The Tupac Amaru Rebellion

Charles F. Walker

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780674416383
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

The largest rebellion in the history of Spain's American empire—a conflict greater in territory and costlier in lives than the contemporaneous American Revolution—began as a local revolt against colonial authorities in 1780. As an official collector of tribute for the imperial crown, José Gabriel Condorcanqui had seen firsthand what oppressive Spanish rule meant for Peru's Indian population. Adopting the Inca royal name Tupac Amaru, he set events in motion that would transform him into Latin America's most iconic revolutionary figure.Tupac Amaru's political aims were modest at first. He claimed to act on the Spanish king's behalf, expelling corrupt Spaniards and abolishing onerous taxes. But the rebellion became increasingly bloody as it spread throughout Peru and into parts of modern-day Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. By late 1780, Tupac Amaru, his wife Micaela Bastidas, and their followers had defeated the Spanish in numerous battles and gained control over a vast territory. As the rebellion swept through Indian villages to gain recruits and overthrow the Spanish corregidors, rumors spread that the Incas had returned to reclaim their kingdom.Charles Walker immerses readers in the rebellion's guerrilla campaigns, propaganda war, and brutal acts of retribution. He highlights the importance of Bastidas—the key strategist—and reassesses the role of the Catholic Church in the uprising's demise. The Tupac Amaru Rebellion examines why a revolt that began as a multiclass alliance against European-born usurpers degenerated into a vicious caste war—and left a legacy that continues to influence South American politics today.

1

The Andes in the Atlantic World

JOSÉ GABRIEL CONDORCANQUI, born on March 10, 1738 in Surimana, was the son of Miguel Condorcanqui Usquionsa Tupac Amaru and María Rosa Noguera. Miguel, who died in 1750, was the kuraka of three towns in the Tinta district, Surimana, Pampamarca, and Tungasuca, a position José Gabriel inherited. José Gabriel would throughout his life use multiple last names. Condorcanqui—you are a condor in Quechua—was his patronym associated with the rights to the kuraka position but like his father, he also employed the last name Tupac Amaru to underline his royal Inca blood. Amarus are mythological winged serpents while Tupa (as his name was usually spelled) denotes royalty or proximity to the Inca.¹ José Gabriel claimed to be a direct descendent of Tupac Amaru, the final Inca ruler, beheaded by Viceroy Toledo in 1572. These bloodlines gave him considerable prestige among Quechua Indians, many of whom believed, two centuries after the Conquest, that the Tawantinsuyo or Inca rule would return. In addition, José Gabriel occasionally added his mother’s last name, Noguera, which some scholars believe indicated Catalan roots.²

José Gabriel spent his childhood in Surimana, but accompanied his father on trips throughout the district and beyond as he fulfilled his duties as kuraka and plied his trade as merchant. These expeditions continued when José Gabriel came of age and assumed his father’s position and profession. After initial classes by Fathers López de Sosa and Rodríguez, he studied in the prestigious San Francisco de Borja School in Cuzco, run by the Jesuits for the sons of kurakas. The Jesuits provided him a strong education that also impressed on him his social standing as future kuraka and someone of royal Inca blood. At school just up the hill from Cuzco’s imposing cathedral, he learned Latin and deepened his Spanish.³

As a kuraka, José Gabriel held rights to land. He also had small mining interests and coca fields in Carabaya, to the south, and owned several houses and a small hacienda. His wealth, however, should not be exaggerated: he owed and was owed a great deal of money and had liens and mortgages on his property.⁴ He inherited 350 mules from his father, which he used to work the Cuzco-to-Upper-Peru circuit, the trade route that linked Lima and Cuzco with the all-important Potosí mines. He carried textiles from local mills as well as sugar, coca leaves, and dried chili peppers on his mules and llamas to sell or trade in the Lake Titicaca region and Upper Peru. He returned with more mules and other goods as well as posts and packages. As a muleteer, he gained important contacts throughout the region and had a privileged viewpoint on the ebb and flow of the colonial economy and the increasing strains it put on the indigenous population. Over campfires at night or when negotiating a deal, people told him about the local situation and asked him for news from Cuzco and beyond. Throughout the colonial period and until the emergence of four-wheeled vehicles and the diffusion of radios in the twentieth century, Andean muleteers such as Tupac Amaru served as the main conduit between rural life and the outside world. People revered him for his Inca heritage and, according to many, his kind manner and willingness to defend the rural poor.

The late 1770s were difficult years for the Andean economy. The opening of Buenos Aires to Upper Peruvian trade (Lima had previously held a monopoly) meant that producers in Cuzco selling their wares in Potosí had to compete with products from Buenos Aires and even from Spain. Moreover, widespread overproduction throughout the Andes prompted prices to drop. The coarse wool fabric from Cuzco’s mills, for example, confronted unprecedented competition from European textiles. Moreover, the years 1778 and 1779 brought extremely cold weather to Andean Peru, damaging crops and making travel more difficult.⁵ Tupac Amaru himself experienced this crisis. By 1780, he had considerable means but mounting debts as well. He also witnessed and heard about widespread economic malaise, ranging from merchants verging on bankruptcy to Indian communities that could not pay the increasing tax load.⁶

Writers have long asked whether Tupac Amaru was an Indian or a mestizo, a question that would not have been posed in the same way in his time. His contemporaries made clear that he was both and that he took full advantage of his ability to move among the different social groups of the period. His economic interests and education made him a member of the colonial middle class, with ties to the upper and lower classes. He had close connections with distinguished Spanish and creole residents of Cuzco such as his friend Gabriel Ugarte, but also was comfortable with the region’s masses, Quechua-speaking Indians. He spoke both Spanish and Quechua well, wrote graceful Spanish, and thanks to the Jesuits knew some Latin. The upper classes in Lima saw him as a well-educated Indian; some understood this as an acceptable case of social mobility while others saw it as an aberration and threat to the flexible but ultimately real barriers between caste groups in colonial Peru.

Tupac Amaru and Micaela Bastidas were able to carry out the rebellion because of this ability to move among, gain acceptance from, and recruit different social groups. They attracted, at least initially, Spanish, creole, mestizo, black and, above all, indigenous followers. In the midst of the uprising, however, this balancing act became increasingly difficult. Europeans quickly became concerned about the use of violence and the ransacking of estates. Some groups never supported the rebels. For example, some kurakas, particularly those of the Sacred Valley, saw him as an arriviste with an unimpressive lineage. They questioned both his claims to royal Inca blood as well as his economic standing, believing themselves superior on both fronts.⁷

Many Spaniards and Creoles scoffed at the notion of a “noble Indian,” and despite business dealings and even friendship with him, wanted nothing to do with his political project. They rejected his requests for support. On the other hand, while Indians venerated the couple, some abandoned the movement or pushed for more radical (violent) actions. Doubts about the leaders’ revolutionary credentials and opposition to the multiclass alliance they sought nourished these desertions and insubordination. In a society as hierarchical as colonial Peru, coalitions that united racial and class groups strained from the beginning.

As for Micaela Bastidas, she was born in 1744 in Pampamarca. Some writers have contended that she was from Abancay, west of Cuzco, but the archival records confirm Pampamarca, part of the Tupac Amaru’s family kurakazgo. When I visited this town in 2007, locals proudly claimed her as their own and showed where she had lived about a mile outside of town. They maintained that parts of her house had stood until recent decades. Her mother was Josepha Puyucahua (look at the clouds in Quechua) Sisa and her father Don Manuel de Bastidas; they never married. He died in 1746 and his identity remains unclear. Some contend that he was a local man with black heritage, inasmuch as a few documents refer to her as a zamba or one with cinnamon-colored skin, implying that she had black blood. Others claim that he was a priest, assigned to nearby Yanaoca.⁸ Being an illegitimate daughter of either a partially black father or a priest placed her in an unusual social category, particularly in the overwhelmingly indigenous highlands, and closed doors to her. It certainly excluded her from elite circles. Yet her wedding certificate listed both her parents as “Spaniards,” a sign of respectability more than birthplace. Racial and class categories in Spanish America were quite fluid and someone like Micaela could move among different sectors comfortably and gain their respect. She had three brothers, Antonio, Pedro, and Miguel.

Micaela was a devout Catholic throughout her life. She had little schooling and her Quechua was far superior to her Spanish. In Pampamarca, oral history claims that she was forced to work in an obraje, the oppressive textile mills. Father Antonio de Sosa married her and José Gabriel in Surimana on May 25, 1760. They had three children, Hipólito (born 1761), Mariano (born 1762), and Fernando (born 1768), all baptized by Father Sosa in Pampamarca.⁹ The nineteenth-century English geographer Clements Markham, who knew the Cuzco area well and wrote widely on the Incas, Quechua, and Andean geography, called her a “beautiful Indian girl.” He knew this because Dominga Bastidas, Micaela’s cousin, had survived the uprising and, fifty years later, described her beauty to General John Miller, who was in Cuzco in 1835. Miller then relayed the description to Markham.¹⁰

Micaela was a full partner in José Gabriel’s enterprises. While he was away in Lima or elsewhere, she managed his business and kuraka affairs, overseeing tax collection and the labor draft and supervising the men who stepped in for him in his work as a merchant. This helps explain how she proved to be such an exceptionally able leader of the rebellion. She excelled at paying the troops, managing supplies, keeping discipline, posting sentinels, and watching for spies—all of the intricate logistics that make up military campaigns. Her proficiency brings to mind the military axiom, “amateurs talk about strategy, professionals talk about logistics.” Even before the uprising, she displayed her strong nature. One tithe collector claimed that in front of the corregidor Micaela had threatened to “punch him” if he did not relent.¹¹ Her work as Tupac Amaru’s partner in his political and economic endeavors prepared her well for the uprising.

Micaela’s prominence in the uprising was not a shocking reversal of gender roles in the Andes. Women participated actively in the cash economy, particularly in the sale of produce, livestock, and other goods in markets and fairs. They frequently managed the household economy. Men believed themselves the representative of the family and saw themselves in charge. Domestic violence, frequently fueled by alcohol, was rampant. Nonetheless, women were usually significant partners in the large, extended families that characterized the period, and led the household if males weren’t present. In the case of the Condorcanqui-Bastidas household, Tupac Amaru no doubt spoke for the family and believed that he had the final say. But, as would occur in the rebellion, Micaela Bastidas helped make decisions and run the household economy.¹²

Although Spaniards burnt the portraits of Tupac Amaru that he commissioned during the rebellion, we have several descriptions and one painting. Markham reproduced one royalist’s recollection:

Tupac Amaru was five feet eight inches in height, well proportioned, sinewy, and firmly knit. He had a handsome Indian face, a slightly aquiline nose, full black eyes, and altogether a countenance intelligent, benign, and expressive. His address, remarkable for gentlemanlike ease, was dignified and courteous toward superiors and equals; but in in his intercourse with the aborigines, by whom he was profoundly venerated, there was sedateness not inconsistent with his legally-admitted claims (de jure) to the diadem of the Incas. In mind he was enterprising, cool, and persevering. He lived in a style becoming his rank, and, when residing at Cuzco, usually wore a black velvet coat and small-clothes in the fashion of the day, a waistcoat of gold tissue, embroidered linen, a Spanish beaver dress hat, silk stocking, and gold knee and shoe-buckles, and he allowed his glossy black hair to flow in ringlets which extended down nearly to his waist.¹³

An anonymous Spaniard stressed his seriousness and deemed Tupac Amaru “very white for an Indian, although not so very much for a Spaniard.”¹⁴ Descriptions from the rebellion cast him as an elegant figure on a white horse, dressed in European style with a few Andean touches such as the uncu or overshirt and the mascapaicha or royal band. Royalists emphasized his cold, calculating bearing, which in their eyes enabled him to oversee the slaughter of innocent Europeans, while subsequent generations of admirers have presented him as an elegant and handsome mestizo. Portrayals from the mid-twentieth century gave him the impossibly large muscles of the Soviet Social Realism school and, in the 1960s, features that made him a sort of darker-skinned Che Guevara. Twentieth-century depictions of Micaela cast her as a long-necked, thin beauty, with European features. Many have whitened her skin considerably.

The Atlantic World Reaches the Andes

Tupac Amaru moved throughout the Peruvian viceroyalty, from the legendary silver mines of Potosí to the regal colonial capital of Lima, where he found himself entangled in new policies and ideas emanating from Europe. While the rebellion cannot be understood without taking into account the lives of Tupac Amaru and Micaela Bastidas as well as those of the indigenous masses of the southern Andes, it also requires examining changes in Spain and its treatment of its American holdings. Tupac Amaru, Micaela Bastidas, and their followers lived and suffered the Bourbon Reforms. Their lives provide excellent entryways into local Andean society as well as global changes.

In the eighteenth century, warfare and commercial competition with France and England plus a palpable sense of decline prompted Spain to change its relations with and demands on its American holdings. Its alliance with France against Great Britain in the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) proved disastrous. The English occupied strategic Havana and Manila in 1762, a “devastating blow to Spanish prestige and morale.”¹⁵ King Charles III, who ruled from 1759 until 1788, understood that he had to revamp the military and modernize the administration in Spain and its colonies in order to keep pace with France and Great Britain. In 1765, he commissioned the lawyer José de Gálvez to conduct an inspection or “general visit” to New Spain (Mexico), where he remained for six years. Gálvez then became Secretary of the Indies in 1775 and dominated the Madrid court on all overseas issues until his death in 1787. Rival factions among the Spanish in Peru maneuvered to gain his favor. It was Gálvez who received the voluminous information arriving from Peru about the Tupac Amaru uprising and oversaw the royalist response.

Spain closely followed events in Europe and the Americas. Anticolonial movements in North America in the 1770s and 1780s troubled authorities. The Madrid court believed that if victorious, the patriots would set a bad example for their colonial brethren in Spanish America; worse yet, if the British maintained control, they might launch new attacks to the south.¹⁶ Some authorities even worried that the English secretly supported Tupac Amaru.¹⁷ In reality, the British focused their attention and resources on keeping as large a claim as possible in Canada and the newly emergent United States. While the English press printed information about “revolution in Peru” with a certain satisfaction, the Spanis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraphs
• Contents
• List of Maps
• Introduction: The Execution of Antonio de Arriaga
• 1. The Andes in the Atlantic World
• 2. From Pampamarca to Sangarará
• 3. A World without the Catholic Church?
• 4. The Rebellion Goes South
• 5. The Siege of Cuzco
• 6. In Pursuit of Tupac Amaru
• 7. Torment
• 8. The Other Side of the Lake
• 9. Southern Campaigns
• 10. The Pardon and the Cease-Fire
• 11. The Rebellion in Limbo
• 12. Ordered by the Catholic King
• Conclusion: The Legacy of Tupac Amaru
• Illustrations
• Chronology of the Rebellion
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index