Etapas en la integración de TIC

When Atahualpa learned of the cruel sentence, he lamented to God Almighty how those who had seized him had failed to keep their word. He could not find a way to escape. If he believed that he could do it with more gold, he would have given them another house, even four more. He said many pitiful things: that those who were listening to him should have mercy because of his youth; he asked why they were killing him, even though he had given them so much and not caused them any harm or injury. He complained about Pizarro, and with reason.

At about seven in the evening they removed him from where he was held. They took him to where the execution would take place; Friar Vicente, Juan de Porras, Captain Salcedo, and some others went with him. On the way he kept repeating: “Why are they killing me? Why am I being killed? What have I done, and my children and my wives?” and other similar words. Friar Vicente was admonishing him to become a Christian and abandon his beliefs.

[Atahualpa] asked to be baptized, and the friar did it. And then they strangled him, and to fulfill the sentence they burned some of his hair with pieces of straw, which was another foolishness.

Atahualpa, and after condemning the Inca on trumped-up conspiracy charges, he executed the supreme ruler on July 16. The Inca, who had ordered the death of his imprisoned brother Huáscar from his own prison cell, chose a last-minute conversion to Catholicism to avoid death by burning at the stake, a fate that would have made the preser-vation of his mummy impossible. He died by garroting. Atahualpa was solemnly buried in the church the next day, but shortly afterward his corpse disappeared, probably destroyed by the Spaniards to prevent his followers from using a royal mummy as a rallying point for resistance, or taken by his followers to rescue their Inca and bring him safely to the hanaq pacha.

When the Spanish king, Charles V, heard about the execution, he was deeply upset. Pizarro had killed a monarch, and no vassal could ever kill a king (even if he was a foreigner and a heretic) without seriously disturbing the monarchical order itself.

CONQUEST AND THE BEGINNINGS OF COLONIAL LIFE

Some of the Indians say that before they killed him, Atahualpa exclaimed that they should await him in Quito, that they would see him again in the form of a snake (Cieza de León, Cook and Cook 1998, 256–257).

A modern-day view of Cajamarca, where Francisco Pizarro captured in 1532 and executed in 1533 the Inca Atahualpa, effectively bringing the sprawling Inca Empire under the control of the Spanish Crown and gaining a fortune in ransom for himself and his men (Harryhausen/Alamy)

Civil Conflict and Inca Resistance

Even before the death of Atahualpa, the Spaniards began to quarrel among themselves. Over the course of the following several years, the early conquistadores and settlers fought so vigorously among them-selves that the period might accurately be labeled one of civil war.

The basic conflict was between Francisco Pizarro—backed by his three brothers, Hernando, Juan, and Gonzalo—and Pizarro’s former ally Diego de Almagro. Almagro and his men had arrived at Cajamarca too late to take part in the ambush and capture of the Inca, and therefore Pizarro refused to give them much of a share in the fabulous ransom. This was only the beginning of the bad blood between them. Pizarro took political control of Peru. He ruled from his new city of Lima, established on the coast, and, more important, he handed out land grants, called encomien-das, to himself, his brothers, and his followers with a liberal hand.

Almagro and his party failed to receive what they felt was their due. After an expedition to Chile failed to produce riches, a disappointed Almagro occupied Cuzco and took two of the Pizarro brothers captive.

There were a series of disagreements and temporary settlements over the next several years, but since these were violent times and these men were soldiers, the conflict eventually worked itself out through vio-lence. In April 1538, at Las Salinas, near Cuzco, Pizarro’s army defeated Almagro’s outnumbered men in a brief battle. Almagro was captured, and on orders of Hernando Pizarro, he was beheaded in the main square of Cuzco. (Hernando was tried and imprisoned for this execu-tion when he returned soon thereafter to Spain.)

Three years after Almagro’s defeat and death, a group of his support-ers led by Almagro’s mestizo son, also named Diego de Almagro, assas-sinated Francisco Pizarro in his home in Lima. The Almagro faction then claimed control of the colonial government, but their triumph was short lived. The king appointed a new royal governor, Cristóbal Vaca de Castro, in an attempt to bring order to the unruly colony. Vaca de Castro assembled an army, defeated and captured the younger Almagro in 1542 at the battle of Chufas, and executed him afterward.

Meanwhile, the hopes of the Incas to return to power had been dashed several times. When Huáscar and Atahualpa died, the potential leadership was thrown into disarray. Pizarro understood the need to restore order and therefore named a puppet Inca, Tupac Huallpa, a son of Huayna Capac. Tupac was poisoned only a few months later and was replaced by Manco Inca II, another son of Huayna Capac, brother of Huáscar. Manco Inca had initially sought an alliance with the Spaniards in his struggle against the followers of Atahualpa, but he soon came to

A BRIEF HISTORY OF PERU

understand that the Spaniards did not intend to become his allies and was virtually a prisoner in his own palace. He bribed Hernando Pizarro with several massive gold statues, and on April 18, 1536, Manco Inca was freed and made his escape to the Urubamba Valley. From there, he organized an army to fight the Spaniards.

Four times between 1536 and 1537, Manco Inca’s troops laid siege to Cuzco, hoping to dislodge the Spaniards; however, several other ethnic groups, wishing to free themselves from Inca dominion, aided the Spaniards. Apparently, the curacas of these ethnic groups little sus-pected the miseries they would face shortly afterward.

Not the least of the difficulties was the displacement the Spaniards inflicted on much of the indigenous population. From the early days of their control, the Spanish needed labor to create the wealth they so craved. As a consequence the Spaniards insisted on moving and reor-ganizing ethnic groups. The largest groups, which may have numbered several units called guarangas, each of which had 1,000 households, were often subdivided into smaller units, called pachacas, of 100 households each. The smaller units were then assigned to work where the Spaniards felt the sharpest needs for labor. The organization into

CONQUEST AND THE BEGINNINGS OF COLONIAL LIFE