american-holocaust

86 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTico, over a somewhat longer period, the native population fell from morethan 2,500,000 to less than 320,000. Wherever the invaders went, thepattern was the same. On the island of Cozumel, off the eastern coast ofMexico, more than 96 percent of the population had been destroyed lessthan 70 years after the Spaniards' first arrival. In the Cuchumatan Highlandsof Guatemala the population fell by 82 percent within the first halfcenturyfollowing European contact, and by 94 percent-from 260,000 to16,000-in less than a century and a half. In western Nicaragua 99 percentof the people were dead (falling in number from more than 1,000,000to less than 10,000) before sixty years had passed from the time of theSpaniards' initial appearance. In western and central Honduras 95 percentof the people were exterminated in half a century. In Cordoba, near theGulf of Mexico, 97 percent of the population was extinguished in littlemore than a century, while simultaneously, in neighboring Jalapa, the samelethal pattern held: 97 percent of the Jalapa population was destroyedfallingfrom 180,000 people in 1520 to 5000 in 1626. With dreary regularity,in countless other locales across the length and breadth of Mexicoand down into Central America, the European intrusion meant the suddenand near total disappearance of populations that had lived and flourishedthere for thousands upon thousands of years. 100Those natives who survived remembered, however, and in poetry theypassed on to posterity the dreadful tale of what had happened. Recalledan Aztec poet:Broken spears lie in the roads;we have torn our hair in grief.The houses are roofless now, and their wallsare red with blood.Worms are swarming in the streets and plazas,and the walls are splattered with gore.The water has turned red, as if it were dyed,and when we drink it,it has the taste of brine.We have pounded our hands in despairagainst the adobe walls,for our inheritance, our city, is lost and dead. 101The Maya book of Chi/am Balam adds "what the white lords did whenthey came to our land":They taught fear and they withered the flowers. So that their flower shouldlive, they maimed and destroyed the flower of others. . . . Marauders byday, offenders by night, murderers of the world. 102