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Peru Demographic Collapse
Throughout the Americas, the impact of the Spanish
conquest
and subsequent colonization was to bring about a
cataclysmic
demographic collapse of the indigenous population. The
Andes
would be no exception. Even before the appearance of
Francisco
Pizarro on the Peruvian coast, the lethal diseases that
had been
introduced into the Americas with the arrival of the
Spaniards--
smallpox, malaria, measles, typhus, influenza, and even
the
common cold--had spread to South America and begun to
wreak havoc
throughout Tawantinsuyu. Indeed, the death of Huayna Cápac
and
his legitimate son and heir, Ninan Cuyoche, which touched
off the
disastrous dynastic struggles between Huáscar and
Atahualpa, is
believed to have been the result of a smallpox or measles
epidemic that struck in 1530-31.
With an estimated population of 9 to 16 million people
prior
to the arrival of the Europeans, Peru's population forty
years
later was reduced on average by about 80 percent,
generally
higher on the coast than in the highlands (see
table 2,
Appendix). The chronicler Pedro de Cieza de Leon, who
traveled
over much of Peru during this period, was particularly
struck by
the extent of the depopulation along the coast. "The
inhabitants
of this valley [Chincha, south of Lima]," he wrote, "were
so
numerous that many Spaniards say that when it was
conquered by
the Marquis [Pizarro] and themselves, there were ... more
than
25,000 men, and I doubt that there are now 5,000, so many
have
been the inroads and hardships they have suffered."
Demographic
anthropologists Henry F. Dobyns and Paul L. Doughty have
estimated that the native American population fell to
about 8.3
million by 1548 and to around 2.7 million in 1570. Unlike
Mexico,
where the population stabilized at the end of the
seventeenth
century, it did not reach its nadir in Peru until the
latter part
of the eighteenth century, after the great epidemic of
1719.
War, exploitation, socioeconomic change, and the
generalized
psychological trauma of conquest all combined to reinforce
the
main contributor to the demise of the native
peoples--epidemic
disease. Isolated from the old world for millennia and
therefore
lacking immunities, the Andean peoples were defenseless to
the
introduction of the deadly viruses by the Europeans.
Numerous
killer pandemics swept down from the north, laying waste
to
entire communities. Occurring one after the other in
roughly tenyear intervals during the sixteenth century (1525, 1546,
1558-59,
1585), these epidemics did not allow the population time
to
recover, while impairing its ability to reproduce itself.
Data as of September 1992
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