Born: 12 July 1780, Bolivia
Died: 25 May 1862
Country most active: Bolivia
Also known as: NA
Juana Azurduy de Padilla was a guerrilla military leader who fought for Bolivian independence, earning the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. She was known for her strong support for and military leadership of the indigenous people of Bolivia, then called Upper Peru.
As a child, Azurduy developed an especially close relationship with her father after the 1787 death of her mother. Despite the strict Catholic and conservative gender roles of colonial society, her father raised her to be a skilled rider and sharpshooter, and she joined him in working the land alongside indigenous laborers. Along with her native Spanish, she became fluent in the local indigenous languages of Quechua and Aymara, and would spend days at a time in local indigenous villages.
When her father died in her early teens, the orphaned Azurduy sisters became wards of their aunt and her husband, who administered the properties the girls had inherited. Her aunt Petrona disliked Juana’s unconventional behavior and found her hard to control, and eventually sent her to the Convento de Santa Teresa de Chuquisaca to become a nun. Classmates would later recall Azurduy idolizing the warrior Saint Joan of Arc and declaring her own battlefield aspirations. Due to her rebellious temperament and clashes with the nuns, Azurduy was expelled at age 17.
In 1797, Azurduy returned to her father’s hacienda, spending much of her time with the indigenous people who lived on the land. She saw the brutality of the Spanish silver mines in which they worked, and became an ally to the indigenous revolutionary movement. In 1805, Azurduy married Manuel Ascencio Padilla, her neighbor and childhood friend and fellow revolutionary who left a Royalist law school to join the independence movement. Their relationship was remarkably progressive for the time, with Padilla supported his wife on and off the battlefield. Before their military careers began, the Padillas had two sons, both of whom would later die young due to disease and malnutrition in military camps.
On May 25, 1809, the couple joined the Chuquisaca Revolution, ousting the governor of the Real Audencia of Charcas. in September 1810, the governing Junta de Buenos Aires was established, but was forced out of Chuquisaca in 1811 by royalist troops. Across the Viceroyalty, rebels maintained control of republiquetas (independent territories). Azurduy was captured during the fighting and held prisoner in her home by Spanish soldiers, but Padilla killed her guards in a successful rescue. The Padillas escaped Chuquisaca in 1811 to the republiqueta of La Laguna, where they continued organizing rebel forces.
Juana and Manuel joined the Army of the North that same year, fighting the Spanish occupation of Upper Peru. They tried unsuccessfully to block the region’s invasion of the Spanish army in Peru, but were outnumbered and defeated on 20 June in the Battle of Hauqui. The couple’s properties were confiscated and Juana and her sons captured. Her husband was able to rescue them, fleeing to Tarabuco.
In 1812, Juana and Manuel helped recruit 10,000 militia members to the Army of the North. Azurduy inspired indigenous people, criados and other women, known as the Amazonas, to join. She led the “Loyal Battalions,” a force of indigenous men and women known for their fierce loyalty to their commander. Armed with only slingshots and wooden spears, the “Loyals” fended off Spanish forces in the Battle of Ayohuma on November 9, 1813. Outnumbered and outgunned, however, the Army of the North, was eventually pushed back to their border, and Juana and Manuel began a phase of guerrilla warfare.
In an act that became legendary, Azurduy returned to the battlefield in 1815 only hours after giving birth to her fourth son, rallying her troops at Pintatora and personally capturing the defeated Spainards’ standard.
On March 3, 1816, Azurduy led 30 cavalry, including her Amazonas, in an attack on La Hera Spanish forces near Villa, Bolivia. The women captured both their standard and a valuable cache of rifles and ammunition for their undersupplied troops. Later that month, on March 8, her cavalry temporarily captured the main source of Spanish silver, the Cerro Rico of Potosí, leading a charge that captured the enemy standard. As a result of these victories, she was formally granted the title of Lieutenant Colonel in a ceremony on 16 August 1816.
In September 1816, during the Battle of La Laguna, Juana, who was pregnant with her fifth child, was injured. Manuel was shot and captured by the Spanish while trying to rescue her. He was beheaded on September 14, his head was mounted on a pike in the village of Laguna. This led to the dissolution of the northern forces, but, pregnant and surrounded by Royalists, Azurduy led a counterattack to recover her husband’s body.
When the Spanish temporarily took control of Chuquisaca in 1818, she was forced to retreat again with her soldiers to northern Argentina. She was appointed commander of the Northern Army of the Revolutionary Government of the United Provinces of the Rio de la Plata, leading an estimated 6,000 soldiers at the peak of her command. She established an independent region on the Argentina/Upper Peru border until the Spanish forces withdrew from the area.
After the Spanish withdrew from Upper Peru in 1825, Azurduy petitioned the independent government for help returning to her hometown, now renamed Sucre. That year, she was granted a colonel’s military pension by Simón Bolívar’s independent government. Following a visit to Azurduy to commend her service, Bolívar said to Marshal Antonio José de Sucre: “This country should not be named Bolivia in my honor, but Padilla or Azurduy, because it was them who made it free.”
In 1857, Azurduy’s pension was revoked during bureaucratic reorganisation; she died in poverty five years later at age 82 and was buried in a communal grave.
When she died on May 25, 1862, the anniversary of the 1810 revolution in Argentina, she had been living forgotten and in poverty, only remembered as a hero a century later. In Bolivia, President Evo Morales declared her birthday (12 July) the Day of Argentine-Bolivian Fellowship. Other namesakes include Sucre’s Juana Azurduy de Padilla International Airport, Azurduy Province in Bolivia and Argentina’s Juana Azurduy Programme for Strengthening Women’s Rights and Participation. In 2009, President Nestor Kirchner promoted her posthumously to the rank of general of the Argentine Army. In 2015, a statue of Azurduy replaced the one of Christopher Columbus in front of the Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires, causing some controversy.