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Being a highly ambitioned genre in Latin American literature during Romanticism, epic poetry has heroicity as one of its defining features. This article analyses how two Latin American Indianist epic poems – “I-Juca-Pirama” (1851), by the Brazilian Antônio Gonçalves Dias, and Tabaré (1888), by the Uruguayan Juan Zorilla de San Martín – present convergent problems and solutions in the shaping of Indian epic heroes. The recognition of the excellence of a new kind of hero, whose heroicity is based on his/her subjectivity, cannot take place on the diegetic level and is only possible by means of complicity, understood as a sharing of ethical values, between hero, reader and, in the case of Tabaré, narrator.