Blandon is something of a white saviour, I do wish we saw more of that front from the indian point of view, but its quite funny that he's introduced as the bad ecuadorian general to alba's good but is the one you'd rather meet as a native.
The closest I could get to that point of view was Pablo. There was just literally no frame of reference for Blandon. It's like a family of Martians moved in next door and the wife was a terrestrial African elephant. It's just insane and colossal and sweeps you up as you struggle to get through day to day.
Blandon to me was the subversion of the 'white saviour.' He clearly sees himself in that role, at least sometimes, when he thinks in those terms. But what he really is, is a man who progressively loses his sense of identity. He loses all touch with any semblance of who he is or who he was. He prosecutes a war into alien territory based on his own narrowmindedness, and then as he loses his frame of reference, the compromises of each day, the landscape that he finds himself in. Despite his racism, he's compromised and compromised again, building an army of indians for his purpose but with a more broken idea of purpose. In the end he's not using Indians in his war, they're using him in their war. And arguably, his only accomplishment, as with Alba, is to overreach and bring ruin. By the time he dies, he's completely lost, and would be institutionalised. And perversely, Pablo and Montressor rehabilitate him after he's safely dead and turn him into an anti-colonial visionary.
I did want to write a Quechua from Ecuador, but quixotically, as Ecuador declines, the Quechua are allowed to go home and return to their isolationism. The war becomes just some inscrutable white man's think that they got dragged into, and thank the saints they aren't bothering us any more. There wasn't a lot of good ways in.
But truth is, there was so much to touch on, I could have written another half million words. And I was getting excruciating already.