american-holocaust

PESTILENCE AND GENOCIDE91not come quickly enough or because they did not bring enough load, andfor the slightest reason makes them go down again. 113These were the "improved" conditions in the Spaniards' Andean silvermines, where still two-thirds of those who ascended the mountains soondied or withered away. Even the initial survivors' lives were brief, however,since most of them soon developed mal de Ia mina, or mine sickness,which-before it killed-began with ulcers on the gums and soon progressedto rotting and destruction of the mouth and jaw, while its victimscoughed up sputum mixed with mercury and blood. Understandably, beforetoo long, likely draftees started moving out of the conscription zonesaround the mining regions, which only heightened the Spaniards' need formore recruits-recruits whose terms of labor then also necessarily grewlonger, which in turn drove still more of them to migrate from the area.As Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala explained:Some absent themselves from their communities to avoid going to the mineswhere they would suffer agony and martyrdom, and in order to avoid experiencingsuch hell, hardship and torment of the devils, others flee the mines,and still others take to the roads to avoid the mines and would rather chancedying suddenly than to suffer a slow death. They say that they reach such astate because contracting mercury sickness one dries up as a stick and hasasthma, and cannot live day or night. It goes on in this manner a year ortwo and they die.l1 4But by moving away from the reach of the Spanish mine recruiters,Indians had to break up their families and communities and move downto the lowlands where the Europeans' epidemic diseases-such as measles,mumps, typhus, influenza, diphtheria, scarlet fever, and hemorrhagicsmallpox, to mention only those diseases that are known to have brokenout here during these years-spread more easily in the warm and muggyair. The would-be conscripts, therefore, were trapped: they could either bedrafted and destroyed in the torture of the mines, or they could movedown to a hot and humid seething pesthouse-where, recent research hasshown, the population was disintegrating at about twice the speed that itwas even in the mining regions.l1 5Whether or not to migrate from the highland regions, then, was anagonizing individual and family decision. For Andean society as a whole,however, no alternatives were afforded. Within a century following theirfirst encounter with the Spanish, 94 to 96 percent of their once-enormouspopulation had been exterminated; along their 2000 miles of coastline,where once 6,500,000 people had lived, everyone was dead.And then there was Brazil. Here, the Englishman Anthony Knivet once hadsaid, you could travel from the Atlantic coast across the continent to Po-