José Gabriel Condorcanqui was a kuraka — a hereditary Indigenous lord — of towns south of Cuzco: educated by Jesuits, prosperous in the mule trade, bilingual in Quechua and Spanish, and a documented descendant of the last Inca, whose name he formally claimed: Túpac Amaru II. For years he petitioned the colonial courts against the machinery grinding his people — the mita labour draft to Potosí, and above all the reparto, the forced sale of goods by which provincial governors (corregidores) extracted fortunes from Indigenous households.
The petitions failed. On 4 November 1780 he seized the corregidor of his province, Antonio de Arriaga, tried him in the name of the king — the rebellion’s early banners claimed loyalty to Spain against its corrupt officials — and hanged him before thousands.
The rebellion
The southern Andes went up like dry grass. Túpac Amaru’s forces destroyed a Spanish column at Sangarará in mid-November; his wife Micaela Bastidas, the rising’s co-commander, ran logistics, correspondence, and recruitment, and pressed him — correctly, historians largely agree — to march on weakly held Cuzco at once. He delayed; the city was reinforced; his January 1781 siege failed. Betrayed after defeat, he and his family were taken in April.
The sentence, carried out in Cuzco’s Plaza de Armas on 18 May 1781, was designed as theatre of terror: Túpac Amaru was forced to watch the executions of his allies, his eldest son, and Micaela — garroted, the executioners botching it — before his tongue was cut and he was bound to four horses to be quartered. The horses could not tear him apart; he was beheaded. His limbs were displayed in the rebel towns; the rebellion answered from La Paz, where the Aymara commander Túpac Katari held the city under siege for months. Katari was quartered in his turn that November. The wars burned on into 1783, killing — by the standard estimate — on the order of 100,000 people, the great majority Indigenous, in one of the deadliest conflicts anywhere in the eighteenth century.
The name
Spain’s victory came with a program of erasure: the execution of the Inca nobility’s visible culture — dress, titles, paintings of the Inca kings, even Quechua literature — as if the past itself had rebelled. It worked no better than such programs do. Forty years later Peru’s independence generals invoked him; two centuries later his name travelled far indeed — to a Uruguayan guerrilla movement (the Tupamaros), a Peruvian one, and, via the Black Panther Afeni Shakur, to her son Tupac Amaru Shakur. The kuraka executed for claiming a name became one himself.