Colonialism and Independence

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Lima, known to the Spanish as the City of Kings, served as the transition center for silver mined in the Andes and destined for Spain. With the fall of the Spanish Empire and the expiration of easily extractable silver, Lima declined. In the backcountry, the Indians were locked in a cycle of poverty that began with Spanish rule. Even in the 1990s, Indians form the peasant class of Peruvian society and Vargas Llosa notes a few of them in his book of 1962. The Indians are poor, malnourished, and during the 1990s wracked by cholera. Lima was renewed in the late nineteenth century when guano— bird droppings—were in demand due to their high concentrations of nitrogen, which is used in gunpowder. Peru had a huge supply of guano that it mined for the West. Chile, however, took the guano...