A Conqueror Moved

A onetime swineherd, cruel Francisco Pizarro, conquered the Incas and in 1535 founded the city of Lima. After laying out a great square, which he called the Plaza de Armas, he placed the cornerstone for a cathedral on the eastern side. Then he allotted spaces for a city hall and a governor's palace, to be occupied by himself. In the middle, he added a touch of his own, a gibbet.

The gibbet has long since given way to a graceful fountain, but Pizarro's spirit still inhabits the Plaza de Armas. His mummy, bones protruding through dark yellow skin, lies in a glass case in the cathedral. Lima's charter, kept in the city hall, shows the double loop the illiterate conqueror used as a signature. The fig tree he planted at the palace still lives. In 1935, there was added a 22-foot statue of Pizarro on horseback, which dominated the plaza from a lofty pedestal rising out of the cathedral's steps.

The statue has long been the subject of hot criticism. Many thought, as the newspaper La Prensa said, that the monument "interfered with the architectural ensemble of the cathedral and the cardinal's palace." Others argued that the sword-brandishing statue was "too warlike a figure to stand in front of a church." And Peru's inarticulate Indians never saw any reason to glorify the man they still consider no better than a heroic butcher. But the church-front spot for the statue also had its defenders, who thought it a "commanding position from which he could seem to keep watch over the city he had laid out and founded 400 years before."

Last week the old conqueror was moved. City architects, demolishing some buildings to give a clear vista toward one side of the big presidential palace which has replaced Pizarro's old palace, created a small park plainly in need of embellishment. So they simply sent around a crane which plucked the 6 1/2-ton statue of Pizarro from its old base and set it in the park. The conqueror's bronze eyes are still within eyeshot of the plaza he founded, but, as one of his defenders indignantly protested, "they have shoved him from the parlor to the basement."

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