José de la Riva Agüero displayed prodigious activity, managing within two months to organize a national army of more than 5,000 men, ready to enter the campaign.

Riva Agüero proposed to carry out the attack plan from the so-called "intermediate ports" of the south, since he considered that it was good, and that the failure of the previous campaign was due to the slowness with which the operations were developed and the wrong decisions.

Olañeta had 1,500 men in Upper Peru, José Carratalá 1,500 in Arequipa and Puno, Canterac 9,000 in Huancayo and Jauja; It was expected that Valdés would occupy Lima with the Burgos, Gerona and Centro battalions and the Granaderos a Caballo squadron, a total of 3,000 soldiers.

During the Republican expedition, specifically in July, Viceroy La Serna will be forced to ask Canterac to order Valdés to return with 2,500 soldiers, something not expected by Antonio José de Sucre when devising the campaign.

[5] Alarmed by the patriot advance, Viceroy La Serna urgently called General Gerónimo Valdés, who was then near Lima, a city that had been occupied by the royalists during the period of a month, between June and July 1823.

As a consequence of the almost non-existent military defense of Lima, 9,000 royalists under the command of General José de Canterac took the capital on June 18, 1823, which triggered a social readjustment to the new situation that became a political crisis.

Immediately, the same Congress granted Sucre powers equal to those of the President of the Republic for the duration of the crisis, and on June 23, it ruled that Riva Agüero was exonerated from supreme command.

The only important encounter of this campaign was the battle of Zepita, fought on August 25, 1823, on the shores of Lake Titicaca, where Santa Cruz initially managed to defeat Valdés, but was unable to take advantage of this circumstance, allowing the royalist leader to retreat.

In this series of marches and countermarchs the patriots lost a large number of men and equipment, so much so that when they reached the port of Ilo, Santa Cruz had only 800 infantry and 300 cavalry.

This campaign, like its predecessor, had great political repercussions; anarchy spread in Peru as two governments existed at the same time: Riva Agüero in Trujillo and Torre Tagle in Lima.

Added to this, the failure of the campaign created the perfect environment for, at the unanimous request of the population, the intervention of Bolívar and his Colombian Army to take place, seen as the only one that could save Peru.