Free WAR CRIMES AND ATROCITIES (True Crime) by Anne Williams, Vivian Head, Janice Anderson

and horror at the Aztecs’ practice of human sacrifice in the name of religion in Mexico as an excuse for their ruthless suppression of the Aztecs and the looting of the empire’s wealth.
    Two decades later, the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of the Inca Empire of Peru was every bit as rapacious and murderous as that of his fellow Spaniard, Hernan Cortés, in Mexico. However, unlike Cortés, Francisco Pizarro was a rough, uneducated man, unable to read or write and totally unversed in the social graces or the ways of diplomacy. He was nearly 40 years old when he arrived in the New World in 1509. He helped Balboa found a colony on the Darien isthmus, and in 1515 he crossed the isthmus to the Pacific side of America, to trade with the native Americans there.
    Pizarro made three great voyages of discovery down the Pacific coast of South America, setting out each time from or near the little colonial capital of Panama. On each, he put in at various points on the coast, exploring a little inland and getting to know something of the nature of the vast Inca empire, most of which lay hidden on the high plateaux of the Andes.
     
    THE INCA EMPIRE
     
    Although the Inca empire had reached peaked only about 100 years before Pizarro arrived on the scene, it had been in existence for several centuries, built on much older civilizations about which little is now known. This is partly because the earlier peoples of Peru had not developed any form of writing or picture writing and partly because the Spaniards’ indoctrination of the Indians they conquered was so thorough.
    Archaeologists and historians have discovered that the states of South America that preceded the Incas, who pulled them all together into one vast empire, were as advanced as anything in Mexico. They had highly bureaucratic societies, well-developed agricultural techniques, including the use of irrigation, and rich cultural bases, as demonstrated by their finely woven and designed textiles, fine pottery and metalwork, and jewellery. They had also developed a sophisticated building technique that allowed their stone buildings, made without mortar, to withstand the strong earthquakes regularly experienced in the Andes. All this, the Inca Empire inherited and built upon.
    The first Inca, or emperor, appeared in Peru some time in the 13th century. He and his successors gradually melded together the various states and peoples in that part of South America, creating a vast empire that stretched for 3,200 km (2,000 miles) down one of South America’s coasts, contained one of the world’s greatest mountain chains and reached inland as far as the rain forests of the Amazon. It was ruled by the absolute Inca, aided by a highly organized governing bureaucracy, many of whose members were his blood relatives and children. The capital of the Inca Empire was Cuzco, in the central highlands. The empire’s huge army, whose officers, like the government bureaucrats, came from the Inca’s extended family, expanded its operations through the empire by using an amazing network of roads which, by the time the Spaniards arrived, stretched 5,230 km (3,250 miles) from Quito in the north to Talca in central Chile. This road network was to make the Spanish conquest of Peru relatively simple and speedy.
    The Inca was the divine symbol on earth of the sun god whom the Peruvians worshipped. Unlike the Aztecs in Mexico, the Incas were not bloodthirsty in their religious observance. Captives were sometimes sacrificed and in times of difficulty, such as drought, parents might sacrifice a child, but the usual sacrifice was a llama or an alpaca. Offerings to the gods were often as simple as a cone of spun wool, set down on the temple steps. Pizarro and his men did not know this when they arrived in Peru and expected to deal with people as bloodthirsty as the Aztecs. This perhaps explains the cold-blooded violence with which Pizarro conducted his first meeting with the