The Cuzco region was the principal theatre of protest, rebellion and sundry subversive activities in the Viceroyalty of Peru during the last half-century of colonial rule (c.1770–1824). Royal authorities considered it to be the military and political key not only to Peru itself, but also to Spanish South America in general. This view took into account the obvious symbolism of the city of Cuzco for indigenous groups who yearned (according to Creole and peninsula pundits of the age) for a return to the supposed Golden Age of the Incario (Tahuantinsuyu), but it had also to do with the city's symbolic importance for the region's Creole elites. They sought a degree of independence from limeño interference in their administrative, judicial, and especially commercial and fiscal affairs, as well as either a better political profile within the imperial structure or their own total emancipation from Spanish hegemony. There were still other, more prosaic considerations: Cuzco was then located at the centre of those provinces in which the indigenous population was most numerous, and it would have been difficult to send military reinforcements while at the same time providing the logistical resources necessary for successful prosecution of any campaign to crush an uprising or even a localised insurrection. Here, for example, is the advice proferred the crown in 1783 (conserving the original orthography) by the Intendant of Cuzco, Benito de la Mata Linares, who spoke of:

In a later representation, Mata Linares referred to the ‘consideracion que merece esta poblacion, pues segun asegure, como no se pierda se conserba el Reyno, pero si la ocupan los enemigos se extinguió la Dominacion’. In this formulation, military and political domination are equated with control of hearts and minds, and in Mata's view the crown was losing the latter, thereby imperilling the former.