Túpac Amaru II and the Andean rebellion of 1780
Túpac Amaru II (José Gabriel Condorcanqui, 1738–1781) was the cacique of Tinta in the southern Peruvian highlands and the leader of the great Andean rebellion of 1780–1781, the largest and most serious indigenous uprising in the history of colonial Spanish America. He took the name Túpac Amaru in deliberate invocation of the last independent Sapa Inca, Túpac Amaru I, executed by the Spanish at Cusco in 1572. The rebellion he led convulsed the Andean provinces of Peru and Bolivia, briefly threatened the Spanish cities of Cusco and La Paz, and was only put down after a series of brutal campaigns in 1781. Túpac Amaru II was captured, tried, and executed in the plaza of Cusco on 18 May 1781, in a particularly gruesome public execution that was widely reported in both Spanish and indigenous accounts. The rebellion failed, but it became a founding event of the nineteenth-century independence movements in Spanish South America, and the name of Túpac Amaru is still a symbol of indigenous resistance throughout the Andes. The broader context of the Vilcabamba resistance and the legacy of the conquest is treated elsewhere in this site.
José Gabriel Condorcanqui and the Cacique of Tinta
José Gabriel Condorcanqui was born in 1738 in the village of Tinta, near Cusco, into a family of indigenous curacas (hereditary chiefs) who could claim descent from the Inca royal panacas. His family belonged to the lineage of the Sapa Inca Túpac Yupanqui, and the family still held the title of cacique of Tinta, one of the hereditary leadership positions recognized by the colonial system. As a young man, José Gabriel was educated by the Jesuits and was fluent in Spanish, Latin, and Quechua; he also traveled to the Spanish coast and to the silver-mining city of Potosí, where he observed the operation of the colonial economy at first hand.
The grievances of José Gabriel and the broader indigenous population of the southern Andes in the 1770s are well documented. The colonial system imposed by Spain, two and a half centuries after the conquest, was widely experienced as oppressive. Indigenous communities were subject to the tribute (tributo) tax, which had replaced the Inca mit’a; to the reparto de comercio, a forced sale of Spanish goods at inflated prices; to the mita minera, a periodic labor draft to the silver mines of Potosí and Huancavelica; to the encomienda and yanaconazgo labor obligations; and to a layer of tribute-collectors, parish priests, and local officials who were widely seen as corrupt. The Bourbon reforms of the eighteenth century, intended to modernize the colonial economy, had in many cases made conditions worse.
The Outbreak of the Rebellion, 1780
The immediate cause of the rebellion was the execution of the Spanish administrator of Tinta, Antonio de Arriaga, by José Gabriel and a group of followers in November 1780. Arriaga had been particularly unpopular in the region, and his execution was presented by José Gabriel as an act of justice for the abuses of the colonial system. José Gabriel adopted the name Túpac Amaru and announced his intention to restore the Inca order and to expel the Spanish from the Andes. Within a few weeks of the execution of Arriaga, the rebellion had spread through the southern highlands of Peru, and José Gabriel had assembled an army of several thousand indigenous followers.
The first phase of the rebellion, in late 1780, was a series of military campaigns in the provinces around Cusco. José Gabriel’s forces besieged the Spanish cities of Cusco and Arequipa, and they won a number of engagements against the poorly prepared Spanish garrisons. The rebellion was at its peak in December 1780, when José Gabriel’s forces controlled much of the southern Peruvian highlands and threatened the colonial capital of Lima itself. The Spanish response was slow and confused: the Viceroy of Peru, Agustín de Jáuregui (in office 1780–1784), was unable to act decisively in the early weeks of the uprising, and the local Spanish militia forces were not prepared for a major indigenous rebellion.
The Failure of the Rebellion
The rebellion began to fail in early 1781. The first serious setback was the death of one of José Gabriel’s closest allies, the cacique of Azángaro, in an engagement with Spanish forces. More serious was the failure of the indigenous peoples of the northern Andes, including the highland communities around Cajamarca and Huánuco, to join the rebellion in significant numbers. The indigenous population of the Andes was not united: there were deep divisions between the curacas and the hatun runa (commoners), between highland and lowland communities, and between those who had benefited from the colonial system and those who had been ruined by it.
A second serious problem was the lack of a clear political program. José Gabriel had announced his intention to restore the Inca order, but he had not developed a clear vision of what that would mean in practice, and he had not built the institutions that would have been needed to govern a post-colonial Andean state. The rebellion was also, in many respects, an alliance of convenience between different communities with different grievances, and the alliance began to fray as the Spanish counter-attack gathered strength.
The decisive Spanish victory was the Battle of Cangallo in late January 1781 (the precise date is disputed in the sources), in which a Spanish colonial force defeated the main indigenous army and killed several of José Gabriel’s principal lieutenants. A second engagement near Acomayo in March 1781 effectively ended organized resistance in the southern highlands. José Gabriel was captured in April 1781 near the village of Langui, in the company of his wife Micaela Bastidas and several of his closest associates.
The Execution at Cusco
The trial and execution of Túpac Amaru II took place in Cusco in May 1781. The trial was conducted by the Spanish judge José Antonio de Areche, and the sentences were confirmed by the new Viceroy. José Gabriel, Micaela Bastidas, his son Hipólito, and several of his principal associates were sentenced to be executed in the plaza of Cusco. The sentences were carried out on 18 May 1781. José Gabriel was forced to witness the execution of his wife and son before being himself dismembered: his tongue was cut out, his arms and legs were tied to horses that pulled in four directions, and finally his body was beheaded. The chronicler Baltasar Martínez de Compañón records that the execution was attended by a crowd of more than 20,000 indigenous and Spanish onlookers, and that the Spanish authorities were clearly concerned that the rebellion might reignite at the site of the execution.
The execution of Túpac Amaru II was the most dramatic public event of the late colonial period in the Andes, and it was widely reported in both Spanish and indigenous accounts. The brutality of the execution was deliberate, and was intended as a warning to other potential rebels. It did not, however, prevent the further indigenous resistance that continued in the Andean countryside for several more decades. The execution of Túpac Amaru II also became a founding event of the independence movements of the early nineteenth century: the Argentine revolutionary José de San Martín named a cavalry regiment Túpac Amaru in 1815, and the modern flag of the indigenous rights movement Tupac Amaru is descended from the same tradition.
The Legacy of Túpac Amaru II
The rebellion of 1780–1781 was the largest indigenous uprising in the history of the colonial Americas. It involved, by some estimates, more than 60,000 people in active combat, and it affected an enormous area of the southern Andes. The failure of the rebellion is sometimes treated as a setback, but the long-term consequences were significant. The rebellion exposed the vulnerability of the colonial system, it inspired later indigenous movements, and it contributed to the reforms that the Spanish Crown undertook in the 1780s and 1790s. The execution of Túpac Amaru II is also an important moment in the history of human rights: the manifiesto that José Gabriel issued at the start of the rebellion is one of the earliest documents in Andean political thought to articulate a vision of indigenous sovereignty.
The name of Túpac Amaru is still a powerful symbol in the Andes and beyond. The Peruvian revolutionary movement Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru (MRTA) of the late twentieth century took its name from the same figure, and the day of his execution, 18 May, is remembered in Peru and Bolivia as a day of indigenous resistance. The legacy of the conquest and the persistence of the Inca memory are treated in the article on the legacy of the conquest.