War
armed conflict in Peru
The First Iquichan War, Iquicha campaign of 1825–1828 or Iquicha War of 1825–1828 was a rebellion that broke out between 1825 and 1828 between local royalist peasants from Huanta known as Iquichanos and the army of the newly formed Peruvian Republic. The war ended with a Republican victory
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Text from the Wikipedia article “Iquicha War”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
The First Iquichan War, Iquicha campaign of 1825–1828 or Iquicha War of 1825–1828 was a rebellion that broke out between 1825 and 1828 between local royalist peasants from Huanta known as Iquichanos and the army of the newly formed Peruvian Republic. The war ended with a Republican victory
After the crushing defeat in the Battle of Ayacucho in December 1824, all Spanish troops had left Peru, except for the garrison at Callao. However, the Iquicha peasants from Huanta, remained loyal to the Spanish King and rebelled on three occasions against the new Peruvian Republic.
The first uprisings occurred in March and December 1825, but were easily subdued by the huge contingent of the Peruvian army that was still in the area. In January 1826, the Peruvian prefect of the area, General Juan Pardo de Zela, organized a punitive expedition, which only managed to harden their resistance.
A second uprising occurred on 5 June 1826, after the Republican army had dispersed throughout Peru. The rebels attacked Huanta, under the command of Antonio Huachaca and the former soldier and then Spanish merchant Nicolás Soregui (or Zoregui). Shortly after, on 6 July, two regiments of the Hussars of Junín stationed in Huancayo mutinied and joined the rebels, encouraging them to assault Ayacucho. Eventually they were repelled by the local garrison.
The third uprising took place at the beginning of October 1827, where Huachaca once again mobilized the population in favor of the Spanish King. On 12 November, Huachaca's forces came out of the mountains and attacked and took Huanta. When they also attacked Ayacucho on 29 November, they were defeated by troops under command of Prefect Domingo Tristán.
An other battle was fought in Uchuraccay, on 25 March 1828, when the Peruvians under command of Gabriel Quintanilla, defeated an Iquicha force during the "Pacification" phase, also known as the War of the Punas. Prudencio Huachaca, brother of Antonio Huachaca, was killed in this battle.
The movement is compared to the resistance of the Vendeans and Chuanes against the French Revolution. Similar situations existed, with peasant resistance to regular armies of nascent revolutionary states in San Juan de Pasto and Araucanía, in which they were flagged. in "tradition" as their ancestral right for self-determination. The conflict has also been defined as: "the time in which that piece of our country absurdly and fiercely resisted separating from Spain."
"The Iquichanos war was in itself a Vendée, which shows us the resistance that existed against a political system that was considered imposed. Antonio Huachaca, Huantino Indian and General of the Royal Army of Peru, rebuked the Republicans (XI-21-1827) saying: "You are rather the usurpers of the religion of the crown and the national soil... What do you know?" has obtained from you during these three years of your power? The tyranny, the despair and the ruin of a kingdom that was so generous. What inhabitant, whether rich or poor, does not complain today? On whom does the responsibility of the crimes? We do not bear such tyranny."
— Altuve-Febres Lores, Fernán (1996)., Los Reinos del Perú: apuntes sobre la monarquía peruana. Lima: Estudio Altuve-Febres y Dupuy.
Some historians (currently criticized) refer to the indigenous people as a "formless and ahistorical mass" because the majority of them lived scattered in valleys with difficult access and with an "archaic" culture based on respect for tradition. Like other peasant communities, they were not "isolated" from politics, but played a key role in the formation of the Peruvian State, the "Cadillo State", a period from the 1820s to 1840s characterized by constant struggle between ambitious caudillos.
Authors such as Patrick Husson or Carlos Iván Pérez Aguirre, with sympathies to Marxism and making use of Historical Materialism, interpret the rebellion as the manifestation of "alienation" (according to the definition of Henri Favre) among the Huantine rebels, which in the Indians was a product of the ideological restriction that the rural environment generated in their consciousness, causing them not to understand the benefits of Liberalism due to the dominance of the colonial ideology that alienated them (reducing the traditionalist monarchical initiative only to whites, who only they would perceive that type of society as the only possible legitimate system, while they only took advantage of the frustrations of the indigenous people), while the failure of the Republic of Peru among the Huantin peasants was due to the nonexistence of "political parties or progressive organizations that, representing peasant interests, organize these masses and turn them against the subsisting feudal regime in order to fulfill their demands" which would only cause great deficiencies in the class consciousness of the indigenous people and peasants of Huantín to fulfill their role in the dialectical movement of history to "fulfill their demands, especially its right to land, under the leadership of the revolutionary bourgeoisie and, when its historical role has expired, only under the leadership of the proletariat." However, the conclusions have been accused of being very limited and reductionist, failing to understand the complexity of the event and the indigenous peasantry in the viceregal context, the greatest deficiency of the analysis being that it only makes a reading from the perspective of economic classes (in specific, of the dominant and liberal class, assuming a priori that their policies would be effective against the anti-liberal dominant class) and leaving aside the experience and perception of the indigenous Estates to the power mechanisms of the viceregal institutionality. That would only cause incomprehension of the political imagination of the indigenous peasantry as the possibility was not conceived in the analysis of a sincere conviction of these with reactionary thinking, without alienation of conscience and based on their own local political tradition, since that possibility would violate Marxist and liberals dogmas about the historical purpose of the bourgeois Revolutions (which assume a priori that they are inevitably progressive in nature, so the possibility of another alternative of progress outside of political Modernization being inconceivable, which would question the Marxist postulates on the inevitable development of a revolutionary class consciousness in the popular sectors towards the End of history). Authors such as Heraclio Bonilla argue that these historicist exercises have only caused contemporary intellectuals to lack knowledge of the political worldview of the indigenous peasantry of that time and their tendency towards royalism (a phenomenon also present in the Pastusos, Chilotas or Mapuches), and that the cause of these bad practices is the ideological burden of the official historiography of the Peruvian State (and similar modernist governments) with its attempt to base its legitimacy on the dominance of the Criollo bourgeois class based on a reading of the facts with nationalist and liberal biases (trying to assume a priori that these modern ideologies were present, or were determined to be potentially present, in the popular sectors, and making it a logical impossibility to assume any popular opposition to the modern nation-state project or the sincere defense of Pactism with the Ancient Regime of Spain).
"As is known, traditional national historiography has privileged the examination of this period, and has unanimously maintained that all groups of colonial society, regardless of their ethnic and class affiliation, resolutely supported the Creole leadership. Independence Therefore, it would have been the result of a unanimous process, in addition to a completely autonomous decision and execution. The ideological load that this version contains cannot explain, by the way, why the presence of the armies of San Martín and of Bolívar, for the definitive achievement of the independence of Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. (...) consequently, examining once again in this context the "nationalism", real or potential, of the indigenous peasantry does not make much sense, since the answer is quite obvious (...) On the other hand, the allusion to the peasant rejection of the republican system as a response to the tax extortions and abuses of the patriot army, is nothing more than a confirmation, in the same way as the innovation to the absence of a bourgeoisie as a limiting factor of peasant mobilization says more about the author than about the reality he is trying to analyze. A more convincing explanation of peasant support for the colonial regime and King Ferdinand VII would rather take the situation of 1827 as the necessary result of a durable and specific political and cultural experience of the Indian peasantry within the colonial context. Which in turn implies a rigorous reconstruction of its political history in the long term, through evidence that is enough for now to confirm that the Iquichana rebellion of 1827 says how little we know about the colonial articulation of the peasants, and of the political vision they shared."
— Heraclio Bonilla
Authors such as Cecilia Mendez do not consider that the Huantine rebellion was the expression of a supposed archaic mentality of ignorant indigenous people and religious fanatics who opposed progress, due to their servile and submissive nature to the powerful classes, which prevented them from knowing what was best for them. for their passivity towards their oppressors; but in reality the Huantine peasants would have managed to act out of their own motivations and with an active role, in which they were not good savages who had been manipulated by their innocent ignorance (being an erroneous popular belief that would have analogies with public opinion about the Uchuraccay Massacre), but rather they were people who were fully aware of what they were doing and sought to defend a political project with solid foundations to predict the progress of their community (since the republican structures of the nascent Peruvian state could not integrate them, but rather In fact, it threatened their status obtained during the Spanish empire, making the defense of the monarchy something that is not something ignorant).
“They have continued to say, without evidence to support their claims (that is, based on prejudices), that the peasants of Huanta rebelled because they resisted the new. But I am convinced that those who resist the new, more often than the characters studied, are those who study them."
— Cecilia Méndez
Text from the Wikipedia article “Iquicha War of 1825–1828”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.