Treasure Seekers: Lost Cities of the Inca Page #4

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In the years of his travels,

he accumulated an astonishing

As Francisco listened to

Indians talking,

he understood the magnitude of

their catastrophe.

Not only had they been subjected to

the encomenderos,

but they were dying by the

hundreds of thousands.

A series of devastating epidemics of

European diseases

to which they had no resistance

had already wiped out over half

the Indian population of Peru.

In just 30 years since the arrival

of Pizarro,

almost a million people had died of

colds, flus,

measles and small pox.

In despair, many people were focusing

unreal hopes of salvation

on the Inca court in exile.

Francisco started to believe that

Vilcabamba's hold on the Indian

imagination had to be broken.

Francisco traveled on.

In the course of his research

he covered all the territory

from what is now Quito in Ecuador

to Bolivia.

And as he traveled,

he learned something else.

The Inca Empire had been composed of

many different tribes.

The Incas were just one of them

who had come to dominate the others

only recently,

about 100 years before the arrival

of the Spanish.

Just like the Spanish, they had waged

fierce war to conquer the country.

There was no shortage of evidence

of Inca brutality to weaker tribes.

The Incas are tyrants,

and as such, intruders in the

government of these lands.

I think he was looking for arguments

in order to justify the Spanish

conquest within this particular region.

And he saw that the excuse

could be to blame

the Inca people as being tyrants,

as being dictators, as being people

who had imposed themselves

with force on the populations

they had conquered

in order to present

the Spanish Conquest

as a sort of liberated process.

He wasn't wrong.

What happens is when you use the word

'tyrant'

it has a whole moral connotation.

The Incas were an

authoritarian system,

with an imperial military force

which was extremely violent, cruel,

and would use the sorts of torture

which would scandalize us

if they were used in European wars.

As Francisco pondered the realities

he had discovered on his voyages,

any doubts he might have had

about the legitimacy of the

Spanish conquest evaporated.

With typical thoroughness,

he came up with a plan which was

brilliantly argued,

utterly coherent

and totally draconian.

His vision was of a great kingdom

of stern justice in Peru.

He would impose Spain's authority

on the quarreling encomenderos

and church alike.

He knew he would make enemies

of both of them.

He did it anyway.

And he would totally reorganize the

Indian world so it could experience

both the justice and authority

of the Spanish crown.

The Indians were to be resettled

from their remote villages

into more accessible towns

where they would pay taxes to Spain

and be protected by her.

And he would insist that, as subjects

of Spain, they had rights.

But there was one terrible price

to pay

for Francisco's vision of

a just social order in Peru

there would be no place

for Vilcabamba.

There could not be two kings

in the colony.

Vilcabamba and the remaining power

of the Inca kings must be destroyed.

Unknown to Francisco, the Inca king

he was deciding to destroy

was little more than a boy,

Tupac Amaru.

Brought up by the Inca priestesses

of Vilcabamba,

he was deeply religious and knew

nothing of the outside world.

He was gentle, famously beautiful,

charming, and it seems, not very smart.

Tupac Amaru was very young

when he was crowned Inca.

Tupac Amaru is referred as an 'Uti'.

Uti is meant to be sort of

not mentally retarded,

but not the quickest,

not the brightest.

Tupac Amaru was a very young person.

I don't imagine him as being

very well politically trained.

He was very young.

He was just a symbolic figure.

Tupac Amaru was an innocent,

but that wasn't going to save him.

On June 16th, 1572, Spanish troops

thundered towards Vilcabamba.

As they charge into the citadel,

Tupac Amaru manages to escape

with his wife

who is expecting their first child.

They don't get far.

The bewildered young Tupac is

dragged back to Cuzco,

and on September 21st, 1572,

condemned to death.

As Tupac Amaru is led through

the streets to his execution,

the town is seething.

Everybody has fallen in love with

the handsome young king,

not just Indians,

but Spaniards too.

They all want Francisco to relent.

Francisco locks himself in his office

and refuses to see anyone.

In the main square of Cuzco, Tupac

Amaru rises to the execution block.

An eyewitness records the scene:

as the multitude of Indians saw

that lamentable spectacle,

they deafened the skies making them

reverberate

with their cries and wailing.

There are two versions of

what happens next.

In one, Tupac quiets the crowd

and says nobly,

"Mother Earth, witness how my enemies

shed my blood."

In another, he makes

a rambling, tearful speech

and renounces the Inca gods.

Everyone prays that Toledo will

change his mind.

But from Toledo's closed office,

there is a resounding silence.

Toledo writes to King Philip:

what Your Majesty has ordered

concerning the Inca has been done.

But His Majesty had not ordered

the death of Tupac Amaru,

only a solution to the Indian problem.

From this moment the tide starts

to turn against Francisco.

Toledo accomplished the mission

that he had set out for himself.

That's why he wanted it to be so

public and so theatrical,

to send a message,

"This is over; this is it."

But it wasn't over.

As Tupac's head was mounted on

a pike in Cuzco's central square,

the Inca king's faithful subjects

held vigil all night.

And immediately the stories

circulated that

Tupac Amaru's head became more

beautiful with each passing minute.

As the centuries passed,

it became more beautiful still.

Tupac Amaru was converted into

a Christ like figure

of martired innocence,

the symbol of native resistance

to oppression.

For 500 years, almost every popular

rebellion in Peru,

from the Great Indian uprisings of

the 18th century,

led by Tupac Amaru II,

to the urban guerrillas of the late

It's a tragic myth,

because everybody who invoked

Tupac Amaru failed as well.

Tupac Amaru II failed,

the Peruvian Revolution of '68,

which relied on the image of the

two Tupac Amarus, also failed.

As history turned Tupac Amaru

into a tragic hero,

it turned Francisco into a caricature

of the cruel Spaniard.

Forgotten were his stands for justice

and the rights of Indians

against the brutal exploitation

of the encomenderos,

he became famous for one thing:

executing the innocent boy king,

Tupac Amaru.

You've got to remember

who was writing that history.

The history of Spain was written

by priests,

the missionaries who hated Toledo.

I think he held everybody

to the same standards.

In administrative terms,

he did the right thing.

In terms of his conscience,

only he can tell.

After a remarkably successful reform

of the colony in Peru,

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