american-holocaust

PESTILENCE AND GENOCIDE 89Those who did survive the Spanish gifts of plague and famine and massacre,and who were not force-marched into jungles as the conquistadors'enslaved beasts of burden, were subject to being herded together and drivenfrom their J"tighland residences in the Andes to coca plantations on thesweltering peripheries of low-lying tropical rain forests. Ther~, their lungslongadapted to the cool, thin air of mountain altitudes-were assaultedby a barrage of still more strange, debilitating, and murderous diseases,including uta or mal de los Andes, which ate away at noses, mouths, andthroats before bringing on terrifyingly painful death. So many were succumbingat such a rapid rate, in fact, that even the Spanish Crown beganworrying about the long-term success of their enterprise should too manyIndians be destroyed. Because "an infinite number of Indians perish," observedKing Philip himself in a belated imperial decree, "and others emergeso sick and weak that they never recuperate;" the coca trade, he urged,must be moderated or discouraged. The Spanish on the scene, trying formore precision than their king regarding the matter of Indian mortality,estimated that "between a third and half of the annual quota of coca workersdied as a result of their five month service" in the fields. And those whodid survive, and the fewer still who lived out the remainder of the year,had only the next round of lethal work to face in the coming season ahead.Still, despite the urgings of the Crown, the trade in coca grew-because,as Hernando de Santillan put it, "down there [in the coca plantations]there is one disease worse than all the rest: the unrestrained greed of theSpaniards." 109Work in the silver mines, if anything, was worse. Dropped down ashaft bored as far as 750 feet into the earth, taking with them only "somebags of roasted maize for their sustenance," observed Rodrigo de Loaisa,the miners remained below ground for a week at a time. There, in additionto the dangers of falling rocks, poor ventilation, and the violence of brutaloverseers, as the Indian laborers chipped away at the rock faces of themines they released and inhaled the poisonous vapors of cinnabar, arsenic,arsenic anhydride, and mercury. "If twenty healthy Indians enter [a mine]on Monday," wrote Loaisa, "half may emerge crippled on Saturday."Crippled, if they were lucky. To enter a mine, wrote Santo Tomas, was toenter "a mouth of hell." 110For as long as there appeared to be an unending supply of brute laborit was cheaper to work an Indian to death, and then replace him or herwith another native, than it was to feed and care for either of them properly.It is probable, in fact, that the life expectancy of an Indian engagedin forced labor in a mine or on a plantation during these early years ofSpanish terror in Peru was not much more than three or four monthsaboutthe same as that of someone working at slave labor in the syn~heticrubber manufacturing plant at Auschwitz in the 1940s.l1 1So immense was the indigenous population of the Andes that the Span-