Reducción

Indian reductions in the Andes (Spanish: reducciones de indios) were settlements in the former Inca Empire which were created by Spanish authorities and populated by the forcible relocation of indigenous Andean populations. The purpose of the Spanish Empire was to gather native populations into centers called "Indian reductions" (reducciones de indios), in order to Christianize, tax, and govern them more effectively.

Beginning in 1569, the viceroy Francisco de Toledo presided over the resettlement of about 1.4 million native people into approximately 840 of these reductions. The resettlement was carried out in the Royal Audiences of Lima and Charcas, modern day Peru and Bolivia, roughly speaking. The native populations, who had adapted to a way of life suitable to the many, minor microclimates throughout the Andes, experienced immense hardship in the transition to these new regions. Despite these hardships, certain aspects of native Andean life were fiercely preserved by their own agency, and life in the reductions reflected a complex hybrid of forced Spanish values and those preserved from the older native communities.

Reducciones were not new to Latin America, and had been a Spanish policy in many other regions, starting in the Caribbean as early as 1503. From 1532 when Francisco Pizarro invaded the Inca empire until the arrival of Francisco de Toledo as Viceroy in 1569, Spanish rule of the Andean population had largely been indirect. Except for Roman Catholic priests, Spaniards were forbidden from living among the Indians and the Spanish extracted tribute and labor from the Andean population through their indigenous leaders, the caciques or kurakas. Although the Indian population was devastated by the internal wars of Spaniards and Incas, the ravages of European diseases, and forced, brutal labor in silver and mercury mines, the Andean Indian cultures remained in many ways little changed from the days when the Incas ruled.

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