Rebellion of Túpac Amaru II

In November 1780 an indigenous noble from the highlands near Cusco, José Gabriel Condorcanqui, who called himself Túpac Amaru II after the last Inca ruler, launched a revolt against Spanish colonial officials in Peru. Joined by Quechua, Aymara and mestizo followers, and alongside a parallel rising led by Túpac Katari in what is now Bolivia, the rebellion spread across the southern Andes and lasted until 1783. It is regarded as the largest revolt in the Americas before the Haitian Revolution and the Spanish American wars of independence, and it was crushed with great bloodshed on both sides.

In the later eighteenth century the Spanish crown introduced the Bourbon Reforms to make its empire more profitable. In 1776 it separated Upper Peru, with the great silver mines of Potosí, from the Viceroyalty of Peru and placed it under the new Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, diverting trade away from Cusco and Lima. In 1778 sales taxes were raised, partly to pay for Spain's role in the American Revolutionary War. Indigenous communities also bore forced labour in the mines under the mita system and the abuses of local governors, the corregidores. Condorcanqui, a kuraka, or hereditary indigenous leader, claimed descent from the Inca royal line and at first presented himself as acting for the king against corrupt officials.

On 4 November 1780 Túpac Amaru and his supporters seized Antonio de Arriaga, the corregidor of Tinta, after a celebration in honour of King Charles III. Six days later Arriaga was hanged before a large crowd. On 16 November Túpac Amaru proclaimed the freedom of enslaved Africans, and on 18 November his army, by then several thousand strong, routed a force sent from Cusco at Sangarará. His wife Micaela Bastidas, one of the movement's chief organisers, urged him to strike Cusco at once, but he turned south towards Lake Titicaca, gathering support across the highlands.

He returned to besiege Cusco in late December, but hoped the city would come over to him and spent days writing letters to its bishop and council. The delay allowed royalist reinforcements to arrive from Lima on 1 January 1781. Cusco's defenders, including many loyal indigenous troops under kurakas such as Mateo Pumacahua, grew to more than 12,000. After a week of fighting, Túpac Amaru lifted the siege on 11 January. By then both sides had begun killing prisoners, and each portrayed the other as enemies of God.

In February a royalist army of perhaps 15,000 to 20,000 men reached Cusco and advanced in several columns towards the rebel base at Tinta. Despite rebel ambushes and the hardships of the cold and the altitude, it defeated the main rebel army at Combapata in early April. Túpac Amaru escaped across the river but was betrayed by two of his own officers at Langui and handed over with Bastidas, their sons and other leaders. On 18 May 1781, in the main square of Cusco, he was made to watch the execution of his wife and a son. Horses failed to tear him apart, and he was beheaded.

The war continued. His cousin Diego Cristóbal Túpac Amaru shifted the fighting to the region around Lake Titicaca and took Puno, while Túpac Katari besieged La Paz in 1781. Diego Cristóbal accepted an amnesty and surrendered in January 1782, but the Spanish arrested and executed him in July 1783. Organised resistance had ended by May 1782. During this phase rebels systematically killed non-indigenous people, which some historians have described as genocidal.

Estimates suggest that about 100,000 indigenous people and between 10,000 and 40,000 others died. The authorities eased the mita, abolished the corregidores in favour of intendants, and founded a high court in Cusco. They also banned the Quechua language, indigenous dress and the commemoration of the Inca past, though these laws were largely unenforced.

Our 1783 map shows the Spanish Empire in South America just as the rebellion ended, with the Viceroyalty of Peru and the Río de la Plata side by side.