Guaman Poma witnessed the injustices of the colonial government and personally suffered by its hands. He was the descendant of Incan noblemen who grew up after the conquest of Peru by the Spanish. His family was stripped of their lands and titles, and his attempts to regain them were continuously rebuffed by the colonial government (Kilroy-Ewbank, n.d.). Although he initially worked with the colonialists, Poma was exiled for supposedly false claims of nobility and then decided to publicly denounce the Spanish treatment of natives. He published a 1200-page illustrated document addressed to the Spanish king, chronicling the Andean way of life before invasion and the abuses they had suffered since under the Conquistadors.
Poma’s manuscript illustrates the full horrors of colonialism and argues that the Spanish were foreign settlers who had no right to take control of the land God had given to Peruvians. He proposes a system of political organization wherein the government is representative of its people and adapted to their practical needs (Kilroy-Ewbank, n.d.). Poma has thus made a significant contribution to the discussions of liberty, political representation, social responsibility, and self-determinacy of individual states. His notion that the government should be created for and by the people that have historically occupied the land it rules over is strikingly modern.
Furthermore, Poma’s work completely refutes the idea that Europeans brought civilization and political organization to the Incas. This interpretation is revealed as only a hypocritical pretense to justify violence, economic exploitation, and cultural erasure as a means of political control. It portrays how an entire way of life was completely destroyed and lost as its people were deprived of their freedom and forced to assimilate. Although Poma admires the moral standards the Spanish purport to uphold, he shows that they have not actually measured up to them.