Galeano pp. 11-31
The year 1492 was a momentous year for Spain because of their conquest of “America” but also because they recovered Granada from the Arabs. These are both instances of the Spanish exerting their power over minority groups. It also reinforces the opinion held by the Spanish at the time that Christianity is the superior religion and the Spanish are superior to other groups of people. It seems to me that the Spanish used their “faith in God” to reinforce their reasonings for enslaving native Americans and overtaking their land. I also notice the privilege that the higher ups in the church had in society, since they could read and write. This appears to me to be a strategy to abuse power solely because “it is God’s will”. The Europeans had soldiers, trained dogs, guns and “their good Catholic faith” that could be considered advantages over the native Americans. Columbus described the Indies as “the greatest rich domain in the world”. Galeano says that “the Spaniards and Portuguese in America combined propagation of the Christian faith with usurpation and plunder of native wealth”. Potosí was supposedly the city of silver, “even the horses were shod with silver”. The city had “120,000 inhabitants by the census of 1573”. It was “one of the world’s biggest and richest cities”. Its history starts with the Incas not the Spaniards. I think that the city’s legacy consisted of scandal and parties, miners and prostitutes. The cow and milk metaphor can be explained as Spain being the one who owned the cow while the others drank the milk. The metals that Spain took “not only stimulated Europe’s economic development; one may say that they made it possible”. Marx says that the ultimate effect of the discovery of America was “the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production”. Galeano says that the “Latin American colonies were discovered, conquered, and colonized within the process of the expansion of commercial capital”. Galeano says that the “international division of labor, as it emerged along with capitalism, resembled the distribution of function between a horseman and a horse…the markets of the colonial world grew as mere appendices to the internal market of invading capitalism.” Merchants ran the colonial economy “under the jealous and omnipotent eye of the Crown and its chief associate, the Church”.
Bartolomé de las Casas
When describing the native Americans, de las Casas says that they are “guileless, the most devoid of wickedness and duplicity, the most obedient and faithful to their native masters and the Spanish Christians whom they serve”. He says these people hold no grudges. He says “The sons of nobles among us, brought up in the enjoyments of life’s refinements, are no more delicate than are these Indians”. He says the Spaniards act like “ravening beasts, killing, terrorizing, afflicting, torturing, and destroying the native peoples”. He describes the relationship between wealth and religion when he says “the Christians have an ultimate aim, which is to acquire gold, and to swell themselves with riches in a very brief time and thus rise to a high estate disproportionate to their merits”. I feel like this contrasts with Galeano because Galeano seems to be arguing that they used their religion as an excuse where as it seems to me that de las Casas believes that they wanted to be rich to compensate for their lack of admirable deeds.
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