Clara Tocarruncho: “Túpac Amaru, emperor of America!”

By: Ana María Zabala Gómez

Andean rebellions

In 1780, the Andes were shaken by the relentless winds of rebellion. From Cusco, the indigenous peoples waved the flag of liberation under the leadership of the cacique José Gabriel Túpac Amaru (1740-1781). They were fed up with three centuries of servitude to an invading crown. From La Paz, the Quechua and Aymara peoples, with Túpac Katari and Bartolina Sisa, plundered colonial properties and burned churches, challenging the colonial order built at the cost of pillaging mines where so many natives were enslaved and driven to early deaths, poisoned and worn out. 

The whirlwind of Andean rebellions generated terror in the viceroyalties of Lima and Buenos Aires and presented the most important challenge to Spanish rule by indigenous peoples in South America. Despite disrupting the regime of the Spanish empire three decades before the independence struggles in the region, the Eurocentric historiography of the later republics excluded these rebellions from their emancipation narratives. In the 20th century, the histories of the Aymara-Quechua rebellion and the rebellion of Tupac Amaru were vindicated by the historiography of the Andean countries. 

The colonizers violently quelled these movements, cruelly executing their leaders and displaying their dismembered bodies to intimidate the rest of the uprising. But the echo of the gale resounded throughout the Andean mountain range, the longest on Earth. Its liberating winds that heralded hopeful omens reached an audacious woman with millenary roots in the mountains of the northern Andes. 

The “Motín de Cómbita”

In the town of Cómbita in the then New Granada, Clara Tocarruncho proclaimed “Túpac Amaru, emperor of America!” in a congregation of natives and mestizos in early 1781. The winds of the Andean rebellion were blowing through the humid fog forests through the voice of the Muisca descendant of the Zaques of Tunja. In 1781, Clara Tocarruncho led an indigenous insurrection movement that was dubbed “El Motín de Cómbita.” At the same time that the merchant Manuela Beltran protested the taxes of the Spanish Crown’s Bourbon reforms when she threw the royal parchment to the ground in the plaza of El Socorro, Clara Tocarruncho proposed to supplant the Spanish monarchy with the government program of the Inca Túpac Amaru. 

According to Marisa Gallego (2017), the demands of the program enunciated by Túpac Amaru were: 

-the extinction of the “bad government” of the corregidores; 

-the abolition of the mita of Potosí¹; 

-the suppression of the textile manufactures; 

-the end of mercantilism and the cancellation of debts;

-the liberation of the enslaved, and 

-the establishment of an Audiencia (colonial institution) in Cusco.

The “Cómbita mutiny” of Clara Tocarruncho created its own winds of rebellion that stirred nearby towns such as El Cocuy, Silos, Mutiscua and Socorro. In Socorro these winds became the well-known Rebellion of the Comuneros. The Rebellion of the Comuneros arose from the dissatisfaction with the new taxes imposed by the crown and the monopoly they were creating around certain products such as tobacco and aguardiente. These fiscal measures affected mainly mestizo merchants and wealthy criollos, most of whom led the rebellion in El Socorro. 

It does not surprise me, then, that the white and mestizo “Rebellion of the Comuneros” is better remembered and much better documented than the indigenous “Cómbita Mutiny”. For instance, there are several biographies of Manuela Beltrán, the descendant of Spaniards. Her name resonates in educational texts, institutions, squares and monuments, and she was even honored with her portrait on a Colombian stamp. Of Clara Tocarruncho and her winds of broader emancipation that included the dispossessed in the history of this territory, few records remain: there’s no portrait and her biography consists of the same three sentences that are repeated in different sources. 

The end of Clara’s life is unknown. It is uncertain whether she lived a long life or if she was killed at the hands of the colonial order like Tupac Amaru, who before the executioner cut out his tongue on May 18, 1781 said in Kichwa and Spanish: “Tikrashami hunu makanakuypi kasha” “I will return and I will be millions” (Bacacela, 2017).

More tributes are needed to those figures who have carried out deeply emancipatory struggles in Latin America. Those who, like Clara Tocarruncho, have been excluded by racist and Eurocentric historiography.

Notas

1.  Through the “mita de Potosí”, the colonizers recruited indigenous people for enslaved labor in the extraction of silver from the Potosí hill. In the three centuries that the plundering of the Potosí hill lasted, according to Eduardo Galeano in the Open Veins of Latin America, some 60,000 million tons of silver were extracted, which would be enough to build a silver bridge from Potosí to Madrid.

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