Freedom fighters of the ‘forgotten continent’

On 18 May 1781, Tupac Amaru II’s rebellion came to an abrupt and grisly end. Seized by Spanish forces, the Peruvian muleteer-turned-popular-revolutionary knew the game was up. Still, he refused to go quietly. After Tupac’s captors’ horses failed to wrench off his limbs, the executioner reached for his axe. ‘You kill only me,’ legend has Tupac shouting as the blade descended. ‘But tomorrow I will return as millions.’

As Laurence Blair’s Patria assiduously demonstrates, death rarely has the last word in the ‘forgotten continent’ of South America. In the case of Tupac, his narrative of a ‘Peru for Peruvians’, free from colonial oppression, would later be resurrected in radical leftist movements from Uruguay to Venezuela. Even the Black Panthers in 1960s New York managed to shoehorn a space for him – cue the rapper ‘2Pac’.

Bolivia continues to maintain a navy in the expectation of one day regaining its route to the Pacific

Search for stories of native heroes in the official record, however, and they are difficult to find. If names such as Tupac, Zumbi or Marshal Lopez resonate at all, they do so as passing factoids, dredged up to win a pub quiz but otherwise blotted out. With the passion of a convinced revisionist, Blair, a British journalist based in South America, sets out to ‘defamaliarise us from what we know’, and in the process reveal the contemporary resonance of the region’s ‘crushed alternatives’.

He dismisses the lazy trope that South American history ‘begins and ends with the Incas’, and the first rabbit hole he dives into belongs to the Chincha. An affluent coastal civilisation once located in southern Peru, this ancient maritime kingdom was said to count some 100,000 ocean vessels at its peak in the early 16th century. The secret of its success was simple: guano. The Chincha had worked out that the gulls’ droppings coating the rocky islands off the coast were a perfect fertiliser.