December 10 is International Human Rights Day. The Spaniard Bartolomé de las Casas was a slave owner in New Spain during the sixteenth century. He soon saw no point in the forced employment of the colonized population and he stood up for their rights.
Bartolomé de las Casas has engaged in practices that we now consider despicable. He emigrated to Hispaniola in 1502 when he was about eighteen. Columbus had claimed this island for Spain, on which the Dominican Republic and Haiti now lie, ten years earlier. Las Casas took part in military expeditions against the local population and in slave hunts. He was ordained a Dominican priest and went as a cleric with the Spanish conquerors, the conquistadors, who in 1513 carried out massacres among the Indian tribes in Cuba.
As a reward he was given an estate in Cuba and some natives as working people. This was in accordance with the encomienda system ('encomendar' =entrust). In the mines and on the plantations, the militarily overwhelmed local population was entrusted to conquistadors. They had to give them food, shelter, education and evangelism. The population provided work or products. It is easy to imagine how this system could degenerate into cruelty, exploitation and de facto slavery.
Unknown diseases
Las Casas himself seems to have been a reasonable boss. He was also genuinely concerned that so many natives were dying in New Spain. We now know that most of them succumbed to contagious "childhood diseases" such as chickenpox and measles. In the west, you went through them as a child and built up resistance to them, but in America these diseases were unknown and deadly to adults. At the time, the Spaniards themselves thought that so many people died because they were tormented on the plantations and in the mines, or were not suitable for that heavy work.
In a book about the colonies that Las Casas published in 1516, he recommended that they be replaced by African slaves. In this way Spain could still have access to precious metals and other colonial treasures. This has been carried on to him for centuries, as if he were single-handedly responsible for the Atlantic slave trade. However, it had already started in 1516, although some historians think that the Spanish crown felt encouraged by his advice.
Revelation
Western colonization and evangelization has affected local cultures and the slave trade has deeply affected the lives of Africans. This bitter legacy is noticeable to this day. Las Casas contributed to all of this. Still, I would call him a hero. A hero is brave, not afraid to stick his neck out, someone who excels in great deeds. It is a matter of discussion and taste what great deeds are; Exploiting Indians and Africans is not part of it, that's clear, but Las Casas deserves the designation hero precisely because he distanced himself from it.
In 1514 he had a kind of revelation that made him realize that he and all the Spanish government were wrong. While preaching, he studied the book Sirach, which is not part of the Hebrew or Protestant but belongs to the Catholic Bible. This calls unacceptable to God what is illicitly acquired, such as bread stolen from the poor. It, together with what he had experienced, gave such an inspiring insight that Las Casas broke with his old existence. He came to live by his newfound belief that the indigenous people deserved a better life and tried to get others involved in this change through books and debate. He also distanced himself from black slavery after a few years.
A hero, then – with this caveat:he modernized his views on human rights, but continued to believe as a child of his time that Spaniards had the right to seize the riches of New Spain. But it had to be done peacefully. In his books he explained how:farmers from Spain had to start small-scale family farms, and thus produce sugar and so on. The local tribes would pay a tribute to the Spanish king in kind or with work and in return would receive a house in new towns around the mines and trade centers, where there were schools, a hospital and a church. However, he only wanted to accept their conversion on a voluntary basis.
Evil Natives
Las Casas left for Spain in 1516 to lobby against the encomienda system. This was the first of nine working journeys between the colony and the motherland, notable in the sixteenth century when this was a perilous and lengthy journey. It shows how motivated he was. In 1520, after much deliberation, he was given the opportunity to demonstrate his peaceful method of colonization. The king allotted him a piece of land in Venezuela. But it all went wrong. Partly because of a court grocer's mentality, the lot was too small for his plan to safely resettle all native slaves. He was not allowed to win and sell pearls and gold, which made the company unattractive for investors.
Finally he went there with borrowed money and with a bunch of Spanish farmers for the reclamation work. They gave up when it turned out that in his area in particular slave hunting had been against all agreements. The provoked Native American tribes had raided the local monastery in retaliation and were not keen on any new experiment. Las Casas started on his own. After a few months of struggling, the tribes attacked again. Four local employees were killed.
Mass baptisms
Las Casas gave up the colony and entered a Dominican monastery on Hispaniola. But he didn't lock himself in there. His stay in the interior of Guatemala in 1537-1538 was very risky, where no other Spaniards had yet been. Here he wanted to show the superiority of voluntary conversion unprotected by soldiers with other clergy. He did not want to baptize natives without real awareness of the new faith.
Fellow missionaries elsewhere, who were less peaceful and thorough and who converted the local population en masse and often by force, found him fanatical and impractical and his method of Christianization too time-consuming. The Indians would kill before they saw the benefits of Christianity. In Guatemala, Las Casas proved them wrong, as the mission was a success – perhaps not from a modern point of view for renunciation of the indigenous religion, but by the standards of the time.
In 1540, the church leadership in Spain agreed with him:mass baptisms were banned. Las Casas became bishop of Chiapas (Mexico) but first traveled to Spain to get King Charles V to provide protective legislation at court.
Human rights debate
Karel only wanted to gradually abolish the encomienda system, so that Spanish settlers and treasury suffered little, and in 1542 he passed a law:encomiendas forfeited to the crown upon death. Civil servants and clergy had to hand them in immediately. The natives were regarded as free people, who had to be paid for their work and had to pay a fair tax.
So it took until Las Casas' annoyance a while before the system would really be a thing of the past. He couldn't speed up the process. At first he had only been able to do things in a small circle, as in Guatemala, but when he was given a formal position with power as a bishop, he squandered his opportunity with his rectilinear stance:in 1545, back in Mexico, he made his diocese more than clear. what he stood for. He forbade his priests to give slaveholders absolution; if they mistreated their slaves, even excommunication had to follow.
His sharpening caused enormous irritation among the settlers, already white-hot because of Charles's mild reform law that they associated – rightly – with Las Casas, even though he found the measures to be inadequate. When Karel withdrew his law after three years because of the many protests and revolts, the pent-up anger was expressed in armed revolt. Las Casas' position became untenable and he had to leave for Spain in 1546 - this time for good.
Here he faced charges of treason:he seemed to denounce the legitimacy of the entire Spanish colonial administration. While in the eyes of many sixteenth-century settlers the settlers were brave Christian pioneers who wanted to civilize a couple at the risk of their own lives. In 1550 the opposing visions of colonialism were given a face.
In the famous Dispuut of Valladolid, two learned Dominican priests faced each other before a jury of clergy and lawyers. On the one hand, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who believed that natives were inherently inferior. Spain had every right to enslave them; rather, it was Spain's duty to bring Christianity, order and mutual peace. On the other, Bartolomé de las Casas, who suggested, among other things, that the local population was not at all uncivilized. After a few months of deliberation, the jury decided that neither had won; it was nevertheless the first national debate on the rights of colonized peoples.
Black legend
Las Casas was free to go. In 1551 he rented a monastery cell in Valladolid. He continued to lobby and write books at court until several years before his death on July 18, 1566, aged 82. His work was soon eagerly used by people who wanted to put Spain in a bad light, such as publishers in the Dutch Republic. The atrocities against the indigenous population that Las Calas described became the basis for the "Black Legend" that demonized the Spanish colonial administration. In Spain itself, he has remained controversial for a very long time. That would rather see a positive story about the conquistadors. But now Las Casas is mainly regarded as the first to fight for human rights.