4 PART ONE
backwardness; political arbitrariness, corruption, and nepotism; and a hierarchi-
cal social order with feelings of condescension and contempt on the part of elites
toward the masses.
We begin our survey of the colonial period of Latin American history with
some account of Ancient America, the name of that long span of time during
which indigenous Americans developed their cultures in virtual isolation from
the Old World. This past profoundly infl uenced the character of the colonial era.
By no accident, the chief capitals of the Spanish Empire in America arose in the
old indigenous heartlands—the Mexican and Peruvian areas—the homes of mil-
lions of industrious natives accustomed to performing tribute labor for their rul-
ing classes. The Spaniards well understood that these people were the true wealth
of the Indies. Territories with small indigenous populations remained marginal in
the Spanish colonial scheme of things.
Equally decisive for the character of the colonial period was the Hispanic
background. The conquistadors came from a Spain where seven centuries of
struggle against Muslims had made warfare almost a way of life and had created
a large hidalgo(noble) class that regarded manual labor with contempt. To some,
like the Spanish chronicler Francisco López de Gómara, “The conquest of Indians
began when the conquest of the Moors had ended, in order that Spaniards may
always war against the infi dels.” Spain’s economic backwardness and immense
inequalities of wealth, which sharply limited opportunities for advancement or
even a decent livelihood for most Spaniards, help explain both the desperate valor
of the conquistadors and their harshness in dealing with others. It seems signifi -
cant that many great captains of the Conquest—Cortés, Pizarro, Valdivia, Bal-
boa—came from the bleak land of Estremadura, Spain’s poorest province.
Another factor that may help to explain the peculiarly ferocious, predatory
character of the Conquest is the climate of violence that existed in contemporary
Spain, a clear legacy of the reconquest and its social conditions and values. In
hisSpanish Character: Attitudes and Mentalities from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth
Century, Bartolomé Bennassar notes that assassins proliferated, as did the ancient
practice of issuing writs of pardon in return for the payment of blood money—
usually a small amount—for the murder of individuals of humble social status. To
concede that the historical background had created this climate of violence is not
to ascribe to Spaniards a unique capacity for cruelty or deviltry. We know all too
well that colonial, imperialist, and civil wars are replete with atrocities and hor-
rors of every kind. Indeed, what distinguishes Spain among the colonial powers of
history is the fact that it produced a minority of men who denounced in the face
of the world the crimes of their own countrymen and did all in their power to stop
what Bartolomé de Las Casas called “the destruction of the Indies.”