpected joy
to my life, for which I am deeply thankful.
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1
Introduction
In January 1983, as the insurgency unleashed by the Communist Party of
Peru-sl, best known as Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), entered its third
year, eight Peruvian journalists set out from the city of Ayacucho on their way
to Huaychao, a peasant village in the province of Huanta, in the Andean
department of Ayacucho. Their purpose was to investigate the murders of a
group of alleged Senderistas that a sector of the press attributed to the military.
Five of the journalists had come from Lima for the journey, and three others
from Ayacucho joined the Limeños on the way. They never arrived at their
destination. Not long after their departure, the press reported the discovery of
their lifeless bodies in the vicinity of Uchuraccay, another village in Huanta.
The corpses, which were buried, bore signs of a horrifying death. The case
passed into history as the ‘‘massacre of Uchuraccay’’ and became one of the
most controversial, emblematic, and talked-about murders in an internal war
that ultimately claimed nearly seventy thousand Peruvians lives.
Although prior to the Uchuraccay massacre nearly two hundred people had
been killed in the violence unleashed by Sendero since 1980, none of those
killings received nearly as much media attention as the journalists’ deaths.
While in previous cases low-ranking policemen (guardias civiles) and mostly
illiterate, Quechua-speaking peasants were the victims, on this occasion they
were men of letters. Painful as it is to admit, adversity had to touch the urban,
educated sector directly for the media and the government to pay more
attention to a war that had already hit the rural populations of the south-
central highlands of Peru harshly.
The case became politically charged when some of the media, especially
those on the left, held the military responsible for the journalists’ murders.∞
Controversy grew, moreover, because the massacre and, perhaps more force-
fully, the ensuing trial of the Uchuraccay comuneros (community peasants)
gave rise to debates about the (unresolved) nature of Peruvian identity, with
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2 introduction
not a few commentators evoking images of the Spanish conquest. The trial
of the comuneros, held in Lima, pitted monolingual (or barely bilingual)
Quechua-speaking villagers against Spanish-speaking magistrates, requiring
the presence of interpreters; the villagers remained for the most part silent or
refused to collaborate with the magistrates. More than any truth regarding the
deaths of the journalists, the hearings of Uchuraccay laid bare another truth:
the extent to which ethnic and linguistic markers still defined the place of the
powerful in Peruvian society at the very moment social analysts were envisag-
ing a new era of ‘‘modernity’’ and democratization.≤
Then President Fernando Belaúnde appointed a commission presided over
by novelist Mario Vargas Llosa to investigate the events (henceforth the Vargas
Llosa Commission). The commission, which included, in addition to Vargas
Llosa, two anthropologists, a linguist, a psychoanalyst, and a lawyer, arrived at
the conclusion that the villagers of Uchuraccay killed the journalists because
they mistook them for Sendero Luminoso guerrillas—and that they did so
following the military’s own advice that the villagers should defend them-
selves against the terroristas.≥ This hypothesis was endorsed by the comuneros
themselves, and its credibility lay in the fact that Uchuraccay did have a history
of confrontations with Sendero.∂ Still, the general tendency was to exonerate
the peasants from responsibility by appealing to the classic stereotype that
emphasizes peasants’ ‘‘naiveté,’’ in consonance with the image the villagers
themselves chose to present.∑ Few could accept (without resorting to other
stereotypes that associate peasants with savagery and brutality) the idea that
the peasants, if they indeed killed the journalists, might have had their own
reasons, which they chose not to reveal.∏
The ensuing hearings in Lima found some military o≈cers indirectly re-
sponsible for the crime, but in the end none were convicted. Three Uchurac-
cayan villagers were found guilty of the massacre and condemned to various
prison sentences, but they never disclosed any further evidence, and one of
them eventually died in jail, a victim of tuberculosis.π The press continued to
speculate, and, in the end, each Peruvian was left to compile her own version
of the events.
As I finished writing this book, and in the climate of dialogue created by the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the Uchuraccay villagers had
acknowledged that they killed the journalists. But they were far from endors-
ing the ‘‘cultural’’ arguments provided in the Vargas Llosa Commission’s re-
port on Uchuraccay (i.e., the Informe [1983]), which stressed the comuneros’
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introduction 3
allegedly innate violent predisposition, resulting, in turn, from the ‘‘secular
isolation’’ in which, the commission believed, the peasants had lived since
‘‘pre-Hispanic times.’’∫ Instead, the villagers pointed to current matters. They
explained that most villagers in Uchuraccay were indeed convinced that the
journalists were Senderistas, partly because they identified the guide who
came with the journalists himself as a Senderista, eventually killing him too.
They added that when the journalists arrived, the villagers were in high alert
against Sendero, which had in recent months, even weeks, killed many people
in Uchuraccay and the neighboring communities who refused to abide by the
dictates of the Maoist group. Of particular note were the cruel deaths su√ered
by communal authorities, whom the Senderistas killed sometimes by dyna-
miting their bodies in ‘‘public executions’’ (ajusticiamientos públicos). The vil-
lagers, in a word, had begun taking justice into their own hands, applying
severe sanctions, including death, against those suspected of Senderismo with-
in and without their community; in this, they were joined by other villages in
the Huanta highlands that refused, like them, to give in to the dictates of
Sendero. The Uchuraccayan comuneros who accounted for these facts apolo-
gized in the name of their community in the context of the audiencias públicas,
or ‘‘public hearings,’’ staged by the TRC. At the same time, however, they have
denounced, emphatically for the first time, that in the months following the
journalists’ massacre their community was victim of severe retaliation by
Sendero Luminoso as well as by military aggression. Between April and De-
cember 1983, 135 Uchuraccayinos lost their lives. Most fell victim to Sendero.
Others were killed by the military. Among the former were reportedly all the
villagers who took part in the journalists’ murder. A list with the 135 names
was made public by the TRC, giving the national community, which until
then had likened the ‘‘tragedy of Ucchuraccay’’ with the deaths of eight men of
the press, much to reflect upon.Ω
At the time of the killing of the journalists I was completing my studies in
Lima, and like many other Peruvians, I was disturbed by those events. My
unease resurfaced with particular intensity some years later, as I took a teach-
ing position at the National University of San Cristóbal de Huamanga, in the
city of Ayacucho. During my tenure there I began an inquiry into the history
of the peasants of Uchuraccay and other high-altitude communities in Huanta,
an inquiry that has resulted in the present book.
From local monographs to archives, I set myself in search of references to
the ‘‘Iquichanos,’’ the name which the Vargas Llosa Commission, following
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(above) The old
town-casa hacienda
of Uchuraccay as
seen from an incline
where the new
town lies.
(right) Villagers
assembling in the new
town of Uchuraccay.
Modern houses in
the background were
built under a special
program sponsored
by the Alberto
Fujimori government
in the late nineties.
Both photographs by the
author, ca. 1998.
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introduction 5
ethnographies and histories of Huanta, used to designate the high-altitude
peasant communities of Huanta, including Uchuraccay. Colonial ethnographic
sources make no mention at all of the Iquichanos. References to them started
appearing only during the republican period starting in the 1820s. These
sources, especially those originating in the late nineteenth century, portrayed
the Iquichanos as descendants of the so-called Chanka Confederation and
attributed to them a warlike tradition of opposition to the Incas. They also
emphasized the Iquichanos’ ‘‘hostility toward outsiders’’ and unwillingness to
submit to the laws of the state.
I later learned, however, that such conceptualizations, which were echoed
in the Vargas Llosa Informe, did not reflect an actual knowledge of the pre-
Hispanic or colonial history of Huanta. Rather, they were construed with a
more recent episode in mind: the rebellion that Huanta peasants (thereafter
called Iquichanos), in alliance with a group of Spanish o≈cers and merchants,
mestizo hacendados (estate owners), and priests, launched against the nascent
Republic, between 1825 and 1828.∞≠ The rebels, acting in the name of King
Fernando VII, aimed to restore colonial rule. Their supreme leader was An-
tonio Abad Huachaca, an illiterate muleteer from the punas (high-altitude
lands) of Huanta who was said to have held the position of General of the
Royal Army. As my research progressed, I found myself immersed in the work
of reconstructing the history of this rebellion and its aftermath, which con-
stitute the subject of this book.
One of the details which initially drew my attention to the monarchist re-
bellion of Huanta was the similarity between the opinions of contemporaries
toward the royalist peasants in 1825–28 and those of the press in relation to the
murder of the journalists in Uchuraccay in 1983: basically, the same resistance
to accepting that villagers had acted of their own volition. If in 1983 the
peasants were persuaded by the military, in 1826 they were duped by the
Spanish. Moreover, historians who attempted to explain peasant participation
in the monarchist uprising limited themselves to reproducing the interpreta-
tions made by contemporary observers. Juan José del Pino, a local historian to
whom we otherwise owe a careful compilation of sources about peasant
rebellions in Huanta, endorsed the theory of ‘‘deception’’ and peasant naïveté:
‘‘These attacks took place because of the deceptions of a group of Spaniards in
Ayacucho, who took advantage of the ingenuousness of the indigenous, and
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