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August 6 commemorated 200 years of the birth of Bolivia as a free, independent and sovereign country. It was the culmination of a long and tortuous process of liberation from the territory known as Alto Peru, at the Audience of Charcas. It was the first territory to declare independence in America of the Spanish colonial yoke and, paradoxically, the last to consummate it, after 16 years of war.
The independence movement had had an important antecedent in the Aymara indigenous rebellion headed by Túpac Katari between 1780 and 1782, which was violently repressed. Then, when the Napoleonic invasion occurred to the Iberian Peninsula and the resistance of the Spanish people against José Bonaparte, the brother of Napoleon, the Creole elites, headed by the president of the audience and the archbishop of Chuquisaca, the largest city of Alto Peru, declared their autonomy and fidelity to the courts of Cádiz and the Spanish monarch Fernando VII, 25 May 1809. A popular insurrection in La Paz, on July 16, 1809, proclaimed the independence that, however, lasted little, since they were repressed by the realistic army of Lima in November 1809. The insurgent leader, Murillo and his main collaborators were executed in January 1810. Alto Peru was under the jurisdiction of the Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata since 1776; Before, he had been part of the Viceroyalty of Peru.
In the following years, an insurgent Creole generation maintained resistance with support from the Aymara and Quechua indigenous population, which represented the vast majority of the population of Charcas. That territory, in which the Mining Zone of Potosí was located, one of the largest sources of the wealth produced in Spanish America during the colonial period, was the subject of an intense dispute between the viceroyalty of Peru and Rio de la Plata, as well as the realistic forces that sought to stop the overwhelming growth of the Liberator Project headed by Simón Bolívar, which was hurting death to the death Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Ecuador and Peru.
The Argentine insurgent movement, which had managed to establish independence in May 1810, sought to expand to Alto Peru. To control that rich region, the territory invaded three times. In April 1811, the Argentine troops occupied and released La Paz and Oruro, but were defeated the following month by the realistic forces of Cuzco. After that defeat, the Argentine army prevented the reconquest of Buenos Aires in February 1813 and invaded Alto Peru in June of that year, but were defeated again. A third invasion occurred in November 1815, but suffered a terrible defeat that made the leader of the Argentine insurgency, José de San Martín, abandon the attempts to incorporate the territory of Charcas into his domain. A last Argentine, small and without major importance raid, occurred in early 1817. All these invasions had the support of the insurgent popular Creoles and sectors of the highlands of Peru.
In 1816, after a difficult period, Bolívar revived the independence movement in Venezuela. Meanwhile, San Martín did the same and released the territory of Chile in April 1818. Bolívar led the liberation of Peru. With Antonio José de Sucre as his main lieutenant, The Liberator He began the definitive battles to south-bright what remained of the realistic troops that desperately tried to keep the Hispanic colonies. The final, decisive battle, which sealed the end of the colonial regime in America was the triumph that Sucre reached in Ayacucho in December 1824. With that defeat, the fate of Alto Peru, the last redoubt that Spain retained in South America, was defined.
That region was controlled by the realistic general Pedro de Olañeta, who refused to capitular. It was a complicated region on the regional stage, because although it was under the jurisdiction of Buenos Aires, the realistic elites had reinstated it to Peru to prevent its independence when the first Argentine invasion occurred. In addition, she was also coveted by Brazil, where Carlota, sister of Fernando VII and wife of the Portuguese monarch, wanted to maintain the influence of the Bourbons in America supported by the governments of the Holy Alliance.
Bolívar, who after liberating Peru was its president and supreme commander, knew that a jurisdiction conflict between Peru and Buenos Aires could be caused. He also knew the autonomist wishes of the high -perruan Creole elites, which would be an obstacle to his project to integrate Colombia, Peru and Ecuador into a single country. That is why I doubted if Alto Peru should occupy and precipitate the independence of that region before specifying its trans -Andean integration project. Sucre took peace in February 1825. He had written to Bolívar on the 8th of that month: “We have to work in a country that is not from Peru or seem to be but of himself.” Two days later, without consulting The Liberator, He summoned an assembly with representatives of the four Altoperuanas provinces, who, gathered in Chuquisaca, proclaimed the independence of Bolivia on August 6, 1825.
* Director of the National Institute of Historical Studies of the Revolutions of Mexico (INEHRM)
