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
History 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.Lineas del tiempo
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.Husson, 1992: 24
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.Bonilla Mayta, 1996: 145; Husson, 1992: 26
The third uprising took place at the beginning of October 1827, where Huachaca once again mobilized the population in favor of the Spanish King.Galdo, 1968: 44 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.Husson, 1992: 39, 45 Prudencio Huachaca, brother of Antonio Huachaca, was killed in this battle.
Historiography The movement is compared to the resistance of the Vendeans and Chuanes against the French Revolution.Husson, 1992, p. 21.Leguía y Martínez, 1972, p. 328. 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.Bonilla Mayta, 1996, p. 144. The conflict has also been defined as: "the time in which that piece of our country absurdly and fiercely resisted separating from Spain."Vega, 2003, p. 16.
Some historians (currently criticized) refer to the indigenous people as a "formless and ahistorical mass"Husson, 1992, p. 106. because the majority of them lived scattered in valleys with difficult accessHusson, 1992, p. 109. and with an "archaic" culture based on respect for tradition.Méndez Gastelumendi, 2002, p. 10. 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.Méndez Gastelumendi, 2005a, p. 127.
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).La Oposición De Los Campesinos Indios A La República Peruana: Iquicha, 1827. Anuario Colombiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura 23, 1996.
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).Echeverri, Marcela. Reseña de "The Plebeian Republic: The Huanta Rebellion and the Making of the Peruvian State, 1820-1850" de Méndez, Cecilia. Anuario Colombiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura, núm. 33, 2006, pp. 411-416. Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Bogota, Colombia.
Furthermore, Cecilia Mendez, according to her historical vision of monarchism, does not interpret the rebellion as proof that there were reactionary political convictions in the Huantino peasantry (in contrast to the case of the French Royalistes of the Vendeé), and that the reasons for their rebellion would have been because that, in the Republic, the ethnic hierarchies bequeathed by the viceregal times were altered, not so much by traditionalist monarchical convictions (which would have been reduced to merely propaganda in the counterrevolutionary pamphlets made by Spaniards and priests), although it admits the existence of an indigenous or popular realism (which were related to the political rituals that had been essential in the traditional political life that developed in the Spanish monarchy), but that said loyalty to the King of Spain was conditioned by an instrumental convenience to legitimize the political project of the Huantine peasants in the pacts contained in the vassalage of their community, and not so much because of a sincere conviction that monarchy was the best form of government (except in leading caudillos like Huachaca) or the belief that said pacts could only be fulfilled only with the protection of the Spanish Crown (advocating future alliances with the Peru-Bolivian Confederation). Therefore, it was more an anti-republicanism (or specifically, a specific denial of the authority of the Republic of Peru) than a Hispanist monarchism that founded the rebellion, which even took the liberties of developing new fiscal institutions, challenging ethnic hierarchies (both colonial and republican) and other types of reforms that were not present in the legislation of the Spanish monarchy at the time, so the monarchism of the rebellion was dynamic, a fundamental creative element, to protect mostly its own local interest and not so much that of the Spanish monarchical state. Finally, he would postulate the idea that the Huantine peasants sought the “dissolution of ethnicities” (to abolish the legal differences between the republic of Indians and that of Spaniards), and that deep down they were envisioning a new “subversive” order with liberal tendencies that would become more present decades later.