General José de San Martín, having liberated Argentina and Chile, marched into Lima and proclaimed Peruvian independence from Spain. The declaration did not end the fighting immediately; royalist forces held the highlands for three more years, and it took Simón Bolívar's forces and the decisive Battle of Ayacucho in 1824 to secure independence fully. San Martín became Peru's first Protector, ruling briefly before withdrawing from politics.
San Martín's campaign to liberate Peru was the culmination of an extraordinary continental strategy. Rather than attacking Spanish power directly in its stronghold, he had first secured Argentina, then crossed the Andes with an army to liberate Chile, and finally sailed north with a fleet commanded by the Scottish admiral Lord Thomas Cochrane to strike at Lima itself.
When he entered Lima in July 1821, the Spanish viceroy had already fled to the highlands, leaving the city undefended. On July 28, in the Plaza Mayor, San Martín declared: 'Peru is from this moment free and independent by the general will of the people and the justice of its cause that God defends.' The crowd, according to contemporary accounts, erupted in a mixture of celebration and uncertainty about what would follow.
What followed was complicated. San Martín took the title Protector rather than claiming personal glory, but Peru's liberation was far from complete—royalist armies still controlled the Andean interior. It fell to Simón Bolívar and Antonio José de Sucre to finish the job at Ayacucho three years later. San Martín, in one of history's more graceful exits, met Bolívar at Guayaquil in 1822, ceded the stage to him, and sailed into self-imposed exile in France, never returning to the country he had helped birth.