Tupac Amaru II

Túpac Amaru II — born José Gabriel Condorcanqui about 1742 near Cusco, a descendant of the last Inca — led the greatest uprising against Spanish colonial rule the Americas had yet seen. He took the name of his executed ancestor and raised the Andes against the empire.

A kuraka, a native lord, and Jesuit-educated, he moved between two worlds. In November 1780, after seizing and executing a Spanish official notorious for his cruelty to the Andean people, he launched a rebellion that swept the southern highlands of Peru and Bolivia and drew tens of thousands to his cause.

His was a call for justice: he demanded an end to the forced labor and abuses of the colonial order, and decreed the abolition of slavery — among the first such acts in Spanish America.

Betrayed and captured in 1781, he was made to witness the killing of his family before he himself was put to death in the great square of Cusco. His name became, and remains, a banner of indigenous freedom. Honored among the Great Ones of every civilization; kept here so the memory is never lost.