GO rD hIll 500 Years of Indigenous resistanceSlavery was another major economic activity. Not only for work in the
mines, but also for export to Europe. In Nicaragua alone, the first ten years of
intensive slaving, beginning in 1525, saw an estimated 450,000 Miskitu and
Sumu peoples shipped to Europe. Tens of thousands perished in the ships that
transported them. Subsequently, the slave trade would turn to Afrika, begin-
ning in the mid-1500s when Portuguese colonists brought Afrikan slaves to
Brazil to cut cane and clear forest area for the construction of settlements
and churches. An estimated 15 million Afrikan peoples would be brought as
slaves to the Americas by 1800, and a further 40 million or so perished in the
transatlantic crossing in the miserable conditions of the ships holds.
In areas such as the highlands of northern Chile, Peru, Guatemala,
and Mexico, where the climate was more suitable, the Spanish were able to
grow crops such as wheat, cauliflower, cabbage, lettuce, radish, sugar cane,
and later grapes, bananas, and coffee. By the mid-1500s, using slave labour,
many of these crops—particularly wheat and sugar cane —were large-scale
exports for the European markets.
In other areas, sprawling herds of cattle were established. Herds which
rarely exceeded 800 or 1,000 in Spain reached as many as 8,000 in Mex-
ico. By 1579, some ranches in northern Mexico had up to 150,000 head
of cattle.^7 The effects of extensive land-clearing for the crops and ranches
and intensive mining culminated in increasing deforestation and damage to
the lands. More immediately for the Indigenous peoples in the region, par-
ticularly those who lived on subsistence agriculture, was the dismantling of
destruction of agrarian ways replaced by export crops.
In order to carry out this expansion and exploitation, the subjugation
of the First Nations was a necessity, and the task of colonizing other peoples
was one in which the Europeans had had plenty of experience.
In a sense, the first people colonized under the profit motivation by
the use of labour...were the European and English peasantry. Ireland,
Bohemia and Catalonia were colonized. The Moorish nation, as well
as the Judaic Sephardic nation, were physically deported by the Crown
of Castille from the Iberian peninsula... All the methods for relocation,
deportation and expropriation, were already practised if not perfected.^8Prior to Colombo’s 1492 voyage, the development of a capitalist mode of
production emerging from feudalism had dispossessed European peasants
of independent production and subsistence agriculture. Subsequently, they
- Alfred W. Crosby, “The Biological Consequences of 1492”, Report on the
Americas, Vol. XXV No. 2, pg. 11. - Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, Indians of the Americas, Praeger Publishers,
New York, 1984.