How Did The Spanish Enslav The Native American

The excerpt from The Destruction of the Indies had my skin crawling. As I listened to the speaker describe the torture these natives had to endure it got me wondering how someone could be so cruel. How was it even possible that the Spaniards got away with such horrendous acts of torture? I cannot fathom the amount of pure agony the natives went through. I started imagining just how painful and terrifying it all must have been for them. What really shocked me was when the Spaniards had the audacity to say they are doing this as a “testimony to the great deeds and holy miracles performed by these dauntless missionaries of the holy Catholic faith” (8:40). I am still trying to figure out how exactly torturing or harming the natives is a “great
The Spanish colonists would rape and torture the women, torture the men, and even torture the children. They were in a position of power, so they felt like they could treat these new and different people as objects of their own bitter and twisted fantasies. One could argue that humans are naturally drawn to violence, in my own humble opinion these acts of aggression only further prove this claim. From what I recall of the in class lectures, slavery was primarily used as a means of free labor. It furthered capitalistic gain and wealth of the Spaniard’s mother country. Their colonists were going to obtain this wealth by any means necessary, they felt as if it was their god given right to cultivate this land and use up its resources. If doing so meant that natives were simply “vermin to be exterminated” (7:47), as the documentary so kindly put it, they were going to kill any Native Americans that stood in their
These are actual people that lived in the Americas long before the Spanish came along; now Native Americans are being categorized as either beings without souls forced to be slaves or humans that can be converted to Catholicism. I think it is ironic that the Spanish crown decided to outlaw the slavery of American natives but says it is still okay to send in black slaves from Africa to work for the Spanish colonies. This really goes to show just how hypocritical humans can be purely for their own selfish, materialistic gain.
How is it logical that one group of people should be enslaved and not the other? What I mean by this is generally speaking no group of people should be enslaved, for that goes against basic moral principles and human rights. Even though it is not mentioned in the documentary—based on what I’ve learned from the lectures in this class— it could be a possible contributor that the Spanish stopped enslaving natives because they were all struck with illness. Although, the main reason from the documentary was that Las Casas advocated strongly for the abolition of slavery of the