Peruvian Independence

In July 1821, the Argentine general José de San Martín proclaimed Peru independent in Lima, ending the formal authority of the Spanish crown over the heart of its old South American empire. The declaration did not end the fighting. Royalist armies still held much of the Andes, and it took until the Battle of Ayacucho in December 1824 for Spanish power on the continent to be decisively broken. Peru mattered because it had been Spain's richest and most loyal viceroyalty, and its fall marked the effective close of Spanish rule in mainland South America.

Peru was slow to break away. Since the sixteenth century, Lima had been the seat of a viceroyalty built on silver mining and on the labor of a large Indigenous population. Its colonial elite was wealthy, conservative, and wary of social upheaval, especially after the great Andean rebellion led by Túpac Amaru II in 1780-81. When revolutions swept Buenos Aires, Caracas, and Santiago after 1808, Peru remained a royalist base from which Spain launched counterattacks. Independence therefore had to come largely from outside.

San Martín, who had helped liberate Argentina and Chile, led an expedition by sea from Chile in 1820 with naval support under Thomas Cochrane. Rather than storm Lima, he landed on the coast and relied on pressure, blockade, and defections. Royalist forces withdrew inland in 1821, and Lima's leaders accepted independence, which San Martín proclaimed in July. He took the title of Protector of Peru, but he controlled little of the interior and faced political divisions and a shortage of troops. After a private meeting with Simón Bolívar at Guayaquil in 1822, whose contents historians still debate, San Martín left Peru and went into exile.

Bolívar then took up the campaign, arriving in 1823 with Colombian troops and working alongside Peruvian leaders and Antonio José de Sucre. The Spanish were weakened by divisions of their own, as liberal and absolutist factions quarreled in the royalist camp. In 1824 patriot forces won at Junín, and on 9 December Sucre defeated the royalist army at Ayacucho. The Spanish viceroy was captured, and the army capitulated. A few garrisons, notably at Callao, held out into 1826.

Independence brought Peru political freedom but not stability. The new republic faced economic disruption, caudillo rivalries, and a continued dependence on Indigenous tribute and elite landholding. Bolívar's vision of a larger union of Andean states soon faded. Still, the events of 1821-1824 ended three centuries of colonial government, and Peru's national holiday on 28 July continues to commemorate San Martín's proclamation.