american-holocaust

PESTILENCE AND GENOCIDE 85brought up enough gold, but further, most often, he was bound hand andfoot and flung under the bed like a dog, before the [Spanish] foreman laydown, directly over him, with his wife." 96These were just precursors to the open trade in enslaved women thatthe Spanish delighted in as the decades wore on. Native women-or indias-weregambled away in card games and traded for other objects ofsmall value, while stables of them were rented out to sailors who desiredsexual accompaniment during their travels up and down the coast. If anindia attempted to resist, she was whipped or tortured or burned alive.Even when laws were passed to curb the more extreme of such atrocities,the penalties were a joke. When, for example, an uncooperative NicaraguanIndian woman was burned to death in her hut by a Spaniard whotried to rape her, he was prosecuted by the governor-and fined five pesos.97Those women who were not valued as enslaved concubines were forcedto do back-breaking work. Writes one modern historian:Some of the indias even as late as the 1580s were being broken physically,their insides literally bursting in some instances from the heavy loads theyhad to carry. Unable to endure more, some of them committed suicide byhanging, starving themselves, or by eating poisonous herbs. Encomenderosforced them to work in open fields where they tried to care for their children.They slept outside and there gave birth to and reared their babies, who wereoften bitten by poisonous insects. Mothers occasionally killed their offspringat birth to spare them future agonies .... [Other] working mothers presenta poignant image when we hear of them returning home after weeks ormonths of separation from their children, only to find that they had died orhad been taken away. 98Concludes this writer: "All of those factors help explain the fact that ontribute rolls married couples were frequently entered as having no childrenat all or only one, and seldom more than two." 99 In even the most healthfulof environments birth rates of this level will mean zero populationgrowth at first, and then increasingly precipitous decline. In an environmentof such enormous mortality from genocide and firestorms of disease,as was the rule in the Americas during the Spanish conquest, birth ratesthis low were a blueprint for extinction.And that is precisely what happened in community after community.Almost everyone was killed. There were, of course, exceptions. But overallin central Mexico the population fell by almost 95 percent within seventyfiveyears following the Europeans' first appearance-from more than25,000,000 people in 1519 to barely 1,300,000 in 1595. And central Mexicowas typical. Even using moderate estimates of the pre-1492 population,in southeastern Mexico the number of inhabitants dropped from1,700,000 to less than 240,000 in a century and a half. In northern Mex-