american-holocaust

PESTILENCE AND GENOCIDE 81purchase or commandeer. By the time of his own death in 1547 his personalholdings in Indian slaves, despite constant infusions of new bodieswas barely one-tenth of what h~ _started with. 83Meanwhile, Tenochtitlan effectively was no more. About a third of amillion people dead, in a single city in a single lake in the center of Mexico.And still this was just the-beginning.Smallpox and other new diseases-new, at least to the Indians-werenow rippling out in currents of destruction across the Mexican and CentralAmerican landscape. The microbes moved even faster than the ambitiousconquistadors on their horses, but the conquistadors moved as quickly "as they could. And few if any were .as ambitious as Pedro de Alvarado,who had led the temple massacre during the feast day ceremonies for thegod Huitzilopochtli. Alvarado and his compatriots headed south, seekinggold for their coffers and flesh for their mines. Others headed north. Likeparasites feeding on the remains of whatever was left alive once the windsof epidemic fever had passed over the native populations they encountered,the Spanish adventurers invaded, conquered, and enslaved the peoples livingin the rest of Mexico and in what today is Guatemala, Belize, Honduras,El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama.No one knows how many they killed, or how many died of diseasebefore the conquistadors got there, but Las Casas wrote that Alvarado andhis troops by themselves "advanced killing, ravaging, burning, robbing anddestroying all the country wherever he came." In all, he said:By other massacres and murders besides the above, they have destroyed anddevastated a kingdom more than a hundred leagues square, one of the happiestin the way of fertility and population in the world. This same tyrantwrote that it was more populous than the kingdom of Mexico; and he toldthe truth. He and his brothers, together with the others, have killed morethan four or five million people in fifteen or sixteen years, from the year1525 until 1540, and they continue to kill and destroy those who are stillleft; and so they will kill the remainder." 84Alvarado, of course, was but one among many engaged in this genocidalenterprise. Nuiio Beltran de Guzman was one of those who led armiesto the north, torturing and burning at the stake native leaders, suchas the T arascan king, while seizing or destroying enormous native storesof food. Guzman later was followed by Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, byFrancisco Vasquez de Coronado, by Francisco de Ibarra, and countlessother conquerors and marauders. As elsewhere, disease, depredation, enslavement,and outright massacres combined to extinguish entire Indiancultures in Mexico's northwest. Among the region's Serrano culture groups,in barely more than a century the Tepehuan people were reduced in numberby 90 percent; the Irritilla people by 93 percent; the Acaxee people by