Pizarro, Atahualpa and the garrote: another lesson in moralizing history

Atahualpa: accused of idolatry and executed "as a Christian"

Francisco Pizarro formally accused Atahualpa of idolatry, treason and fratricide in a summary trial held in 1533. The chronicle preserves an uncomfortable paradox: the conquistador who signed the death sentence, it has been claimed, had grown fond of the Inca and spent hours chatting with him. Even so, Atahualpa died. The question is not whether it was cruel, but why he needed a legal file in order to kill him.

Two schools of thought clash over how to interpret the events. One sees the trial as a legal farce: idolatry was the legal cover for eliminating an inconvenient political rival. The other points out that Atahualpa could choose between dying at the stake, as a heretic, or being baptized and strangled by garrote, a death the era considered dignified for a Christian. He chose the latter. The irony is not lost: according to Inca beliefs, fire prevented reaching the afterlife, so the garrote was, in a sense, a respect for his convictions.

The matter then drifts toward contemporary sarracena. Judging the conquest with 21st-century ethics gets us nowhere: the Incas were not an idyllic society. They sacrificed children, leaving them to die of cold or from blows to the head, a fact worth remembering. That comparison of pavor does not absolve Pizarro, but it defuses the easy indignation of the present.

We are left with the question history never closes: to what extent could the personal closeness between Pizarro and Atahualpa have altered the outcome? The trial was a formality; the execution, a political decision. That we still debate it says more about our need to sort the past into good guys and bad guys than about what actually peine.