slaughter of the Indians. For years he had been intervening on behalf of the Indians as well as preparing a massive treatise in their defense and conservation.
Las Casas came from a family of conversos (Jewish people who had converted to Christianity). As an adventurous lad of 18, he arrived in Hispaniola in 1502 eager to make his fortune as a colonist. His father and uncle had accompanied Columbus on his second voyage. They brought him and an (enslaved) Indian boy as a souvenir from the islands. Between 1502 and 1514 Las Casas fought as a soldier in the conquest of Cuba. In 1510 the Dominicans arrived in Hispaniola and began denouncing the Spaniards’ treatment of the Indians. They also noted the demographic collapse. Friar Antonio de Montesinos gave an impassioned sermon in 1512 in which he articulated the questions and critique that Las Casas and his followers were to repeat throughout the centuries: “Are they [the Indians] not human? Do they not have rational souls? Are you not obliged to love them as yourselves?” (Brading, 1991: 59). The response was the official wrath of the crown and the church. More atrocities followed.
After his conversion, with the support of the Dominicans, he returned to Spain to campaign on behalf of the Indians and to build alliances, most especially with the bishop of Burgos (Castro, 2007: 63–102). Las Casas’s strategy, not unlike the advice Guamán Poma offered the Spanish king almost a century later, was to make the church and the crown realize that it was in their benefit to keep the Indians in good condition. His proposals were always reform. He wanted to improve the conditions under which the Indians were integrated, albeit more slowly and peacefully, into the strictly hierarchical colonial world that was emerging. The very title of one of his best known tracts, Memorial de remedios (1516), indicates that Las Casas’s project, heroic as it was in demanding that the power system in place recognize the humanity of the Indias, could not advocate a radical turn away from the policies of conquest and colonization. As one of his most recent analysts has put it: “What differentiates him from the rest is his willingness to reach out to offer temporary succor to those being victimized so that they could be benevolently converted, peacefully exploited, and successfully incorporated as members of the new subject–colony where existence depended on the dictates of the king in the imperial capital” (Castro, 2007: 8).
Nevertheless, Las Casas recommended the abolition of the encomienda, that is, the king’s donation of immense tracts of land and thousands of Indians in perpetuity to individual Spaniards who had served in the armies that carried out the conquest. The encomienda system and its later modifications stayed firmly in place until the first half of the twentieth century as the coloniality of power, or rather the dependence of the modern world on its colonial underside, never really entirely waned (see Mignolo’s Preamble in this volume). The Dominican friar hoped to persuade the king of the evils of the encomienda by citing the particular horrors and grief that accompanied the population collapse. In Hispaniola, he reported, out of the two million Indians in 1492, only 15,000 remained at the time he wrote the Memorial.
Las Casas, who had an encomienda in Cuba, described the forced labor conditions and wanton killings in wrenching detail. He had lost all confidence in the ability of his compatriots to treat the Indians in a Christian way. By way of remedies he suggested that Indians and Spaniards live in separate communities, a measure that to some extent was later put in place in Peru, not so much to protect the Indians as to better exploit their labor. The idea that the Indians should be left in communities of their own was predicated on the notion that they had demonstrable intelligence to rule themselves, even though they still needed the light of Christianity to fully achieve their divinely intended purpose on earth. Thus the Indian communities would be put under the care and tutelage of an evangelizing priest. This idea of separate communities was later embraced by Guamán Poma, who also wrote to the king in search of relief from the death toll of the conquest and Spanish rule. Guamán Poma, however, went beyond Las Casas in that he would also expel the priests about whose greed and unchristian practices he writes a scathing tract in his El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615).
The reforms spelled out in the Memorial de remedios constituted the seedbed for many of the later attempts by the evangelizing orders and even some crown officials to engage in what Las Casas envisioned as a peaceful conversation. His stance in defense of the Indians against the charges made by the school of Spanish imperial jurists, theologians, and historians (Brading, 1991: 2–75) has earned Las Casas the title of defender and protector of the Indians. He is also credited as the progenitor of the modern idea of human, that is, universal, rights.
As we shall see below, Las Casas went even further. After the killings of Moctezuma and Atahualpa, he argued that pagan civilizations had the right to keep their governments, and their members were entitled to restitution of the goods and life the conquerors had usurped. All of this swimming against the current earned him the hatred of many people in both the colonies and Spain. During his long life (1474–1566) he was feared, despised, and opposed by many who saw him as the enemy of Spain. Indeed, from the official point of view among Spanish historians, he was and is still regarded as the architect of what they called the Black Legend – the myriad facts and arguments that together question the legitimacy of Spain’s right to conquer and govern Amerindian societies, together with the unmitigated and unavoidable condemnation of the destruction of the Amerindians. The polemic that Las Casas’s criticism of conquest fueled with his Memorial dominated the whole of the sixteenth century, and nowhere was it heard more loudly or did it play a stronger role than in the dynamics of memory and writing of the former Tahuantinsuyo.
Las Casas crossed the Atlantic several times as he sought to obtain changes in policy in Spain and see them implemented in the New World. What he saw in his many journeys to Venezuela, Mexico, and Nicaragua never ceased to astound and shock him. Peaceful conversation was not even an idea in the heads of most of the evangelizing priests. In his Del único modo de atraer a todos los pueblos a la verdadera religión (1530–40), he argued that all peoples of the world were endowed with the same human qualities and cognitive faculties and that God had predestined all souls for salvation. This universalist argument could, however, be interpreted in two opposing ways. On the one hand, it could support the idea of a God–given human universal condition of all peoples, but on the other, it made conversion only the more urgent. In order to stem the force of the second reading, Las Casas argued that the Gospel should be predicated slowly and peacefully, that evangelists should seek to persuade and engage the cognitive capacities of peoples who, like all men endowed with natural enlightenment, sought to know the true God. Preaching was thus coupled with persuasion, an appeal to knowledge and love (Brading, 1991: 64). The violence of the conquest had created impossible conditions for the proper preaching of the Gospel, and it should stop, he argued.
The news from the Americas was shocking and alarming to many Europeans and there developed a great deal of pressure for reform. The pope finally declared the Indians to have souls. Las Casas’s most radical denunciation of Spain and proposals for change were published in his summary work Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1542). In this text he draws stark differences. Resting on the idea that the discovery of America was an act of divine providence, an idea that Garcilaso de la Vega would later exploit also, Las Casas paints the Indians as gentle and humble human beings in virtual expectation of conversion. The Spaniards, in contrast, are nothing but thieves and tyrants. They burn, torture, murder, enslave, and rape at will, as most eyewitness accounts attest. His proposal for radical reform not only recommends the abolition of the encomienda, but also the idea that once the Indians are converted and Spain has accomplished its duty as provided by God, the Spanish should retreat from America, a suggestion not lost in Guamán Poma, who not only promises the king good Indians (Christian vassals) but also unimaginable tribute. The restoration of Andean order and wealth will only be possible if the Spanish retreat to the coastal cities and leave the Andeans to govern themselves.
In 1542 the Spanish crown came out with new legislation for governing the colonies. Known as the New Laws, and in part influenced by Las Casas’s critique and recommendations for better government, the New Laws were rejected by the colonists. Civil war broke out in Peru and more Andeans were compelled to fight and die in the opposing
