The exploitation of the land and the people goes back a long way..
THE RELEASE OF THE MONSTER: THE CONQUEST
From 1453 at the latest, European magnates faced a problem: while trade routes to Asia had previously been the decisive force behind capital accumulation, following the conquest of Constantinople they were blocked by the Ottomans—or at least ceased to be profitable. Consequently, a feverish race began to discover a sea route to India and East Asia.
The Portuguese had been searching for it for a long time and had already established several military bases on the west coast of Africa, but it was not until 1498 that Vasco da Gama reached India.
Six years earlier, Spain had sent a Genoese mercenary, adventurer, and pirate named Cristoforo Colombo—also known as Christopher Columbus—on a mission to find a westward sea route to India. In fact, on October 12, 1492, he arrived at a land he believed to be "India": the Bahamas. This day is still celebrated as an official holiday in many countries—as Columbus Day in the United States, as a national holiday in Spain, and as Columbus Day in many Latin American countries, although Venezuela renamed it "Day of Indigenous Resistance" in 2002. There are countless monuments dedicated to Columbus as a heroic explorer. The DVD series *Animated Hero Classics* introduces Columbus to children as a naive young man whose idealism and childlike spirit open the way to the hearts of monarchs and, ultimately, across the ocean.
But, not without reason, the film ends just at the moment when Columbus arrives at 'Nou Món'. Obviously, the producers didn't want their young viewers to know what happened next. Although the inhabitants of the coastal regions to which Columbus was heading received the strangers with remarkable hospitality, the Spanish had other things in mind. Columbus noted to the ship's log: "With 50 men we could subdue them all and do whatever we wanted with them." Already in the first landings, he had numerous inhabitants arrested for extracting information about gold deposits. But the people didn't know anything. To offer something to European investors, Columbus eventually took about 500 men to Spain as slaves, 200 of whom died during the voyage. To finance his second voyage, he promised the Spanish Crown and Italian financiers as a return on their investment "as much gold and as many slaves as you want." This put considerable pressure on him and his crew: they had to fulfill that promise at all costs by making the capital invested profitable.
The second voyage became the prelude to what was probably the greatest genocide that humanity had experienced until then. As the Spanish's search for gold was initially unsuccessful, they ordered all the men of Hispaniola to deliver a certain amount of gold every three months. Those who didn't lost their hands and were left to bleed to death. But there was hardly any gold in Haiti, at least not the gold that they sought and that the Arawaks who lived there could find. So they fled into the mountains, pursued by the Spanish, who hanged or burned alive all those who fled.
The result was mass suicide among the Arawaks. They also often killed their own children so that they would not fall into the hands of the conquerors. In just two years, half of Haiti's 250,000 inhabitants were wiped out in this way. But this was only the beginning. With almost no gold to be found, the Spanish resorted to making Arawaks work on slave plantations, in conditions so terrible that they ended up killing almost all of them.
In 1515, about 50,000 Haitians remained, and by 1550, only about 500.
This pattern held true in every region where the Spanish set foot, from Mexico to Peru. The exact figures of this genocide will likely never be definitively determined. Of the 50 million inhabitants of Central and South America, only three million remained 150 years after Columbus.
Since the beginning of the Conquest, historians have repeatedly attempted to deny or downplay this genocide. The most common argument is that the majority of indigenous peoples died unintentionally due to introduced diseases. Even if this were true for 90% of these people (for which there is no evidence), there would still be millions who were deliberately murdered or mistreated to death. Indeed, American historian David Stannard rightly points out that deadly epidemics were often the result of the inhumane living and working conditions forced upon millions of indigenous people. The reason for these attempts to trivialize the events—attempts that continue to this day—is evident: fully acknowledging the genocide would shatter the myth of Europe's moral superiority, upon which Western expansion has been based for over 500 years.
The death toll of that genocide offers only a stark impression of the hell on earth the Spanish created in the conquered territories. The Spanish bishop Bartolomé de Las Casas—who participated in the Conquest and later became its most prominent critic—emphasized the unprecedented level of cruelty:
And for forty years, up to this very day, they have done nothing but tear them apart, kill them, distress, afflict, and torment them, and destroy them with a cruelty so strange, new, and varied—unparalleled in anything ever seen, read, or heard of before. Las Casas describes in detail some of these "new and strange forms of cruelty":
They would make wagers on who could slice a man in two with a single sword stroke, or cut off his head, or spill his entrails with one blow. They would snatch infants from their mothers' breasts by the legs and dash their heads against the rocks. Others would fling them into rivers from behind, laughing and mocking them.
They erected long gallows that kept the victims' feet just touching the ground, and thirteen of them, in honor and reverence of our Redeemer and the twelve apostles, piling wood and fire beneath them, they burned alive. Others they wrapped from head to toe in dry straw and set ablaze. Others—specifically those they wished to capture alive—they maimed by cutting off both hands, leaving them to hang there, telling them: "Go, carry the letters"—meaning, take the news to the people who had fled to the mountains.
The extreme sadism that these descriptions attest requires an explanation. Because those Spaniards behaved in such a monstrous way and not only in isolated cases. but systematically?
On the one hand, as we have already seen, they were beset by the international money valuation and borrowing machine.
They tried, by all possible means, to make the most of the people, not only to get rich, but also to pay the interest and repay the debts they had contracted with investors in Genoa, Augsburg and Antwerp. They used torture to obtain information about gold reserves and spread fear and terror to force rebellious natives to submit. It was often a chain of debt: ordinary soldiers went into debt to buy their equipment; Commanders, like Cortés, incurred large debts to pre-finance their expeditions; and the Crown, at the end of the chain, went back into debt with the big banks. But even this does not explain everything. To understand the particular sadism with which those Spaniards proceeded, we must look at the past of the authors of these crimes and the society from which they came. Spain has just overcome a bloody, centuries-long war of conquest against the Muslim Moors, who had ushered in an era of cultural flourishing, economic prosperity and relative religious tolerance in the southern Iberian Peninsula. In a mixture of religious fanaticism and chivalric banditry, the princes who dominated the north of what is now Spain, supported by the popes and financed by Genoese banks, fought tenaciously against this empire until they destroyed it in 1492 and definitively expelled both Muslims and Jews from the peninsula.
Through this permanent war, Spain of that time had become a military society in which generations of people were socialized into war and knew little else. As we know from other militarized societies, violence penetrates families and children's education, thus exerting a terrible influence on personality development. In this context, the indignation of the Spanish over the fact that the original inhabitants of America refused to hit their children is illuminating. The Jesuits, for example, attempted to force indigenous peoples to punish their children in public.
Thus, the Spanish carried with them a culture of violence rooted at various levels: in the economic and political structure, as well as in family footprints.
The third decisive reason for the particular nature of this cruelty is ideological. The Crusader massacre at the Al-Aqsa Mosque had already demonstrated the role that Christianity’s universalist claim to truth could play in justifying violence—both against outsiders and among the perpetrators themselves. Those who believe—and receive confirmation from the highest authorities—that their actions, however inhumane, are part of a mission to bring blessings to the entire world are capable of overcoming any remaining scruples. Columbus himself believed his actions were part of an apocalyptic event of salvation, a belief that aligned perfectly with the financial and military objectives of his sponsors.
The primary driving force behind the Conquest was Europe’s immense demand for precious metals, which were needed to sustain its complex monetary-warfare system. An Aztec contemporary described the Europeans' thirst for gold thus: "Like monkeys, they picked up the gold; they sat there looking delighted, as if their hearts were being renewed and illuminated. Like hungry pigs, they craved gold." The conquistador Hernán Cortés put it this way: "We Spaniards suffer from a heart condition that can only be cured with gold."
After more than fifty years of ravaging half the continent in search of precious metals, the Spaniards finally discovered a 4,000-meter-high mountain in what is now Bolivia—Cerro Rico—which would go on to become the world's largest silver mine. In a short time, the small town of Potosí, situated at the foot of the mountain, became one of the wealthiest places on the planet, surpassing Paris, Rome, and Madrid in size. Some streets were paved with silver; More than 600 richly decorated churches and dozens of lavish gambling halls were built. The flip side of this wealth was the hellish reality of the mines. Tens of thousands of indigenous people were forced to work underground and in the smelters. Most died on the job—from cave-ins, flooding, the drastic temperature swings between the scorching heat inside the mountain and the freezing cold outside, mercury poisoning, and, ultimately, exhaustion and starvation. A local monk described Potosí as a "mouth of hell that swallows Indians by the thousands." Perhaps no place on earth has come closer to the image of hell than the mines of Potosí. At night, 6,000 bonfires burned on the mountainsides to smelt the silver; toxic fumes killed off all vegetation within a 30-kilometer radius.
Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano estimates the total death toll in the mines over their three centuries of operation at eight million people. Vast tracts of land were depopulated, agriculture vanished, and the coast of what is now Peru—once cultivated by the Incas using irrigated terraces—turned into the desert landscape visible today. When nearly all the indigenous people had perished, the Spanish attempted to replace them with African slaves, who also died in large numbers. The mountain itself, which once stood over 5,000 meters tall, subsided by several hundred meters after some 40,000 tons of pure silver were extracted from its depths and shipped to Spain. But the silver did not remain in Spain; instead, it flowed through the hands of the Crown to creditors in Genoa, Augsburg, and Antwerp, fueling the burgeoning money economy there. The entire Conquest—genocide included—was financed on credit, and it was pressure from creditors that stoked the hellish fires of Potosí.
From the book: *The End of the Megamachine* by Fabian Scheidler
