THE COLONIAL HERITAGE OF LATIN AMERICA 5
Since the sixteenth century, defenders of Spain’s colonial record have chargedLas Casas and other accusers with bias and exaggeration, claiming that they cre-
ated a “Black Legend” of Spanish cruelty and intolerance. In fact, every colonial
power has its own Black Legend that is no legend but a dismal reality. The bru-
tality of the Spanish Conquest is matched by that of the genocidal “Indian wars”
waged by American folk heroes like General and President Andrew Jackson, who
supervised the mutilation of some eight hundred Creek corpses, cutting off their
noses to count and keep a record of the dead. The 1899–1902 Filipino revolt
against U.S. colonialism was suppressed with massacres, use of “water torture”
to elicit information, and incarceration of civilian populations in concentration
camps. General J. Franklin Bell, who took part in that repression, estimated that
in Luzon alone over 600,000 people had been killed or died from disease as a re-
sult of the war.
On the ruins of indigenous societies Spain laid the foundations of a new colo-nial order. Three aspects of that order must be stressed. One is the predominantly
feudal character of its economic structure, social organization, and ideology. This
feudal character was most clearly expressed in Spain’s “Indian” policy, which
assigned to them the status of a hereditary servile class, obliged to pay tribute
in goods, cash, and labor and to engage in unequal trade with their European
masters. The same feudal principles assigned separate legal status to Europeans,
castas (persons of mixed race), and blacks and regulated the conduct and lifestyle
of each racial category. These feudal characteristics, admixed with some capital-
ist elements, formed part of Spain’s (and Portugal’s) legacy to independent Latin
America and help explain the tenacious hold of some anachronistic institutions
on the area today.
Second, the colonial economy, externally dependent on the export of preciousmetals and such staples as sugar, cacao, tobacco, and hides, became gradually
integrated into the new capitalist order that arose in northern Europe in the sev-
enteenth and eighteenth centuries. Spain, itself increasingly dependent economi-
cally on the capitalist North, was powerless to prevent the fl ow of colonial treasure
and commodities to its rivals through smuggling, piracy, and foreign takeover of
Spanish merchant houses. In the process of insertion into the European capital-
ist system, the feudal colonial economy acquired some capitalist features. Thus,
slavery, relatively patriarchal in Europe, acquired a peculiarly brutal character in
the Caribbean colonies, with “the civilized horrors of overwork,” in the words of
Karl Marx, “grafted onto the barbaric horrors of slavery.”
Third, Spain’s colonial order was rooted in confl ict between the crown andthe conquistadors and their descendants. The crown feared the rise of a colonial
seigneurial class and sought to rein in the colonists’ ambitions; on the other hand,