american-holocaust

PESTILENCE AND GENOCIDE7Sdown to less than a hundred thousand. By 1518 it numbered less thantwenty thousand. And by 1535, say the leading scholars on this grim topic,"for all practical purposes, the native population was extinct." 61In less than the normal lifetime of a single human being, an entireculture of millions of people, thousands of years resident in their homeland,had been exterminated. The same fate befell the native peoples ofthe surrounding islands in the Caribbean as well. Of all the horrific genocidesthat have occurred in the twentieth century against Armenians, Jews,Gypsies, Ibos, Bengalis, Timorese, Kampucheans, Ugandans, and more, nonehas come close to destroying this many-or this great a proportion-ofwholly innocent people. 62And then the Spanish turned their attention to the mainland of Mexicoand Central America. The slaughter had barely begun. The exquisite cityof T enoch titian was next.IIIUnlike most of the Caribbean peoples the Spanish encountered, the inhabitantsof Mexico had a good deal of experience with warfare. To be sure,Aztec warriors were trained in highly individualistic fighting techniques,since the aim of battle was not to kill masses of the enemy, but rather tocapture and bring back a single worthy opponent to be sacrificed at thefollowing year's ceremonies of fertility. 63 Still, those fighting skills wereformidable. And when combined with the Aztecs' enormous numerical advantage,they were more than a match for any invading army out of Europe.As the European interlopers' own accounts make clear, individualIndian warriors repeatedly showed themselves the equal, and more, of anyamong the Spanish militia. The story of one Aztec soldier who, in handto-handcombat, fought off a handful of Spanish horsemen-"when theycould not bring him down, one of the Spaniards threw his lance at theIndian, who caught it and fought for another hour before being shot bytwo archers and then stabbed"-was but one among innumerable suchreports from the conquistadors themselves. 64The Indians' battlefield experience, however, was the result of complexpolitical rivalries that had existed in the region for centuries, rivalries theSpanish under Hernando Cortes were able to turn to their advantage. Asone scholar of Aztec military strategy recently has emphasized, "while theSpanish conquest is now seen as a major watershed in the history ofthe New World," to the various competing Indian polities at the time"the Spanish were simply another group, albeit an alien one, seeking togain political dominance in central Mexico." As such, although the firstpeople the Spanish confronted, the Tlaxcaltecs, could easily have defeatedthe conquistadors, they saw in them instead potential confederates againsttheir traditional adversaries. 65 It was thus with a formidable army of In-