Lautaro Falls: Spanish Conquest Halts in Chile

Spanish forces ambushed and killed the Mapuche commander Lautaro at the Battle of Mataquito on April 30, 1557, in the foothills of central Chile. Lautaro was approximately 22 years old. He had been fighting the Spanish for five years and had inflicted the most devastating defeats the colonial forces had suffered anywhere in South America. Lautaro was a Mapuche toqui (war leader) who had spent part of his youth as a servant in the household of the conquistador Pedro de Valdivia. During his captivity, he learned Spanish military tactics, observed their use of cavalry and firearms, and studied their weaknesses. He escaped around 1553 and used this intelligence to organize the Mapuche resistance. His military innovations were extraordinary. He trained Mapuche warriors to fight in rotating units that could sustain continuous pressure against Spanish forces. He developed tactics to neutralize the Spanish advantage in cavalry and armor. At the Battle of Tucapel in December 1553, forces under Lautaro's command killed Pedro de Valdivia himself, the governor of Chile, one of the most significant defeats of a Spanish commander during the conquest of the Americas. He followed the victory with a series of campaigns that pushed the Spanish out of much of southern Chile. His forces destroyed forts and settlements along a front that stretched hundreds of miles. The Spanish, who had been accustomed to quick conquests of indigenous populations in Mexico and Peru, found themselves in a sustained, organized military conflict unlike anything they had faced in the New World. A Spanish patrol discovered his camp at Mataquito before dawn on April 30 and attacked while the Mapuche force was still preparing. Lautaro was killed in the fighting. Without his leadership, the immediate campaign collapsed. But the Mapuche resistance did not end with his death. The Arauco War continued for over three hundred years, making the Mapuche one of the only indigenous peoples in the Americas to maintain independent territory against European colonizers until the late nineteenth century.