As Sucre laconically informed the patriot Minister of War on 11 December 1824, the brief, bloody battle of Ayacucho fought two days earlier had effectively ended the struggle for South American independence that had begun 15 years earlier with the installation of creole juntas in the Upper Peruvian cities of La Paz and Chuquisaca: ‘la campaña y la paz de América se han firmado en este campo de batalla’. There was still some mopping-up of royalist resistance to finalize in Upper Peru, of course, and the remnants of the 2,500-strong royalist force under general José Ramón Rodil that had taken refuge in the fortresses of Callao, along with nearly 4,000 civilians, when Bolivar's forces recaptured Lima on 4 December (Bolívar himself entered the city on 7 December) would hold out there until January 1826. Following the eventual surrender of the Real Felipe bastion, fewer than 100 of its 400 surviving defenders would choose to return to Spain with Rodil, implying, as Anna notes, that most of them were Peruvians, as, indeed, were most of the more than 2,000 royalist prisoners taken at Ayacucho. The suggestion made by Valdés (commander of the royalist vanguard division in the decisive battle) that the 500 royalist officers who had chosen to stay in Peru under the terms of the capitulation might serve as ‘una semilla … que podría dar algún dia frutos abundantes’ in the event of an attempted Spanish reconquest, although at first sight somewhat fanciful, seemed to be partially vindicated in 1826 with the outbreak of a rebellion in the province of Huanta, led by the self-styled ‘general in chief of the royal armies of Peru’, Antonio Huachaca, that called for the restoration of Spanish rule. However, despite bold words from Madrid for several years promising reconquest, the proposed restoration of Ferdinand VII in Peru in 1826–1828 was more of a ploy by wily peasants seeking relief from the payment of tribute and other fiscal demands made by the local agents of the new republican government than a coherent royalist reaction.