The leader of an indigenous Peruvian revolt against Spain, Túpac Amaru II (c. 1740–1781) rallied thousands of Indians in a brief, brutal war against the colonial government. After winning several battles in 1780, Amaru was captured the next year and put to death by the Spanish authorities.
His revolt, however, is credited with helping to awaken the South American independence movement. Since his death, Túpac Amaru has also served as an enduring source of pride for Native Americans and a symbol of resistance in Peru.
Túpac Amaru II was born as José Gabriel Condorcanqui, but adopted his nom de guerre in honor of his great-grandfather, Túpac Amaru. The original Túpac Amaru was the last independent king of the Incas, and he had also led a rebellion against Spain that resulted in his execution, in 1572.
Raised in Cuzco, the ancient Incan capital, Túpac Amaru II enjoyed a relatively privileged upbringing. Because of his ancestral ties to the Incas, the Spanish conferred on him the rank of marquis and allowed him an unusual degree of economic freedom. But he identified with native Peruvians, who accounted for the great majority of the country’s population but lived in conditions of near slavery.
In 1780, he organized a rebel army—about 80,000 poorly armed Indians—that swiftly took control of highland areas in what are now Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina, executing hundreds of Spanish colonial officials. Six months later, Spanish troops arrived to quell the rebellion, aided by two of Túpac Amaru’s officers who had changed sides and helped the Spanish capture the rebel leader.
He was drawn and quartered in Cuzco’s square, the same site where his ancestor had been beheaded two centuries earlier. But the desire for independence from Spain endured, and, forty years later, Peru gained its freedom.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- The mother of American rapper Tupac Amaru Shakur (1971–1996) named her son after the Peruvian revolutionary.
- The Tupamaros, a rebel group in Uruguay in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, took their name from Túpac Amaru.
- The word túpac means, roughly, “noble” in Quechua, the language of the Inca Empire. Today, about 10 million people speak Quechua, mostly in the Andean highlands of Peru and Bolivia.
