Book talk tonight regarding the recently discovered letter of Fernando Tupac Amaru. The book contains 16 letters written by Fernando Túpac Amaru between 1787 and 1798 in Spain, as well as a selection of documents of diverse authorship and that keep some relation with the letters. All these documents and the letters signed by Fernando Túpac Amaru have been found in the AGI - Archivo General de Indias in Seville by Viola Varotto (Isole).

Fernando Túpac Amaru Bastidas (1768-1798), was born on May 31, 1768 in Pampamarca (Cusco). He was son of José Gabriel TúpacAmaru and Micaela Bastidas, considered forerunners of independence of Peru. In 1781 Fernando Túpac Amaru was condemned to exile in Africa by the visitor José Antonio de Areche, but this did not happen because this sentence was changed to banishment to Spain. Fernando arrived in Cadiz as a prisoner in 1786, being interned in the Castle of Santa Catalina. After a long stay in two schools of the Piarist Fathers in Getafe and Lavapiés, he lived in Madrid until his death in 1798. During his exile in Spain he wrote several letters, some of them addressed to Kings Charles III and Charles IV. This book rescues, from the Archivo General de Indias, all those found there, and gathers them together with a group of documents not written by Fernando Túpac Amaru, but which are useful to reconstruct his life. The entire process, from the reading of the letters to the research and the editorial care of the book, was possible thanks to a collective work by Ana Karina Barandiarán (art), Rosaly Benites (pedagogy), Rosaura De La Cruz (art), Lizet Díaz Machuca (history of art), Vero Ferrari (linguistics), Cecilia Méndez (history), Eduardo Pérez (archive), Jackeline Sosa (social), Javi Vargas (art) and Viola Varotto, (history of art) between 2023 and 2025.

Moderated by Professor Cecilia Méndez a Peruvian historian specializing in the social and political history of the Andean region during the national period, Peru, in particular. After graduating as a licenciada in History at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (Lima), in 1986, Cecilia took a teaching position at the Universidad Nacional  de Huamanga, in Ayacucho. At that time, Ayacucho’s mostly rural and Quechua-speaking hinterland had become the epicenter of the political violence unleashed by Shining Path’s (Sendero Luminoso’s) insurgency in 1980. Deemed the biggest insurrection in the history of Peru, and the bloodiest in modern Latin America, the inner war, which spanned from 1980 to 2000, claimed nearly 70,000 lives, most of them Quechua-speaking peasants. Her experience in Ayacucho, which was prior to her pursual of graduate studies in the U.S., turned out to be decisive in her professional choices. Henceforth, the largest part of Cecilia’s research has been devoted to the study of the role of Andean peasant society in Peru’s national life.