By 1531, the Spanish imperialist and conquistador Francisco Pizarro landed in Peru with a militia of 180 men. By a force of arms, Pizarro made the Inca Empire a Spanish possession and colony. In 1535 Pizarro established Spanish rule on the banks of the Rimac River the Peruvian capital city of Lima which was then Ciudad de Los Reyes meaning City of the Kings. Consequently, territorial disputes broke out among the Spanish conquistadors, and in 1541 a member of one of the conflicting Spanish factions assassinated Pizarro in Lima.

With the Spanish conquest, indigenous society was radically changed. Before the land and labor of the Incan people were expropriated to the benefit of the Spanish ruling class, the Incans had a political system which included a “mit'a tax”, a labor tax, to be used to build terraces and irrigation systems to meet society's needs. Afterwards, the Spanish imperialists established an “encomienda system” forcing the Incans to produce unfamiliar crops at the expense of their own food supply.

Incan people were concentrated in villages while the Spanish rulers assumed right of ownership of the best lands.

The Roman Catholic Church made additional demands on the native inhabitants. To pacify native resistance and insure the hegemony of the Church and of the Spanish colonizers, they force-fed Catholicism to the indigenous workers. In this respect, the religious class served as a buffer between the Spanish rulers and the indigenous laborers.

When Spanish rule ended a large portion of the population had been reduced to chattel servitude on large haciendas and estates. This condition of virtual slavery continued until late in the present century.

Thus, the Spanish seizure of political power and the subsequent shift in economic and cultural life changed the landscape of this region of Peru, and of Latin America in general, forever and has left an indelible imprint on the consciousness and conditions of Latin Americans today.

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