The Creation of an Imported National Hero: Tupac Amaru and Early Republican Argentina

Juan Bautista Tupac Amaru, the half brother of the Andean rebel martyr José Gabriel Condorcanqui Tupac Amaru, reached Argentina in 1822 after nearly forty years of imprisonment in Spain and Northern Africa.  Authorities treated him well and paid him a pension with the condition that he write his memoirs, Cuarenta años de cautiverio. This paper examines the history of this curious manuscript/publication, deemed a fraud by some and probably co-written or even ghostwritten.   It analyzes the memoir’s relationship to Neo-Inca currents within the Argentine independence movements in the previous decade and follows the role or place of the Tupac Amaru brothers in early republican texts and histories.