Túpac Amaru II, a wealthy muleteer chief, led the Andes against Spain
José Gabriel Condorcanqui was a prosperous Andean chief, educated by Jesuits and at home among Cuzco's elite. After years of petitions against forced mine labour went unanswered, he took the name of his executed Inca ancestor and in November 1780 launched one of colonial Peru's largest uprisings.
Born around 1742 in Surimana, in the province of Cusco, and baptised in Tungasuca, he came from a family of kurakas, hereditary Indigenous chiefs recognised by Spanish officials. He studied at a Cuzco school for the sons of Indigenous leaders, spoke Quechua and Spanish, learned Latin from Jesuits, and made a fortune hauling goods and minerals by mule in Upper Peru. His wife from 1760, Micaela Bastidas Puyucahua, had both Indigenous and Afro-Peruvian ancestry, and he later lost a lawsuit over the Marquisate of Oropesa.
As a kuraka he stood between Spanish officials and his communities. He protested rising sales taxes and new customs posts, and above all the mita, the draft that sent Indigenous workers to the mines, where labour grew harsher as production intensified in the mid-1700s. Bad harvests in 1778 and 1779 and trade shifts that hurt Cuzco's producers deepened the strain. Rereading the Royal Commentaries of the Incas, a heroic account banned by the viceroy in Lima, fed his pride in his ancestry, and he adopted the name of Túpac Amaru, the last ruler of Vilcabamba.
On 4 November 1780, after a banquet, he and his allies seized the corregidor Antonio de Arriaga, forced him to summon about 200 Spaniards and kurakas, surrounded them with some 4,000 Indigenous followers, and had Arriaga executed while claiming royal orders. The rising targeted abuses sharpened by the Bourbon Reforms: the mita, forced sales of goods, and textile workshops. On 16 November he decreed freedom for enslaved Black people, a first in Spanish America. The movement mixed demands for reform in the king's name with visions of restoring the Inca realm.
He was executed on 18 May 1781 after the rebellion ended. Later generations recast him as a hero of independence and Indigenous rights, and the military government of Juan Velasco Alvarado in 1968 to 1975 made him a symbol of social justice.
Source: Túpac Amaru II
