No, the Spanish historian Antonio Espino López does not like to talk about the discovery of America or the conquest of America.
“The verb to invade is much more unequivocal. It implies breaking in, entering by force, as well as occupying a place abnormally and irregularly. And that is what happened in the case of America”, maintains this professor of Modern History at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, a specialist in the history of warfare in the Modern Age and the Hispanic conquest of America.
It is understandable that Espino López avoids the terms conquest or discovery. In “The invasion of America: a history of violence and destruction” -a book published by the Arpa publishing house- he reveals the culture of terror used by the Spanish when invading American territory.
Amputations of hands, executions at the stake, impalement, hanging, herding in which large combat dogs were thrown at people, sexual abuse of women and girls, and massacres were some of the the methods used by the Spaniards to subjugate the local populations, as detailed by Espino López in his book.
BBC Mundo has spoken with him.
The conquest -or invasion, as you claim to call it- of America, was it really a history of violence and destruction?
Yes. It was not different from any other process of invasion, conquest, subjugation of a territory and the inhabitants of that territory. Throughout history this has always been the case. And the Hispanic invasion and conquest of America is no different.
In his book he offers many well-documented examples of cruelty to which the Spaniards arrived in America. One of the methods that he affirms that they used against the native population was the amputation of the hands, and sometimes also of the noses and ears. Was that practice widespread?
Yes, it was a very common practice that came from very old. It is perfectly documented that it was already applied in the imperialism of ancient Rome and, since then, it has been used.
In the terrible civil wars At the end of the 20th century, in some African states, the hands of enemies were systematically cut off. This is a typical practice in those circumstances or situations in which large groups of the population have to be dominated.
When the troops are limited or when there is still no deep control of the territory and people, terror is used to frighten people in the strongest possible way. In Latin America it was a fairly widespread practice, it is mentioned in many texts.
And why did they do something so abominable?
The conquerors frequently cut off the hands of the inhabitants and cauterized the wounded with boiling oil or with fire.
Obviously, what is involved is that the rest of the community perceive clearly and forcefully that the punishment applied to that person could be extended to many others, what stopped his instinct to rebel.
During the siege of Cuzco the mutilation of the hands was used very frequently, right?
Yes. That was precisely a very committed moment, there was a very small group of Spaniards defending Cuzco, although they were supported by a few thousand allied Indians.
Like the pressure Cuzco was subjected to in the years 1536 and 1537 was very strong, when the Spaniards managed to take prisoners they cut off their hands to show the rest what they were facing and try to stop them.
But in the siege of Cuzco not only were the hands of the enemy warriors cut off, but when the conquerors managed to attack one of their camps they killed to the families of the belligerents, since they accompanied them in combat. They resorted to any type of barbarity in order to stop the revolts against Spanish interests.
Another of those terrifying practices that he mentions in his book is the “perreamiento”. What did it consist of?
Combat dogs were used in herding and, again, it is a very old practice that was probably already used in Ancient Greece.
It involves using large dogs with great physical power, such as Alans or Mastiffs, against people. It is a very, very terrible practice. You have to imagine a defenseless person, sometimes with his hands tied, who has to face an animal or several animals in front of the eyes of the rest of the community.
That person would die in a matter of minutes, and seeing it caused a strong shock in those who witnessed it. A shock so terrible that it psychologically annihilated those who saw it for a long time, if not forever. wrong, she was going to end up being executed in such a horrific way. I imagine that, after seeing a perreamiento, people would think twice before rebelling against the Spanish.
And was it common practice?
Yes, it is a practice that is mentioned in many places. Perhaps it was not as widespread, or not as documented, as others.
But it is such an abominable practice that it made the Spanish monarchy react forcefully, which reveals that it was used . In 1536 a Royal Decree is published in which it prohibits the breeding of dogs with the ultimate intention of executing people.
It has even been said that in some cases these dogs were fed with human meat, evidently with Indian meat. It is possible that the perreamientos were considered useful in the first moments of the invasion, conquest and settlement of America.
But once the colonial system was already in place, some Spaniards began to see it as something too abominable.
There were reactions from some jurists and, above all, from many members of the clergy who began to say that this type of practice they were not typical of Christians or civilized people like the Spanish.
In his book he also mentions executions at the stake, indigenous people who were burned alive. It was above all Pizarro who used this practice, but he was not the only one, right?
Torture was a widespread practice in the conquest of America
No, it was used by many people, especially at the beginning of the invasion of America. It was a type of execution that was reserved above all for caciques. Because if the head of a community, of a territory, was being executed, once again a very clear message was being sent.
Seeing the terrible end that a person of the same status had had, other they stopped wanting to rebel.
Executions at the stake were widely used in the conquest of the Antilles, especially in Santo Domingo. Both Pizarro and Cortés used them in specific situations.
Cortés did not hesitate, for example, to burn alive a great Mexica chief and some of his his co-religionists to demonstrate precisely to Moctezuma and the rest of Mexica society that he would not tolerate any revolt or action against Spanish interests.
He also talks about impalement…
This practice was not so common, I have not found many mentions of it, it appears above all in some chronicles about the conquest of Venezuela.
The impalement seems to be that it was used with the objective of denigrating a person and that it is associated on everything to the emperor Manco Inca, who rose up against Pizarro and organized a revolt to try to recover Cuzco in 1536-1537.
Manco Inca was defeated on that occasion and withdrew to a nearby territory , to Vilcabamba, and from there he organized for many years the war against the Spanish and their aboriginal allies, especially in the Huanca Indian towns. Reading the chroniclers, it seems that it was Manco Inca who systematically used impalement.
But it is obvious that the Spaniards themselves and their Indian allies also used it. I have located impalement very punctually committed by the Spaniards in New Granada, Venezuela and Peru.
The impalement could be carried out with the body of a person fallen in combat or with someone alive, I have found both cases.
Were massacres common in the conquest from America?
The massacres took place under certain circumstances and for various reasons: because, for example, one of the Spanish lieutenants or the great caudillos directly understood that a great lesson must be given.
This is the case of Alonso de Ojeda who, when he was trying to conquer Nueva Andalucía, today the coast from Colombia, he resorts to massacres, and we also have some example of a massacre in the conquest of Cuba.
Cortés likewise undertakes very, very important massacres; for example, in the city of Cholula, just before entering Mexico City.
In the city of Cholula, a massacre took place that today is very well documented in which between 2 . and 6.000 people.
Also when Pizarro captured Atahualpa in the city of Cajamarca we can speak of a massacre, there was a reaction against Atahualpa’s retinue and there were many deaths. But it seems that in that event there are certain chroniclers who try to clean up the image of Pizarro, because according to their version of what happened, it was Pizarro himself who stopped the impulse of his people to continue killing, and even so, several hundred people probably died. , perhaps thousands of people.
There are chroniclers who say that Pizarro’s men asked permission to start cutting off the hands of the enemies, and that Pizarro told them no, that enough was enough, that was not the time. Due to the adrenaline generated by these situations of violence, people went further and Pizarro stopped them because it was opportune.
But in the chronicles there are passages about the systematic use of massacres, massacres to a greater or lesser degree, but slaughter after all. There were in Chile, in Yucatan…
The first conquest of Yucatan was especially terrible, massacres were used because there was strong resistance. There were great losses of human lives in the combats and in the massacres after the combats.
You say that the conquerors also resorted to the rape of women as a weapon of war to sow terror. Some of these rapes of women were even committed in front of their husbands and fathers.
On some occasions this happened, but these are issues that are much more difficult to document, because in the documentation of the time women do not appear to the level one would like. In the documentation, mentions of women are quite scarce.
And aboriginal women practically do not appear. In any case, the ones that appear are the women associated with the aboriginal elite, who are the ones who can be the object of political exchange, they could be offered to the Hispanic group to maintain a good relationship with it.
Some testimonies of Bernal Díaz del Castillo and other chroniclers speak, during the conquest of Mexico, that Cortés had to issue an ordinance to force his men to follow a series of precepts when waging war. And that included do not disturb the women of the allied Indians, thus leaving the field free to bother the women of the enemies.
Furthermore, one of the ways to compensate the soldiers when it was still not possible to distribute loot in objects, in gold and silver, was to allow men to become slaves, who obviously had a value, and also to make women slaves, who had another type of value.
Díaz del Castillo records, for example, that the troops, the participants in the conquest who are not high officials, complained that the most beautiful enslaved women are looked at and quickly set aside because they were for use and enjoyment of official status, and the rest of the women were already distributed among the others.
All of this existed, but it is very difficult to document. There are some critical voices -some jurist, some member of the Church- that do refer to these circumstances, and that they are especially terrible. There are authors who have found files of certain characters that today we would directly consider pederasts.
Why all those practices that you speak of are not taught in Spanish schools? Why is the Spanish population unaware of the level of cruelty of the conquerors of America?
I think that because we are still hostages of the marvelous imperial history, there is in fact some author who has spoken of the sacred history of the conquest of America.
This comes from the Francoist era, the Francoist regime tried -and managed- to develop an imperial history of the conquest of America, playing with the trick that the end of the fifteenth century and the entire sixteenth century is the great moment of the Hispanic monarchy.
And, in this context, it was considered that it could not be overshadowed a matter as transcendent for the history of humanity as the discovery of America revealing the formulas that were used for that invasion, conquest and settlement.
The Franco regime appropriated the history of Spain for ideological purposes, and hid the most terrible elements that any invasion, conquest and imperialism entails. And that idea continues to this day.
King Felipe VI, who recently traveled to Puerto Rico for the 200 years of the foundation of San Juan de Puerto Rico, continues with this typical speech that Spain brought civilization, culture, language, religion, technology and the word freedom to America. Because on top of that they tell how the conquerors allied themselves with some aboriginal groups to fight against other dominant groups that had them subjugated, and therefore “liberated” those populations.
And it is not true?
They freed the elites of those populations. Those groups that allied themselves with the Spaniards and confronted the Mexicas or the Incas to try not to be subject to them, to live better in the sense of not being subject to them, fared very well. But only those people. All the rest of the aboriginal societies fared terribly badly.
One of the arguments used by the defenders of the conquest of America Latin America is that there was mestizaje, while in North America there was not…
It is true that miscegenation in Latin America It is very high. But it is wrong to think of this miscegenation as something positive for both parties, when it was rather something imposed by the Spaniards.
In the century XVI only the % -the 25% maximum- of the Spanish population that settled in America were women. The rest were men, almost all of them young. And if the Spanish population in Latin America was made up of a high percentage of young men and the number of women was very small, it is logical that there would be miscegenation.
It was a very different colonization in that sense from the one carried out by England in the 17th century and especially in the 18th century in the North American colonies, where the people who moved to those territories were often entire families. In addition, for reasons of religion and race, these people did not want to mix with the Indians, they reject the Indians.
Another of The arguments used by the defenders of the conquest of America is that it was heroic that only a handful of men could conquer all those territories. Was it achieved through extreme cruelty?
On the one hand, it is true that there was extreme cruelty, extreme violence and terror, especially all at the beginning, when the conquerors had to impose themselves by force on much larger human groups in order to survive. And many died along the way.
But the conquerors also realized that they needed to ally themselves with some Indian groups from territories such as Mexico, Peru, etc., because otherwise they would not win the war. never. Another of the fallacies that the Franco regime has told us is the heroic aspect that with very small troops it was possible to conquer an entire continent.
Cortés began the conquest of Mexico with 600 men and has 2.200. Pizarro, for his part, achieves the conquest of Peru with less than 600 European men. What until relatively recently had not been explained to us is that the force of the aboriginal allies was absolutely necessary to defeat the Mexica empire and the Inca empire.
Without the help of what the chronicles call allies, auxiliaries or friendly Indians, it is impossible for the Spanish to have won these conflicts.
In smaller societies like the Antilles they were able to do more or less settle with the Hispanic troops. And in areas like what is now Panama, they would not have succeeded if it had not been for the massive use of terror. One of the first to make extensive use of the perreamiento that we spoke of earlier was Núñez de Balboa in the area of present-day Panama.
Many They assure that many more Indians died from the diseases brought by the Spaniards than from their violence. It’s true?
You can say yes. Epidemics and unknown diseases affected both the aboriginal population and the conquerors, although the latter to a much lesser extent, and caused a mortality in the local population that could hardly be achieved with weapons.
But what is important to keep in mind is that diseases and epidemics were unleashed when conflicts and wars had already begun, when a great breakdown of the population had already occurred, when a colonial system had already been imposed which was characterized by exploiting people, often to death…
It is in this context of the destruction of a society, the destruction of a religion and the destructuring of people’s lives that the diseases arrived, causing even more deaths and more destruction.
The president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, demands that Spain apologize for the conquest of America, for the invasion from America. Does he think Spain should do it?
Perhaps the term forgiveness is a bit excessive. I would settle for the Spanish State to apologize publicly for much of what happened ago 500 years, recognizing that typical excesses of any imperialism were committed, both before and after.
The North Americans took carried out massacres against the aboriginal population in the 19th century, the British committed real barbarities in Australia, the Turks committed a genocide against the Armenians, the Germans committed genocides in Africa, Leopold II of Belgium committed a terrible genocide in the Congo…
But we also did a lot of barbarities. We, the Spaniards, are not better or worse than the others, we behave exactly the same as any other imperialism.
Was there a genocide in Latin America by the conquerors?
It is difficult for me to use the word genocide in the case of Latin America, because there was no desire for destruction and extermination as there was for example in the Congo for those who did not want to work in the extraction of rubber.
The Spanish case in Latin America was quite different, although the consequences of the policies that were applied there ended up as if it had been a genocide. But it is not a genocide as such, because there was no desire for extermination.
The Indian was the basic workforce for the Spanish colonialist system, if the Indians were exterminated, the workforce would disappear.
What happens is that the desire to get rich was so brutal that they did not hesitate to apply enormous violence when they considered it necessary. Especially at the beginning, when the Spaniards thought that the Indians were an inexhaustible good. Then they realized that no, that they were a scarce commodity.
And what would change if Spain apologized?
I believe that the moment Latin America perceives that there is a certain willingness to understand each other better, to recognize that very, very terrible things were done, the pressure to which Spanish society is sometimes subjected from Latin America will be reduced.
If Spain continues without acknowledging the excesses that were committed, the robbery to which an entire continent was subjected, etc., it is normal that from certain environments in Latin America it continues to demand that it do so.
Statues of Columbus, by Fray Junípero Serra have been demolished in America… Do you understand?
I understand it from the assumption that excesses were committed that Spain has never recognized. Columbus was not only the admiral who discovered America, he is someone who from 976 starts up a company for the sale of slaves.
If this is not known, and in Spain it is hardly known, it is difficult to understand why a statue is demolished of Columbus. For his part, Junípero Serra was a missionary, and missionaries in general were people with the best intentions in the world.
In fact, they were used by the Hispanic monarchy in the second half of the 17th century and throughout the 18th century as the friendly face of the conquest. But immediately behind the missionaries and their crosses came the swords. From that budget, I can also understand that the statue of Junípero Serra is the object of political criticism.
This article is part of the digital version of the Hay Festival Cartagena, a meeting of writers and thinkers that takes place in that Colombian city
- Of 27 to 30
of January of 202two.
- Follow all the information related to the Hay Festival
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