Juan Santos declared himself to be the reincarnation of Inca emperor Atahualpa, and he managed to gather a large following among the Asháninkas.

[2] Juan Santos Atahualpa and his followers began their rebellion in 1742, and they quickly destroyed the Spanish Missions in the Yungas region.

[3] As Juan Santos Atahualpa's military success grew, more people flocked to his cause, and his rebels amassed a large arsenal of muskets and cannons.

The rebellion would last a decade, and in 1752, Juan Santos Atahualpa would lead his rebels on an incursion into the Andes region of Peru, but he withdrew after just a few days.

After this incursion, the Spaniards gave up their attempts to reoccupy the Yungas, and they instead shifted to a defensive strategy to prevent the rebellion from spreading to the Andes.

Because of Juan Santos Atahualpa's successful rebellion, the Indigenous tribes of the Yungas gained their freedom from the Spanish, and they remained independent for the rest of the colonial period of Peru.

Juan Santos' rebellion began on the Gran Pajonal (Great Grassland), an elevated plateau, and his area of influence extended into the regions of the Cerro de la Sal (Mountain of Salt); and the Chanchamayo.

[7] The area of the rebellion was the nearest and most accessible part of the Amazon Basin to Lima, the capital and largest city of Peru, and thus the happenings there were of special interest and concern to the Spanish.

A survivor reported that Torote gave his reasons to a priest for the rebellion, "you and yours are killing us every day with your sermons and doctrines, taking our freedom away."

[16] In May 1742, Juan Santos along with a Yine (Piro) named Bisabequi appeared at the Franciscan mission called Quisopango at the southern edge of the Gran Pajonal a few kilometers north of the 21st century town of Puerto Ocopa.

Within a few days half a dozen missions in the Cerro de la Sal and Chanchamayo region had been abandoned by the indigenous people.

The rebellion managed to bring together the peoples of the central jungle: Ashaninka, Yanesha and even Shipibo, that is, the populations that inhabited the basins of the Tambo, Perené and Pichis rivers.

[18] Juan Santos had more than 2000 men, with whom he managed to control the central jungle, a territory that, otherwise, was not effectively regulated by the viceregal power.

[21] Juan Santos promised that the rebellion would bring peace and prosperity to all the Andes, beginning in the jungle and spreading to the highlands and the coast.

On 11 November, the magistrate Santa left for central headquarters, leaving Captain Fabricio Bertholi with 60 soldiers in the Quimiri citadel.

Then, Juan Santos demanded Bertholi to surrender, but he refused, trusting that the reinforcements that he had requested would soon arrive through a preacher who was able to elude the insurgents.

[27] Meanwhile, a new viceroy, José Antonio Manso de Velasco, future Count of Superunda, a highly experienced military man, assumed power.

This made the viceroy furious, as the vital battle did not result well and the rebels continued to control a large area in the jungle.

Juan Santos moved his base of operations 110 kilometres (68 miles) east from Quisopango to the less isolated and more strategically located mission of Eneno on the Perené River in the Cerro de la Sal region.

[30] The first violence of the rebellion took place in September 1742 when a locally gathered militia force headed by three Franciscans sallied forth from Quimiri and were ambushed and killed.

That same month two Spanish forces of regular soldiers were dispatched from the Andes to suppress the rebellion, but they failed to find Juan Santos.

The Spanish built a fort in Quimiri and left 80 soldiers with artillery while most of the army withdrew to the city of Tarma in the Andes.

Only Sonomoro among the former missions remained in Spanish hands and Santos and his followers were left in uncontested control of a large swath of territory for more than two years.

It was defeated more by the rain and the jungle rather than the indigenous army, estimated by the Spanish to number 500 but in reality only a widely dispersed part-time force of combatants.

[33] In 1751, groups of Asháninka and their Piro allies advanced southward in what was more of an immigration than a military operation to take back former territories in the region of the towns of Satipo and Mazamari, and forcing the evacuation of the Spanish fortress in Sonomoro, the last of the 23 missions in the central jungle.

[34] In August 1752, Santos's rebellion reached its high water mark when he led an Asháninka force which captured the highland town of Andamarca in Jauja Province and held it for three days before departing.

The area liberated by the indigenous people from the Spanish was about 200 kilometres (120 mi) from Pozuzo in the north to Andamarca in the south, marked by where the yungas merge with the high Andes.