The Tupac Amaru Rebellion

The Tupac Amaru rebellion was a conflict between Spain and its colonies in South America which took place from 1780 to 1783.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. We have
some South American history today. So given how many of

(00:21):
our listeners are from places that either are or used
to be British, I think probably most folks know at
least the very basics of of the Revolutionary War, which
went on from seventeen seventy five to seventeen eighty three
between the British Empire and its American colonies. So today
we are going to talk about another conflict that overlapped

(00:44):
this war and was between another empire and its American colonies.
This time the war was between Spain and its colonies
in South America. In particular, we're talking about the tupac
Amaru Rebellion, which took place from seventeen eighty to seven
teen eighty three, so right at the end of the
same time as the Revolutionary War. It started in the

(01:05):
Andies Mountains in Peru, and in addition to stretching over
multiple years, this rebellion actually wound up spanning more territory
than the Revolutionary War did. So as you might imagine
you could really spend a whole series of podcasts honest rebellion,
just like you could with the Revolutionary War. So the
day is really an overview of the basics. Uh And

(01:26):
just because I don't want folks to spend this podcast
distractedly wondering about it every time we say Tupaca Maru. Yes,
late rapper Tupac Shakur was named after him. His mother
actually renamed him after this revolutionary figure while he was
still a baby, and our last caveat his apparent teacher
heads up. This story contains a couple of particularly horrifying executions.

(01:51):
One of them caused me to I am holly while
I was doing the research to say, this sounds like
it came out of Game of Thrones. So it's my
be a podcast to listen to yourself before sharing it
with little ones, and then use your own discretion about
whether it's appropriate for those little Those little ones, all right. So,

(02:12):
Spain's colonization of Central and South America, which started in
the sixteenth century, had three primary aims. To expand the
Spanish Empire, to seek treasure, and to convert the local
population to Christianity. Today's story as Tracy reference just a
moment ago takes place in the Andes Mountains in Peru
in the eighteenth century. Yeah, so, Spain had been around

(02:35):
for a couple hundred years in Central and South America
by this point. The population by now in this part
of the Andes Mountains was overwhelmingly made up of indigenous
South Americans known as Ketchua, and their languages were all
part of the Ketchwan language family. The Ketchwan language family
goes back to the days of the Inca Empire, and
a lot of the indigenous people who were living in

(02:58):
the Andes Mountains by the eighteenth century traced their lineage
back to the Inca as well. In addition to the
region's indigenous population, there were also Spanish Europeans people who
had both European and Indigenous ants ancestry, who were referred
to as mestizos, and people of European ancestry who had
been born in South America who were referred to as creoles.

(03:21):
And there were a few, although not very many, enslaved
Africans along with their descendants. The population of enslaved Africans
was much greater in some other parts of South America,
but not so much in the Andes Mountains. We can
look at the system of local government that Spain had
instituted in Peru in terms of three roles. There were,
of course, lots of other roles besides these three, but

(03:43):
these are sort of the key figures. On the Spanish side,
there was the coreodor, who was an official representative of
the Spanish government. On the indigenous side, there was the
the caaca or the casique, who was essentially a native
liaison between the native population and the Spanish government. Karaca
was actually a Ketchuan title dating back to the Inca,

(04:04):
and casseque was the Spanish term that was applied to
the same basic role. And then there was a local clergy,
the parish priests, who were responsible for particular towns and settlements. Together,
the karaca, the corridor and the priest saw to the
government and the legal and spiritual needs of the community,
at least from the Spanish point of view. Although the

(04:25):
presence of the karaca may make it seem as though
Spain was taking steps to include the indigenous population in
the system of government, this wasn't really the case. Many
of the indigenous populations spoke only Quechuan languages, but official
events and documents were presented only in Spanish. Apart from
the Karaca, most of the people involved in the government

(04:46):
were not only Spanish, but also had been born in
Spain and not South America. While it's certainly within the
realm of possibility that an individual coredor could be acting
with the indigenous population's best interest at heart, this was
really a position that was quite prone to greed and
mismanagement and abuse. The position itself was immensely powerful. It

(05:08):
had grown from one that was mostly judicial to one
that combined judicial, administrative, and legislative power all into one
centralized role. This meant that one unscrupulous corridor had the
power to have an enormous and nearly unchecked impact on
the area that he was in charge of. As is
a recurring theme in just about all of our podcasts

(05:28):
on colonialism, Spain had implemented some policies and practices that
were deeply unpopular in its South American colonies. One, unsurprisingly,
was taxes, both sales tax on goods that people tried
to buy, and another called a head tax, and that's
basically like a tribute based on a number of people.
There were also involuntary labor drafts to staff minds and mills,

(05:52):
some of which were extremely far away from the homes
of the people that were drafted into working there. As
another way to make money, Spain also forced the sale
of European goods to the indigenous population. Basically, a lot
of what Spain was expecting from its colonies in terms
of both labor and money was either forced or coerced,
and in the late eighteenth century, a lot of this

(06:14):
was getting a lot worse for indigenous nouth Americans. Spain
had been in the process of implementing a lot of
changes to how it how it ran its empire. These
became known as the Bourbon Reforms, after the royal house
of the same name. These are reforms had been going
on for a while, but they really peaked during the
reign of Charles the Third, who ruled Spain from seventeen
fifty nine to seventeen eighty eight. The Bourbon Reforms had

(06:38):
wide reaching effects for Spain's military and government, and for
how religion affected the government in civic life. But when
it came to South America's indigenous population, the reforms led
to higher taxes and increase in forced and coerced labor
and fewer rights, along with the range of other cultural
and religious issues. All this dissatisfaction with tack susan forced

(07:01):
sale of goods, and forced labor ultimately led to more
than one rebellion in Central and South America, and the
one we're talking about today was started by, and at
least at first led by, a man named jose Gabrielle Condorkonki,
and we will talk about him after a brief reponsoring.

(07:26):
Josie Gabriel condor Conki was born around seventeen forty two,
and he claimed that he could trace his lineage back
to the last ruler of the Inca Empire, Tupac Amaru.
The first Tupaca Maru ruled the empire from fifteen seventy
one to fifteen seventy two before being executed by the
Spanish at the age of twenty five or twenty six.
This is at the end of Spain's conquest of the

(07:48):
Inca Empire, and with Tupaca Maru's death, the throne was
essentially abolished. Condor Conki had a formal Catholic education. He
spoke both Spanish and Catchu A fluently, and as an
adult he worked as a merchant and a muleteer. His education,
his incoheritage, in his family's place in the community really

(08:09):
uniquely positioned him to be able to interact with every
class in Peruvian life, from the Spanish ruling class to
the most impoverished working class. In seventeen fifty, Condraconki inherited
the rule of Kuraca, of three towns in the Tinted
district known as Surimana, Pampa Marca and Tungasuka, following the
death of his father. He had actually grown up in Suramana,

(08:31):
but as an adult he made his home in Tungasuka.
Ten years after his father's death, he married michaela Batista,
who became an equal partner in his work as a merchant.
In seventeen seventy seven, condor Conky traveled to Lima for
eight months with the hope of regaining a noble title.
While he was there, he met a lot of Spanish nobility,

(08:52):
and he gained a sense of how the Spanish colonial
government worked in Peru and more at a bigger, more
general scale for the region as a whole. At this point,
tensions had already been rising in South America for several years,
and As a result, there had been rebellions and uprisings
that had broken out within Spanish territory in several places.

(09:13):
The Corridor in the area where condor Conky lived was
Antonio di Ariaga, and as you might guess from our
discussion of the role of Corridor before the break, he
was not a beloved figure. Among other things, he was
responsible for arranging an enormously unpopular labor draft to staff
a silver mine. Mining was of course dangerous work, and

(09:34):
the mine itself was about six hundred miles away. Also,
in the face of the ongoing changes that came along
with the Bourbon Reforms, condor Conky was having an increasingly
difficult time in his role as Karaca. More and more
of the Corridor's demands were unreasonable and exploitive of the
local indigenous population, and a lot of them were really

(09:54):
despised by the people that the Corridor was governing. On
November four of seven teen eighty, Ariaga and condor Conky
had dinner at the home of Father Carlos Rodriguez, condor
Conky's old tutor. It was overall a friendly meal which
celebrated the feast day of Saint Charles, known in Spanish
as San Carlos, and later in the afternoon, condor Conky

(10:16):
invited Ariaga to spend the evening at his home. Ariaga refused,
saying that he needed to get back to his own residence,
probably motivated at least in part by the fact the
tax payments were due to him. Soon when Iriaga left
with his entourage of staff and servants, Conder Conky and
some other young men. Condor Conky was about forty at

(10:37):
this point, walked with him for a while, and then
they said that they were going to head back to
condor Conky's home in Tungasuca, and that wasn't really where
they were going though. Instead, they stealthily got ahead of
Ariaga and they ambushed him. Ariaga tried to flee, but
condor Conky's men captured him and some of his entourage.
They took them all back to Tungasuka and they can

(10:59):
find find him in a cell in condor Conky's basement.
Then condor Conky forced Ariaga to write letters to his
treasurer in which he claimed he was going to plan
an expedition to the coast to deal with the pirate problem.
He asked the treasurer to send money and weapons. Then
condor Conky took Ariaga's key and went to his home,

(11:20):
where he armed himself with muskets, gunpowder, and bullets, as
well as taking money, mules, and silver from Iaga's home.
Condor Conky also wrote letters to a lot of other
local leaders, military figures, and entrepreneurs asking them all to
meet up in Tungasuka. He signed Ariaga's name to these letters,
so he's basically writing them as though he were Ariaga.

(11:43):
He also wrote to the other Karakas in the area
asking them to send troops to Tungasuka as well, and
he started sa stationing centuries along the road to Cuzco
to try to keep the Spanish government from hearing about
this massive gathering that was starting to form in Tungasuka.
Over the next few days, all of these people that

(12:03):
condor Conky had written letters to started arriving in Tungasuka.
Thousands of people arrived and had no idea that the
coreodor was imprisoned in a basement not far from where
they were congregating. Spanish leaders who answered that call were
also imprisoned. On November nine, condor Conky sent a priest
to Ariaga fell to take his confession, and at this

(12:26):
point Ariaga knew that he was probably going to die.
He started trying to bargain with his fortune. He basically
offered condor Conky everything he had in exchange for his freedom,
but condor Conky refused. Meanwhile, condor Conky started telling people
who had assembled in Tungasuka that he was acting under
the authority of the King, the High Court, and Visitor

(12:47):
General Jose Antonio di Areq. He set them to practicing
military maneuvers, and he increasingly did something that he had
already been prone to doing, referring to himself by the
name of the Inca Empire's last ruler and his ancestor,
tupac Amaru. He also conducted reviews of these maneuvers on horseback,
and he wore clothing that combined elements of traditional indigenous

(13:09):
attire as well as the fine silks and furs and
gold that were a lot more common among the Spanish aristocracy.
He's reported to have cut a very fine figure doing this.
On the tenth tupac Amaru, Condra Conky, going by that name,
once again, had the assembled crowd, which numbered thousands of people,
line up in a military formation, and then he had

(13:30):
them marched to a nearby set of gallows. There he
had a proclamation read in both Spanish and catch one.
According to this proclamation, the king had abolished the sales tax,
the custom houses, and the forced labor draft the silver mine.
And this proclamation went on the king's wish was for
the indigenous South Americans and the Creoles to live in

(13:51):
harmony with one another. Because that's the name that he
adopted as he led this rebellion. We're basically just gonna
call him Tupaca Maru for the rest of the episode.
And of course none of these things that he was
proclaiming were actually true. He had written all of these
proclamations himself, but they were of course extremely well received. Uh.
And then another important point was that all of this

(14:11):
information was delivered to the indigenous people of the area
in the language that they actually spoke, rather than in Spanish.
Then the event moved on to something else purportedly authorized
by the king, and that was the execution of Antonio
di Ariaga. Soldiers took Ariaga to the to the gallows
and they forced him to change out of his military
uniform and into a Franciscan habit. Then Antonio Oblitas, who

(14:35):
was an enslaved African that Ariaga owned, was forced to
act as his executioner. In the first of this episode's
horrifying executions, the rope broke and both Ariaga and Obliitas fell.
Instead of being hanged, Ariaga was strangled with several ropes.
People screamed epithets at him, with some of the loudest

(14:55):
being hurled by MICHAELA Batista. While tupac Amaru had taken
steps to keep word of what was going on from
reaching Cusco, where it would then get to the rest
of the Spanish Empire, the news that he had executed

(15:16):
the coreodor just could not be contained, and we will
talk about what happened after that news spread after another
brief word from a sponsor to get back to the story.
After the execution of Antonio to Ariaga, tupac Amaru and

(15:38):
his wife set off almost immediately to try to raise
more support from nearby towns. They had already used their
duplicity and strategy to a massive, really large following in Tangasuka,
and the two of them then started using the extensive
connections that they had developed to recruit more people to
their cause. Tupacamanu himself used his new name and the

(15:58):
connections to the Inca Empire that you know existed from
his lineage, to spread the idea that the Inkle were returning.
With this thought inspiring the rebels, they tried to take
the fight to the Spanish. Initially, the targets of the
rebellion were very narrow. He didn't want the priests, the mestizos,
or the Creoles to be harmed. Only Spanish leaders from Europe,

(16:22):
and especially the corridors. Local landowners and others whose behavior
had been exploitative were to be imprisoned, but not killed.
Since Spain hadn't yet raised an army to resist them,
these first few excursions were relatively bloodless, and every town
that they visited to Pacamatu would speak in both Spanish
and Quechua, and he would recruit as many people as

(16:43):
he could to join the rebellion. He still was insisting
that he was actually acting under orders from the king.
The rebels would also abolish any taxes and forced labor
drafts in the towns that they went to. They would
burn down the textile mills where people had been forced
to work, and they would free anyone who is being
held in the jail. Then they would also burn down
the gallows. They'd get as many provisions as they could

(17:05):
from the stores of the local corridor and other landowners
in the area, and then they would move on to
the next town. He also wrote lots of letters and proclamations,
issuing orders to neighboring towns to turn away from the
Spanish and granting local leaders the authority to act in
his stead. On November sixteenth, Tupaca Maru wrote a proclamation

(17:25):
calling for the emancipation of enslaved Africans and Afro Peruvians.
On the seventeenth, and the aftermath of a battle that
had played out in a church and had accidentally destroyed
part of the structure of the church and the in
a fire, the bishop excommunicated Tupacamo and his followers. Tupac
and his wife were both extremely devout Catholics, and they

(17:46):
really had not intended any harm to come to this
church at all. As we said earlier, they had been
trying to protect the clergy the whole time. So this
was both devastating to them personally and it was a
strike against them in terms of public opinion. This is
I note in the end there were priests and others
associated with the Church on both sides of this conflict.

(18:07):
Soon though, this rebellion spread beyond the Andes Mountains, and
the bigger it got, and the farther away from Tupaca
Maru's base at his home in Tungasuka, the bloodier and
more violent it became. Spanish and Royalist forces started calling
in reinforcements and gathering militia, meaning that the rebels had
to fight their way through rather than basically walking into

(18:27):
towns and declaring that the Spanish government was no longer
in charge. By the end of the year, Spain's control
on colonial Peru had started to really crumble. As the
rebellion got bigger and bigger, more and more people got
swept up in it, and the original instructions to harm
only the Spanish ruling class started to fall away. A
lot of people really just got caught in the crossfire.

(18:49):
More and more innocent people were harmed by both sides
as the conflict got bigger and bloodier. At the start
of see Spain, having raised an army of thousands of soldiers,
started actively trying to find and capture Tupaca Maru. On
April seventh, they trapped Michaela and two of her sons.

(19:09):
Michaela and Tupaca Maru had gotten separated from one another
about a month before this, and they had always planned
that should something happen, they would flee through the south.
When he heard that his wife had been captured, Tupaca
Maru did just that, and along the way one of
his followers, a man named Ventura Landeta, insisted that he
stopped and take a rest. It turned out that this

(19:30):
was a trap. Tupacar Maru was taken into Spanish custody
along with his wife and children, along with other prisoners.
Tupac Amaru and Michaela Bastias were put on trial that April,
and when tupac Amaru refused to incriminate himself or name
any of his accomplices, he was tortured by stretching. His wife,

(19:50):
on the other hand, claimed that she knew very little
about the rebellion and had in fact been coerced into participating.
After days of being questioned and times tortured, on May eighth,
seventeen eighty one, Tupaca Matu and Michaela Bastias were taken
to the gallows for the other horrifying execution in this episode. First,

(20:10):
they were made to watch the executions of other prisoners.
Some of them were family members, one of them was
actually their eldest son. These other prisoners were dragged behind
horses and had their tongues cut out before they were hanged.
One was placed in a chair and slowly strangled with
an iron bar before being hanged to confirm that she
was dead. Sources actually disagree on exactly how Michaela Bastidas

(20:35):
was executed. However, universally, she is described as being tortured
to death while her husband Tupaca Maru, was made to watch.
And then and the thing that caused me to I
am Holly and tell her this sounded like it was
out of Game of Thrones. Tupacamat, who's tongue was cut out,
his limbs were tied to four horses in order to
be quartered. They didn't actually quarter him, though his limbs

(20:57):
were dislocated but not severed from his body. Then he
was beheaded. This time his youngest son, who was ten
years old, was made to watch. After the executions, Tupaca
Maru and Michaela's bodies were dismembered and the parts were
sent to surrounding cities to serve as a warning, while
their torsos were burned on a bonfire. Their executions didn't

(21:22):
stop the rebellion, though other leaders moved into Tupacamas place,
some of them also taking a similar name, including his successor,
Diego tupacam He would also be executed on July seventy three. Eventually,
after numerous gory executions, the rebellion failed. About one hundred
thousand people were killed, most of them indigenous South Americans.

(21:45):
Spain put increasing restrictions on South America's indigenous people in
the hope of preventing another uprising, including forbidding the tupac
Amaru Rebellion from being discussed or written about at all.
Tupacamat who was still a really all known figure in
South America today, although MICHAELA bit Beastitas has largely been
written out of a lot of accounts in spite of

(22:07):
the fact that she was a leader of this rebellion. Also,
Tupacamaty's name and image have also been used as part
of other revolutionary movements. Uh And if you're interested in
hearing more about the story, um There is a pretty
recent book which was actually how I heard about this
in the first place, was was reviewing a catalog recently
published books. UM. It is by Charles F. Walker, and

(22:31):
it is called The Tupacar Mighty Rebellion, and it is
from the Bell Knapp Press of Harvard University Press. It
actually came out Ineen, but I think there's a paperback
of it that is coming out soon. And it goes
into a lot more detail than what we have talked
about today. It especially gets into a lot of the
more specifics about the individual UM actions between our UH,

(22:54):
the individual actions between the rebels and the Spanish, and
and specifics on where are all of this fighting took
place and how it all played out, and then also
somewhere about how it later affected UH the colonial government
in South America. And now after all of that rebellion
and execution, do you have some listener mail for us?

(23:16):
I do. It is from Waldo and Wilder, says Holly
and Tracy. I love the show. I most often listen
to you on my way to work, driving through a
place that you both love. I'm having I'm searching for
a suitable fan trinket for you too. But I don't
want to tip my hands too far, and I'm a
recent convert from having listened to stuff you should Know
for a few years. I still listen to them, but

(23:36):
you're my new favorite. While listening to the Robert Smalls episode,
I noticed that Abraham Lincoln was called out for being
a Republican, and this tied to some minor annoyances that
I have with some of my beloved Republican friends. Occasionally
come across posts talking about how great the Republican Party is.
Parentheses Republicans ended slavery, but Democrats wanted to keep it.

(23:56):
I have to stifle myself from having a well actually moment,
I pointing out that the relative positions of Democrat and
Republican parties had swapped uh in positions of conservative versus
liberal over time. Would you consider doing an episode on
the history of political parties in the United States. I
would love to experience your treatment because you have a
knack for explaining the context and impact in a relatable manner.

(24:17):
Thank you for your work. Take care of Waldo. Thank
you Waldo for this note. We got several notes that
were along these lines. So the first thing I wanted
to say is that like, I don't. I can't speak
for Holly. I personally find the story of how the
Democratic and Republican parties so called switch places annoying and

(24:38):
I don't want to research it. That's not what I
expected to do this, you know, I just it makes
me mad. Like so number one, Yes, both parties have
drastically different platforms than they did during the Civil War,
Like they are not the same platforms at all, And

(24:59):
a lot lot of people like to put the credit
or blame, however you want to look at it on
like a specific event in history, and a lot of
people say that that it's after the passage of the
UM of the Civil Rights Act, and that it was
all related to the sixties, but they're actually lots and
lots and lots of things that played out over more

(25:20):
than a hundred years. And I just personally find an
irritating story. And uh, and our episodes are the best
when whoever is doing the research is enjoying what they're doing. UM.
So I like, I don't, I especially probably not this
election cycle. We're probably not going to have an episode

(25:42):
on that, um. But I do want to make it
really really clear both parties have drastically different platforms that
they than they had a hundred and fifty years ago.
So in addition to the whole story of how they
gradually changed their platforms, like that story annoys me. Uh,
the Facebook memes and whatnot that that try to use

(26:06):
this historical fact as a reason to vote for or
against one party or another also get on my nerves
because like, that's not the reason to make your voting choice, right, Like, yeah,
you should vote for the candidate that you support right now,

(26:27):
not for the candidate the candidate whose party was doing
something completely different a hundred and fifty years ago. Uh
So yeah, obviously that whole subject marks me. My point
of view on it is. I actually find the switch
kind of interesting, but I feel like, um, it's a landline.

(26:48):
It doesn't matter how like fair and clear and accurate
you try to do it, someone will get super duper mad.
And because we are in a very politically charged climate,
like it's not worth it. Yeah, and I'm with you,
I get again. I don't mean to be judging, but
I get frustrated with the political memes because I feel
like some of them are witty and and well put together.

(27:10):
But the bottom line is that in a lot of cases,
particularly on social media, you kind of see political discourse
distilled down to nothing but that, And I'm like, that
is not thinking about the issues and what is really
important to you as a person, Like I don't care
which side you're on, let's just have a discussion about
it at least instead of just pictures in five words

(27:31):
like that can never really encapsulate all of the important
things you should consider when you cast your vote. Somebody
comes to you and tries to tell you that, uh, like,
for example, you should not vote for a Democrat because
the Democrats fought for slavery. That's ridiculous, Like, you should

(27:52):
look at what the candidates are doing now too. Yes,
both of the primary parties in the United States have dramatically,
dramatically different platforms than they had a hundred and fifty
years ago. So yes, I think probably we will not
be doing that episode, especially in a presidential election year.

(28:13):
But there's a ton of information about it on the
internet if you want to go research that for yourself. Um,
just don't try to use a party's history from a
hundred and fifty years ago to decide who you're voting
for now. That doesn't make sense, Uh, and if you
live in the United States wherever, if you live in
a place where you have the right to vote, vote

(28:33):
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(28:53):
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(29:14):
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