National Geographic: Treasure Seekers - Lost Cities of the Inca (2000)

Curious minds want to know... documentary movie collection.

Moderator: Maskath3

Watch Docus Amazon   Docus Merchandise

Documentary movie collection.
Post Reply

National Geographic: Treasure Seekers - Lost Cities of the Inca (2000)

Post by bunniefuu »

Peru.

For centuries home of the high

civilizations of the Andes.

Here the Sun Kings of the Inca

ruled over a vast empire,

which stretched for 2,000 miles along

the mountain spine of South America.

In 1532, that empire was destroyed

with tragic ease by the Spanish.

As their world crumbled around them,

Inca nobles retreated into the remote

recesses of the mountains.

There they struggled to keep alive

their culture in its final refuge.

The last city of the Incas

Vilcabamba.

This is the story of two men

lured by the silent call of that

last Inca hiding place.

One to rediscover it

the other to destroy it forever.

Machu Picchu.

For centuries, this spectacular

Inca citadel lay forgotten,

hidden by the plunging ravines

and coiling mists of the mountain

cloud forest.

The year is 1948.

Machu Picchu is visited by

a retired American senator

a man, who in his youth,

revealed it to the world.

He has done many things in

his remarkable life,

but Hiram Bingham knows

he will be remembered for one:

this astonishing archeological

discovery.

Hiram Bingham is a sort of

accidental archeologist.

He's been scorned by better trained

excavators,

but he really doesn't care

he's used to coping with bad press.

Back in Washington he'd been elected

a Republican senator

in the Roaring Twenties.

His flamboyant style was perfectly

in tune with the times.

A bribery scandal, an affair with

the wife of another Congressman,

divorce, accusations that he'd

embezzled his first wife's fortune

had all left him unscathed.

In 1929, he landed a Zeppelin

on Capitol Hill as a publicity stunt.

Hiram loved headlines.

He was a very, very colorful

character

a man of enormous energy,

tremendous ambition.

He was capable of doing almost

anything, and he had an attitude

that led him to believe he could

accomplish whatever he set out to do.

Perhaps Hiram's adventurous life was

the perfect reaction to his upbringing.

Born to pioneering Christian

missionaries in the Hawaiian Islands,

Hiram was raised for a life of

Puritan austerity.

In the world of his childhood,

any extravagance,

lack of discipline, even dancing

were strictly forbidden.

Not surprisingly,

Hiram was eager to escape.

Resourceful and intelligent,

he saved and studied to get into

school on the mainland.

Before long, he was headed for Yale.

Hiram threw himself into

Yale college life.

Gone were the puritanical days

of his Hawaiian childhood.

Suddenly, a new world of temptations

was beckoning.

Intellectual excitement, adventure,

and girls.

Dear Mother, what can I do?

I know it will hurt you

to think that I dance,

but people here in the East do not

understand why

anyone should not dance,

unless one is sick or lame.

I can see nothing wrong with it

unless carried to excess.

Although reserved, Hiram was

determined to enjoy himself.

Thanks to his charm,

he was soon moving freely in this

atmosphere of wealth and privilege.

Before long, he met Alfreda Mitchell,

heiress to the Tiffany fortune.

Alfreda was irresistible, wealthy,

and from the high society

Hiram was now determined to be

a part of.

In 1900,

two years after they first met,

Hiram and Freda were married at the

Mitchell's grand estate in New London.

Hiram took to wealth like a duck to

water but there was a down side.

There was obviously an economic

asymmetry.

The wife brought with her a set

of expectations

about the style in which

she should live,

and her side of the family was

apparently very active

in making sure that those

expectations were met.

He liked the money and status,

but hadn't banked on the pressures

from his in laws.

Used to his independence,

Hiram soon began to feel like a bird

in a gilded cage.

He had every prospect of a

professorship at Yale,

but before long university life, too,

started to feel suffocating.

Feeling hemmed in by academia,

in laws,

and the pressures of domesticity,

Hiram soon started looking for

an escape.

He decided field research for

a book about Simon Bolivar

would be his ticket to

some adventure.

In 1906, he said good bye to Alfreda

and headed off for South America.

I feel the Bingham blood stirring

in my veins

as I start for little known regions,

as nearly all my Bingham ancestors for

ten generations have done before me.

Freda wasn't happy about the long

separation imposed by his travels.

Hiram wrote soothing letters as if

he wasn't either.

Dearly beloved, I love you with a

love that increases

from day to day.

Let us not complain about

our long separation

but rejoice in the opportunity to

accomplish a good piece of work.

But thousands of miles away,

Hiram was ecstatic.

He may have missed Alfreda,

but at last he met his true calling

adventurer.

It was through the actual process of

travel that he began to realize that

exploration rather than documentary

research was what really drew him.

Bingham abandoned his

academic research

to write a book about his travels.

When he reached Peru,

Bingham came face to face with

the Inca world for the first time.

He was entranced.

Here was the remains of a civilization

as vast and sophisticated as

ancient Egypt,

and yet little was known about it.

Its descendants still populated

the Andes.

The ancient sites

which littered Peru spoke to him

of a magnificent bygone world,

but he had no idea how to interpret

what they said.

He had to find a method on the spot.

Fortunately, I had with me that

extremely useful handbook,

"Hints to the Travelers," published

by the Royal Geographic Society.

In one of the chapters I found out

what should be done

when one is confronted by

a prehistoric site:

take careful measurements,

plenty of photographs, and describe

as accurately as possible all finds.

He was soon eagerly examining Inca

sites all over Peru.

One episode of Inca history fascinated

him above all others Vilcabamba,

last stronghold of the Inca kings.

Sixteenth century chronicles recounted

how a core group of Inca nobles

and priests

had escaped the carnage of conquest

and fled into the impenetrable

high jungles

to the north of the Inca capital,

Cuzco.

And there, at a place called

Vilcabamba,

they'd constructed an Inca court

in exile.

A palace, a temple, a final

refuge of their world.

They had taken their sacred relics

of gold with them.

Many had been lured by the accounts

of Vilcabamba and gone in search of it.

None had ever succeeded in

finding it.

Perhaps the relics and the gold

were still there,

hidden in the jungle,

waiting to be discovered.

Hiram was spellbound.

It was a treasure seeker's dream.

Suddenly, Hiram saw a fantastic

adventure opening up before him:

he would discover Vilcabamba,

lost city of the Incas,

and unearth its hidden treasures.

Hiram returned to the U.S.

and threw himself into fundraising

and his researches on Vilcabamba.

He pored over maps and chronicles

of the Conquest.

Based on these, Hiram made

meticulous calculations of

where Vilcabamba must be.

After months of research,

he was certain

the last refuge of the Incas

had been in a remote place now

called Espiritu Pampa.

Now all he had to do was

raise the money for the expedition.

He was too proud to be totally

bankrolled by his wife's family.

He went down to the Yale Club in

New York City, and he gave a speech.

A number of the people came forward.

When they saw the pictures of

his earlier travels,

they became very excited.

Last night a classmate,

of whom I have seen very little,

came over and talked with me.

When I told him about my plans and how

I needed $1800

to pay for a topographer

he smiled and said,

"Eighteen hundred dollars?

I'll give you that."

I could have shouted with joy.

The New York harbor

on June 8th, 1911,

Hiram Bingham stood on the deck

of a steamer

once again waving goodbye

to his wife.

This time it was harder.

They had just had another son,

Hiram IV.

I shall never forget how you looked

as you stood on the wharf with Harry,

so brave and courageous,

and yet so little and so appealing.

It did seem too cruel for words

that I should be

leaving you all alone.

But soon he was back in Peru doing

what he loved most.

In July 1911, he set off

from Cuzco northwards

on the long journey to

Espiritu Pampa.

Back in his element,

Hiram was overjoyed.

He was also extraordinarily lucky.

After less than three weeks easy

trekking down a newly opened road,

a local farmer told him about some old

stone terraces

on a mountain nearby.

Hiram asked the man

what the place was called.

He scribbled down the answer

in his notebook Machu Picchu.

He decided to have a quick look at it

the next day.

A young Indian boy led the party up

onto a plateau a few hours away.

Hardly had we rounded

the promontory

than we were confronted by

an unexpected sight:

a great flight of beautifully

constructed stone faced terraces,

perhaps a hundred of them.

I could scarcely believe my senses.

Would anyone believe

what I had found?

Fortunately, I had a good camera.

He knew he'd found an Inca ruin of

exceptional beauty,

but I think because of his

lack of experience,

he didn't fully appreciate

how unique the discovery was.

It was an entire city

which had lain untouched

since the Incas had abandoned it

almost 400 years before.

Not understanding what he had found,

Hiram left two of his team

to start clearing

and mapping the site

while he pressed on to his

real goal, Vilcabamba.

He forged on northwards

pushing his team through tangled...

jungle and perilous ravines

sure he was heading toward

greater discoveries

a fabulous lost city of

temples and palaces

that would put any other Inca ruin

to shame.

Finally, after weeks of

arduous trekking,

he approached the area where he knew

Vilcabamba must be.

For days his team hacked through

dense underbrush and tangled vines.

To their great astonishment,

they found nothing.

Espiritu Pampa was a desolate

upland plateau

with a few unimpressive stone

foundations and a lot of dense jungle.

It was a far cry from the magnificent

city Bingham had imagined.

He was disappointed and confused.

Could this be Vilcabamba?

Or had his calculations been wrong?

A perplexed Hiram turned back

the expedition.

The men were exhausted and supplies

were running out.

As his team trudged back to

civilization, morale hit rock bottom.

I often wonder why under the sun

I picked out a career

that would force me to spend so much

of my time away

from my dear ones.

The future is not clear to me.

As Hiram headed back to

the U.S. and Alfreda,

gloom and uncertainty hung over

his whole project.

Once back in the U.S.,

Hiram's spirits revived,

and with them his dreams of

Vilcabamba.

He rechecked his calculations of

its position.

If it was not Espiritu Pampa,

could it be Machu Picchu?

But Machu Picchu's position still

seemed wrong.

He decided to return to Peru

the following year

and investigate his find

more thoroughly.

When he arrived in Machu Picchu again

in the summer of 1912,

what the workmen had revealed was,

quite simply, stunning.

It clearly was some sort of city

its size, its spectacular location,

its magnificent terracing,

all made him sure it was a royal city.

No one but a king could have insisted

on having the lintels of his doorways

made of solid blocks of granite,

each weighing three tons.

What a prodigious amount of

patient work had to be employed.

Overcome with excitement,

Hiram immediately began to speculate

that this must be the last refuge

of the Inca kings.

Even if the location was wrong,

everything else was so right.

Here in this breathtaking hideout,

the Inca rulers had surely sheltered

the last remnants of their world.

Hiram devoted himself to his

spectacular find at Machu Picchu.

It was his passport to

worldwide fame.

National Geographic devoted an

entire magazine

issue to Bingham

and his work in Peru.

Suddenly, everybody knew about Machu

Picchu and the man who uncovered it.

At a special National Geographic

Society dinner he was honored

along with the world renowned

discoverers

of the North and South Poles.

Hiram had finally achieved the fame

he'd always wanted.

But his career as an excavator was

not to last much longer.

He returned to Peru in 1915 to a

storm of controversy.

For many Peruvians,

the apparent absence of

spectacular gold

among Bingham's finds

was deeply suspicious.

Rumors flew that Bingham

had found gold

and was smuggling it out of

the country.

Fed up, fearing arrest,

Hiram packed and left Peru.

On his return to the U.S.,

he decided to abandon his excavations.

The first World w*r was raging.

He signed up as an aviator.

World w*r I offered him a very

convenient way of extricating himself

from what had become an intractable

situation in Peru.

He could honorably say that

the world needed him

to become involved in the

m*llitary effort

that, as a patriot,

he should do that.

After a tour of duty in Europe,

Bingham had the perfect qualifications

for a political career.

Yale man, world famous explorer,

and now w*r hero.

He was elected in 1924 to the

U.S. Senate with little difficulty.

His political star rose steadily

through the 1920s,

but a bribery scandal and the Great

Depression brought it down fast.

The political tide turned against

Hiram and his buccaneering style.

He lost his Senate seat in 1932.

Before long, he lost Alfreda too,

and left taking a large part of

her family's money with him.

Remarried, eager to make up

for past mistakes,

he turned back to tend the one

reputation he knew was secure,

discoverer of Machu Picchu.

He believed to his dying day that

Machu Picchu was Vilcabamba.

As it turned out,

here too he was mistaken.

Later discoveries made it clear

the real Vilcabamba was exactly where

Hiram's first calculations had put it,

at Espiritu Pampa.

Beneath the tangled overgrowth of

Espiritu Pampa's desolate jungle,

the remains of Vilcabamba had been

lying only a few hundred yards

from where Hiram had searched.

Determined to dispel

any lingering doubts

that Machu Picchu was not

the last refuge of the Incas,

Hiram devoted many of the years

up to his death in 1956

to his researches into Vilcabamba

and its fall.

His studies took him back to

the 16th century.

The bloodstained and tumultuous era

of the Conquest

and to a brilliant, chilling,

now largely forgotten man

who changed the course of

Peru's history

Francisco de Toledo,

administrator of genius,

passionate believer in the law,

destroyer of Vilcabamba,

k*ller of the last Inca king.

Francisco de Toledo was born in 1515

into the high Spanish nobility

in the town of Oropesa.

In the 16th century, you couldn't get

much more privileged than this.

Spain was the wealthiest and most

powerful nation on earth.

Its massive armies had subdued

Moslems in the Middle East

and Protestants in Europe's north.

It was the powerhouse of the West.

The recent astonishing discoveries

of a whole new continent

promised an inexhaustible supply of

wealth, and it all belonged to Spain.

This was the confident, aggressive and

opulent world

Francisco was born into.

But despite his family's position,

his early life was not easy.

His mother d*ed in childbirth, and

young Francisco was raised by nuns.

He grew up isolated in a world of

austere Catholicism

and fervent devotion.

Young Francisco took on the qualities

of the religious world that shaped him.

He became tough minded,

disciplined,

and an ardent believer

in the justice of Christ.

His family had always been loyal

servants of the Spanish crown,

so at 15 Francisco became a page

at the royal palace.

In 1532, Francisco would have been

at court for only two years

when he heard the astounding tales

of Pizarro's conquest of Peru

and the astonishing ransom in gold

of the Inca king, Atahuallpa.

These were reports from beyond

the edge of the known world.

How could his imagination not be

seized

by the faraway kingdom of Peru

and its amazing riches?

Francisco joined a religious

and m*llitary order

at the forefront of

Spain's expansion.

He took the necessary vows

and dedicated his life to Christ,

Spain and the law.

Toledo was brought up to be

what we would consider a humanist.

He had training in the law,

he could read Latin.

So, he was a man trained to be like,

today we would say a Harvard or

a Yale man, ready to rule.

Francisco rose fast

through the ranks.

By 1558, he'd become a permanent,

powerful member of the royal household.

He was one of the chosen few present

at the bedside of King Charles V

when he d*ed.

Francisco went on to serve the

next king of Spain,

Philip II,

who on taking the throne was confronted

with the devastating

and unexpected realization

the empire was broke.

Overextended in Europe,

Spain had also financed

decades of conquest

and exploration in the Americas.

Very little was coming back.

All that Inca and Aztec gold

that had been melted down

turned out to be a drop in the ocean.

The real wealth of the colonies was

in the hands of the 'encomenderos,'

the new Spanish overlords who had

divided up the lands

and the Indians amongst themselves.

In a feeding frenzy

over the astonishing wealth

of their newfound land,

the encomenderos had spawned Spain's

very own Wild West,

where lawlessness and

the sword ruled.

They were busy making themselves rich,

and not paying tribute to the crown.

Philip realized he desperately

needed someone

who could straighten out the colony

in Peru

and get some revenues flowing

back to Spain.

That man, he decided,

was Francisco de Toledo.

In 1569, Francisco set sail for Peru

to take up the most challenging

and important job

in the Spanish Empire,

Viceroy of Peru.

The grueling journey took almost

an entire year

across the barely charted waters

of the Atlantic,

and then down the Pacific Coast of

South America to Peru.

On November 30th, 1569,

Francisco arrived in the

Spanish capital of Peru, Lima.

Anxious for his favor,

the local encomenderos gave him

an enthusiastic welcome.

But in a letter to King Philip,

he secretly confided his disgust

for the anarchic little frontier town

and its Spanish overlords.

The Spaniards in this kingdom

have tried to fill their greedy hands

in the looting of ancient tombs

and sacred worship sites.

And it is the most common thing

for them to wildly flaunt their finds.

But this is what he'd been sent to

put right.

The new viceroy threw himself into the

task of reforming the delinquent colony.

It quickly became clear to him that

the colony was being pulled apart by

two powerful forces.

On the one hand there were

the encomenderos

who fought amongst themselves

and enslaved the Indians.

On the other, there was the Church,

which also felt it had a moral right

not only to Indian souls,

but their labor.

The whole colony was feeding itself

on Indian toil and Indian ignorance.

Not surprisingly,

the native population simmered with

resentment and discontent.

Francisco could immediately see

where he had to focus his reforms.

I am informed that the Indians

are not free

as a result of their weakness,

and the great awe they have

toward Spaniards.

It is, therefore, my duty

as their protector

to see they are not cheated

in their work.

Francisco also learned

the Inca court in exile,

now established in Vilcabamba,

had already been at the center

of the violent rebellion

which had raged for years.

When Toledo arrived to Peru,

he was sympathetic to the Inca.

On the other hand, there had been

this famous uprising of the Incas.

The Incas had retired to Vilcabamba

and they were threatening the

whole process of the conquest.

Francisco had to somehow

introduce order

into this volatile

and chaotic situation.

He realized he could never

put things right

unless he came to understand it

in greater depth.

So he proposed something that,

for the time,

was absolutely remarkable

a research trip

to find out at first hand

what was happening in the colony.

I saw clearly that I would not be

able to govern the Spaniards

or the Indians with the zeal that

I had for serving God or Your Majesty

unless I saw the land, traveled

through it, and inspected it.

It was what we would do today

in a social survey.

It was completely innovative.

The government up to that point was

based on brutality and the use of arms.

What Toledo proposes is government

based on knowledge,

which makes him a man

ahead of his time.

So in 1570, Toledo set out on his

remarkable voyages of investigation

through the remnants of

the vast Inca Empire.

They would last for five years.

With translators and scribes,

he traveled from one end of

the colony to the other,

interviewing Indians and Spanish

alike, collecting data on population,

land holdings, resources

and local history.

In the years of his travels,

he accumulated an astonishing

As Francisco listened to

Indians talking,

he understood the magnitude of

their catastrophe.

Not only had they been subjected to

the encomenderos,

but they were dying by the

hundreds of thousands.

A series of devastating epidemics of

European diseases

to which they had no resistance

had already wiped out over half

the Indian population of Peru.

In just 30 years since the arrival

of Pizarro,

almost a million people had d*ed of

colds, flus,

measles and small pox.

In despair, many people were focusing

unreal hopes of salvation

on the Inca court in exile.

Francisco started to believe that

Vilcabamba's hold on the Indian

imagination had to be broken.

Francisco traveled on.

In the course of his research

he covered all the territory

from what is now Quito in Ecuador

to Bolivia.

And as he traveled,

he learned something else.

The Inca Empire had been composed of

many different tribes.

The Incas were just one of them

who had come to dominate the others

only recently,

about 100 years before the arrival

of the Spanish.

Just like the Spanish, they had waged

fierce w*r to conquer the country.

There was no shortage of evidence

of Inca brutality to weaker tribes.

The Incas are tyrants,

and as such, intruders in the

government of these lands.

I think he was looking for arguments

in order to justify the Spanish

conquest within this particular region.

And he saw that the excuse

could be to blame

the Inca people as being tyrants,

as being dictators, as being people

who had imposed themselves

with force on the populations

they had conquered

in order to present

the Spanish Conquest

as a sort of liberated process.

He wasn't wrong.

What happens is when you use the word

'tyrant'

it has a whole moral connotation.

The Incas were an

authoritarian system,

with an imperial m*llitary force

which was extremely violent, cruel,

and would use the sorts of t*rture

which would scandalize us

if they were used in European wars.

As Francisco pondered the realities

he had discovered on his voyages,

any doubts he might have had

about the legitimacy of the

Spanish conquest evaporated.

With typical thoroughness,

he came up with a plan which was

brilliantly argued,

utterly coherent

and totally draconian.

His vision was of a great kingdom

of stern justice in Peru.

He would impose Spain's authority

on the quarreling encomenderos

and church alike.

He knew he would make enemies

of both of them.

He did it anyway.

And he would totally reorganize the

Indian world so it could experience

both the justice and authority

of the Spanish crown.

The Indians were to be resettled

from their remote villages

into more accessible towns

where they would pay taxes to Spain

and be protected by her.

And he would insist that, as subjects

of Spain, they had rights.

But there was one terrible price

to pay

for Francisco's vision of

a just social order in Peru

there would be no place

for Vilcabamba.

There could not be two kings

in the colony.

Vilcabamba and the remaining power

of the Inca kings must be destroyed.

Unknown to Francisco, the Inca king

he was deciding to destroy

was little more than a boy,

Tupac Amaru.

Brought up by the Inca priestesses

of Vilcabamba,

he was deeply religious and knew

nothing of the outside world.

He was gentle, famously beautiful,

charming, and it seems, not very smart.

Tupac Amaru was very young

when he was crowned Inca.

Tupac Amaru is referred as an 'Uti'.

Uti is meant to be sort of

not mentally Ret*rded,

but not the quickest,

not the brightest.

Tupac Amaru was a very young person.

I don't imagine him as being

very well politically trained.

He was very young.

He was just a symbolic figure.

Tupac Amaru was an innocent,

but that wasn't going to save him.

On June 16th, 1572, Spanish troops

thundered towards Vilcabamba.

As they charge into the citadel,

Tupac Amaru manages to escape

with his wife

who is expecting their first child.

They don't get far.

The bewildered young Tupac is

dragged back to Cuzco,

and on September 21st, 1572,

condemned to death.

As Tupac Amaru is led through

the streets to his execution,

the town is seething.

Everybody has fallen in love with

the handsome young king,

not just Indians,

but Spaniards too.

They all want Francisco to relent.

Francisco locks himself in his office

and refuses to see anyone.

In the main square of Cuzco, Tupac

Amaru rises to the execution block.

An eyewitness records the scene:

as the multitude of Indians saw

that lamentable spectacle,

they deafened the skies making them

reverberate

with their cries and wailing.

There are two versions of

what happens next.

In one, Tupac quiets the crowd

and says nobly,

"Mother Earth, witness how my enemies

shed my blood."

In another, he makes

a rambling, tearful speech

and renounces the Inca gods.

Everyone prays that Toledo will

change his mind.

But from Toledo's closed office,

there is a resounding silence.

Toledo writes to King Philip:

what Your Majesty has ordered

concerning the Inca has been done.

But His Majesty had not ordered

the death of Tupac Amaru,

only a solution to the Indian problem.

From this moment the tide starts

to turn against Francisco.

Toledo accomplished the mission

that he had set out for himself.

That's why he wanted it to be so

public and so theatrical,

to send a message,

"This is over; this is it."

But it wasn't over.

As Tupac's head was mounted on

a pike in Cuzco's central square,

the Inca king's faithful subjects

held vigil all night.

And immediately the stories

circulated that

Tupac Amaru's head became more

beautiful with each passing minute.

As the centuries passed,

it became more beautiful still.

Tupac Amaru was converted into

a Christ like figure

of martired innocence,

the symbol of native resistance

to oppression.

For 500 years, almost every popular

rebellion in Peru,

from the Great Indian uprisings of

the 18th century,

led by Tupac Amaru II,

to the urban guerrillas of the late

It's a tragic myth,

because everybody who invoked

Tupac Amaru failed as well.

Tupac Amaru II failed,

the Peruvian Revolution of '68,

which relied on the image of the

two Tupac Amarus, also failed.

As history turned Tupac Amaru

into a tragic hero,

it turned Francisco into a caricature

of the cruel Spaniard.

Forgotten were his stands for justice

and the rights of Indians

against the brutal exploitation

of the encomenderos,

he became famous for one thing:

executing the innocent boy king,

Tupac Amaru.

You've got to remember

who was writing that history.

The history of Spain was written

by priests,

the missionaries who hated Toledo.

I think he held everybody

to the same standards.

In administrative terms,

he did the right thing.

In terms of his conscience,

only he can tell.

After a remarkably successful reform

of the colony in Peru,

Francisco returned to Spain

expecting honors for his years

of faithful service.

Instead, insults and disgrace

were heaped on him.

The church had worked its influence

on Philip.

The king who he had served with

such brilliance and devotion

dismissed Francisco

without an audience.

Go away to your house.

I sent you to serve a king,

and you k*lled a king.

It was a devastating blow.

Mortally wounded,

he returned to his family's home.

Six months later,

Francisco de Toledo,

Fifth Viceroy of Peru,

d*ed a broken man.

His stern vision of a realm of

justice in Peru never came to be.

The greed and corruption of the

colony slowly reasserted itself.

The Indians were exploited

as never before.

As the screws of colonial oppression

tightened,

the memory of Francisco faded,

and Vilcabamba became the tragic myth

which would return to haunt Peru

forever.
Post Reply