The Andean nobleman and muleteer, born José Gabriel Condorcanqui, who claimed descent from the last Inca king and took his name, then in 1780 raised the largest Indigenous-led uprising in colonial Spanish America against the forced labor and abuses of colonial rule — a revolt that swelled across the southern Andes, hardened into a brutal caste war with massacres on both sides, and was broken when the Spanish captured him and put him to a death of calculated cruelty in 1781, scattering his body to crush a memory it instead made immortal.
Túpac Amaru II took the name of a murdered king to overturn the empire that had murdered him. In 1780, a wealthy Andean nobleman named José Gabriel Condorcanqui claimed descent from the last Inca ruler, executed by the Spanish two centuries before, and led tens of thousands of indigenous people in revolt against forced labor in the silver mines and the abuses of colonial officials. It became the largest uprising in the history of Spanish America, and it nearly tore Peru from the crown. When the Spanish caught him in 1781, they killed his wife and family before his eyes, then tried to tear him apart with horses and beheaded him, scattering his remains across the region to terrorize his people into forgetting him. They did the opposite. His name outlived the empire that destroyed him, carried by rebels and revolutionaries for centuries after, the enduring symbol of Andean and indigenous resistance.