For the fourth and final Friday of National Native American Heritage Month 2023, here is a reading on Tupac Amaru II with its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. If you recognize this name, it is because, as you have probably already inferred, this eighteenth-century rebel against the Spanish colonial presence moved Afeni Shakur to name her son Tupac Amaru Shakur, who is of course the late, lamented, Hip-Hop star.
You’ll also find Tupac Amaru II in a namesake organization, the Tupamaros, a rebel group in Uruguay in the 1960s and 1970s. They were famous for urban guerilla actions in Montevideo like hijacking grocery delivery trucks, driving them into poor districts in that city, opening them, then walking away–which, editorially speaking, appears to meet or exceed the accepted standards for efficiency and effectiveness in such actions. The Tupamaros also, in one particularly famous incident, got their hands on Dan Mitrione, who was in Uruguay on behalf of the United States Central Intelligence Agency to teach torture techniques to various of the Uruguayan security services.
If you’re interested in learning more about the Tupamaros, the justly famous film by Costa-Gavras, State of Siege, tells the story of the kidnapping and murder of Dan Mitrione, often with actual documentary footage. Also, Netflix offers a documentary series on Jose Mujica, who fought with the Tupamaros, and later became president of Uruguay, called El Pepe: A Supreme Life. President Mujica is known affectionately as “El Pepe,” apparently a Spanish nickname for Jose.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
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