Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sinclair Thomson is assistant professor of history at New York University.

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We Alone Will Rule

THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS

Contents

Illustrations............................................................................................................viiPreface and Acknowledgments..............................................................................................ix1. Contours for a History of Power and Political Transformation in the Aymara Highlands..................................32. The Inherited Structure of Authority..................................................................................273. The Crisis of Andean Rule (I): Institutional and Intracommunity Strife................................................644. The Crisis of Andean Rule (II): The Reparto Connection and Breakdown of Mediation.....................................1065. Emancipation Projects and Dynamics of Native Insurgency (I): The Awaited Day of Andean Self-Rule......................1406. Emancipation Projects and Dynamics of Native Insurgency (II): The Storm of War under Tpaj Katari.....................1807. The Aftermath of Insurgency and Renegotiation of Power................................................................2328. Conclusions and Continuations.........................................................................................269Abbreviations............................................................................................................283Notes....................................................................................................................285Bibliography.............................................................................................................351Index....................................................................................................................373

Chapter One

To some, civilization itself seemed to hang in the balance in 1781. To others, it seemed the dawning of a new day, when men and women could live freely and with dignity. In that year, the most powerful anticolonial movement in the history of Spanish rule in the Americas was sweeping across the southern Andes. For Spaniards and the colonial elite as well as for Indian insurgents, it was a decisive time matched only by the sixteenth-century conquest of the continent. Indian leaders imagined now a counterconquest, a "new conquest" of their own; colonial officials likewise saw their campaigns of repression as a "new conquest" or "reconquest" of the realm. One of the two primary theaters of the violent Andean civil war in the early 1780s was La Paz (in present-day Bolivia), a region situated around the southern rim of the Lake Titicaca basin in the heartland of the Aymara-speaking indigenous population. As an exploration of Indian community and peasant politics, this study sets out to recover and illuminate the history of the Aymara people of La Paz in the age that produced the momentous pan-Andean insurrection.

Since the 1720s and 1730s, the Andean region had been the scene of growing turmoil. Local conflicts flared up with increasing frequency throughout the countryside. The exploitative commercial practices of provincial Spanish governors not only wrought hardship among communities but also stirred trenchant opposition. Indian protests poured into the courts. Anticolonial sentiment found expression in prophecies, conspiracies, and occasional revolts. In the 1770s, after Bourbon state officials imposed a set of universally unpopular measures (including higher taxation and stricter control of trade), Andean society reached an explosive conjuncture.

In 1780, a chain of riots expressing Indian, mestizo, and creole discontent with the Bourbon reforms broke out in highland, valley, and coastal cities. In the countryside near Potos, the fabled source of Spain's wealth in silver, local community struggles turned into an armed regional insurgency led by an Aymara-speaking peasant, Toms Katari. In Cuzco, the preconquest capital of Inka territory, Jos Gabriel Condorcanqui Tpac Amaru, an Indian cacique (community governor) and nobleman stepped forth as the direct descendant of the last native sovereign who had been executed by Viceroy Toledo in the sixteenth century. Tpac Amaru called for the expulsion of all Europeans from Peruvian soil and a profound social reordering. The powerful movement that looked to him as its symbolic leader succeeded in liberating a vast expanse of the southern Andean highlands, an area that today encompasses southern Peru and Bolivia. Its repercussions were felt even more broadly, up and down the cordillera ranges from what is today Colombia in the north down to present-day Argentina in the south and from the deserts of the Pacific coast to the tropical lowlands of the Amazonian interior. When the key struggles shifted to La Paz, where the Quechua-speaking commanders from Cuzco teamed up with the Aymara peasant commander Tpaj Katari, the civil war entered its most acute and most violent phase.

From their camps in El Alto, on the rim of the Andean altiplano, or upland plateau, tens of thousands of Aymara peasant warriors looked out over an impressive scene. Below them opened up a wide basin created by the drainage, over tens of thousands of years, of an ancient sea whose waters had flowed down from the highland elevation of thirteen thousand feet (four thousand meters) through highland valleys and lowland foothills out onto the continental floor of the Amazon. Eerily beautiful limestone badlands, in ashen gray, ochre, and reddish earth tones, formed steep walls around the basin. Across the basin and above it, thrusting up into the brilliant Andean skies, the insurgents gazed upon the massive glacial peaks of Mount Illimani (twenty-one thousand feet high, or sixty-four hundred meters), which they worshiped as an awesome ancestral divinity. Beneath its towering tutelary presence, successive waves of settlers over thousands of years had occupied this basin, farming its hillsides, mining its soils for gold, and pasturing native camelids. When the members of the first Spanish expedition arrived in the sixteenth century, they were unaware of the landscape's numinous powers and the layers of human history it had sustained. A Spanish township named La Paz was founded in 1548, in the location that diverse native ethnic groups speaking Aymara, Quechua, and Pukina languages called Choqueyapu.

La Paz served thereafter as the most important commercial nexus between Cuzco and Potos. It was also the main point of Spanish settlement and colonial political control in a highland expanse overwhelmingly occupied by people the Spaniards called "Indians." Yet now, after two and one-half centuries of colonial rule, the city was under full siege and Spanish power was on the verge of destruction.

The Aymara camp was the scene of constant hustle and bustle. Spies brought reports on developments within the city, and messengers conveyed news and letters from northern and southern provinces. The combatants, coming and going from communities around the altiplano, were organized in twenty-four political assemblies (cabildos). At their head, exercising political, military, and spiritual authority, was the fearsome Tpaj Katari, whose name signified "resplendent serpent" in Aymara. Under a vast...