Mournful canticle, lamenting the state of desolation of the City of Quito, on Thursday, August 2, 1810, at half past one in the afternoon

Unpublished handwritten poem in which the author (anonymous) laments the barbarism that occurred in the massacre of August 2, 1810 in Quito, Ecuador.

The mutiny of August 2, 1810, also called the massacre of August 2, 1810,1 was a citizen revolt and prisoner rebellion that occurred in Quito, capital of the then Real Audiencia de Quito, in which a group of patriots assaulted the Real Cuartel de Lima with the intention of freeing prisoners who had participated the previous year in the First Autonomous Government Junta of Quito and who had been accused of crimes of treason against his majesty for which the prosecutor demanded the death penalty or permanent imprisonment.

The revolted Quiteño people assaulted two barracks and a jail and the royalist authorities responded by executing the prisoners who had not fled and ordering the troops to leave. Then, the fight spread to the streets of the city. There were riots and death of the most hated Spaniards,2 between 200 and 300 people (1% of the population at the time), lost their lives in the fray. The looting of the royalist troops produced losses valued between 200 and 500 thousand pesos of the time. The retaliatory massacre, ordered by the royalist governor, Manuel Ruiz Urriés de Castilla, and Count of Ruiz de Castilla, had wide repercussions throughout Hispanic America, as an act of barbarism and justification of the “War to the Death” decreed by the liberator Simón Bolívar.