Juan Santos Atahualpa: A Millenarian Movement in the Jungle

Abstract

In June 1742, in the heart of the Peruvian Central Jungle, the longest rebellion recorded during the colonial period broke out. Led by Juan Santos Atahualpa, a young mestizo of highland origin, the movement dismantled within a few months all the evangelization efforts that the Franciscans had begun in the region in the seventeenth century and consolidated in the eighteenth century. This rebellion, characterized predominantly by millenarian features, failed to achieve its goal of expelling the peninsular Spaniards from the Viceroyalty and crowning Juan Santos Atahualpa as the new Inca of Peru. This article seeks to analyze the rebellion from an ideological perspective, for which purpose it considers it necessary to explain the situation of the Central Jungle at that time.