'"These great towns and temples and buildings rising from the water, all made of
stone, seemed like an enchanted vision of the tale of Amadis. Indeed, some of
our soldiers asked whether it was not all a dream."
"Their city was indeed the most beautiful thing in the world . . . They are so well
constructed in both their stone and woodwork that there can be none better in
any place."
"Even had the Spaniards done it, it would not have been better executed."
"I shall not attempt to describe it at all, save to say that in Spain there is nothing
to compare with it." (Cortes)
Shortly afterwards, one of the same chroniclers, Bernal Diaz, writes:
" . . . all that I then saw is overthrown and destroyed; nothing left standing."
The first bishop of Mexico, Juan de Zumarraga, describes the activities of Spanish governor
Nuno de Guzman:
"When he began to govern this province, it contained 25,000 Indians, subjugated
and peaceful. Of these, he has sold 10,000 as slaves, and the others, fearing the
same fate, have abandoned their villages."
Bishop de las Casas describes another result of slavery:
"When husbands and wives met, they were so exhausted and depressed that
they had no mind for marital intercourse, and in this way, they ceased to
procreate. As for the newly born, they died early, because their mothers,
overworked and famished, had no milk to nurse them with."
Cortes arrived in 1523. The population declined by 90% in 50 years, from 25 million to 2.5
million. By 1600, there were only a million native people alive in Mexico. Juan Bautista Pomar
explains in this account of 1582, that the native people were especially vulnerable to
diseases, because they were exhausted by hard labor and had lost the will to live:
"The blame goes to affliction and fatigue of their spirits because they had lost the
liberty God had given them, for the Spaniards treat them worse than slaves."
Motolinia, who landed in Mexico with the Franciscians in 1524, begins his history with the
plagues which had stricken the native people. He starts with disease:
"They died in heaps, like bedbugs. Many others died of starvation because they
were all taken sick at once, they could not care for each other, nor was there
anyone to give them bread or anything else."
Another plague mentioned by Motolinia was famine. During the war, there could be not
sowing, and even if some grain was sown, the Spaniards destroyed the harvests. But that
was nothing compared with the Spanish peasants who were brought in to run the slave
gangs:
"These overseers were so absolute in their mistreatment of the Indians,
overloading them, sending them far from their land, and giving them many other
tasks, that many Indians died because of them and at their hands."
Then came the taxes and tributes the Spanish collected. When the native people had no gold
left, they were forced to give their children.
"When they were unable to do so, many died because of it, some under torture,
and some in cruel prisons, for the Spaniards treated them brutally and
considered them less than beasts."
Motolinia considered the gold mines as another plague. Heavily laden native people traveled
hundreds of miles with provisions.
"The food they carried for themselves often gave out before they could return to
their homes . . . Some reached home in such a state that they died soon after.
The bodies of these Indians and of the slaves who died in the mines produced
such a stench that it caused a pestilence . . . For half a league around these
mines and along a great part of the road one could scarcely avoid walking over
dead bodies or bones, and the flocks of birds and crows that came to feed upon
the corpses were so numerous that they darkened the sun, so that many villages
along the road and in the district were deserted."
"It would be impossible to count the number of Indians who have, to the present
day, died in these mines."
Then there was the rebuilding of Mexico City according to the Spanish plans. The native
people were not paid for their labor, and in fact had to pay for the building material. They were
not fed, and since they could not work on the buildings and work in the fields, they went
hungry. Weakened, many died:
"In the construction, some were crushed by beams, others fell from heights,
others were caught beneath buildings which were being torn down in one place
to be built up in another."
Slavery produced other victims. Motolinia describes how the slaves were branded each time
they changed owners:
"They produced so many marks on their faces, in addition to the royal brand, they
had their faces covered with letters, for they bore the marks of all who had
bought and sold them."
Vasco de Quiroga adds another version of the same phenomena:
"They pass from hand to hand and some have three or four names, so that the
faces of these men who were created in God's image have been, by our sins,
transformed into paper."
The monk Jeronimo de San Miguel wrote the king in 1550:
"Some Indians they burned alive; they cut off the hands, noses, tongues and
other members of some; they threw others to the dogs; they cut off the breasts
of women."
The Bishop of Yucatan, Diego de Landa, described a tree he saw from whose branches:
"hanged many Indian women, and from their feet, he also hanged the infant
children. There the Spaniards committed the most unheard of cruelties; they cut
off the hands, arms, and legs, and women's breasts, and they threw the Indians
into deep lakes, and stabbed the children because they could not walk as fast as
their mothers. If those whom they had chained together by the neck fell ill or did
not walk as fast at the others, they cut off their heads so as not to have to stop to
release them."
Alonso de Zorita in 1570 wrote about hearing a judge say from the bench:
"If water were lacking to irrigate the Spaniards farms, they would have to be
watered with the blood of Indians." '
powhatan.org
There are your civilised europeans - you wanna trade barbarism stories with me? ... this is off on a tangent, way off for a financial discussion site, and it was not my intention to insult you in any way, but hey i'm game, you shit on my people i'll shit on yours double, no problema .... however before you get really rolling may i gently point out that nobody is engaging in 'adulation of barbaric tribal cultures' here, unless maybe you're listening to rap 'music' while you're typing, or something .... geez M
If the object of the enterprise in which we are here engaged is to learn how to avoid losing net worth and perhaps from time to time gain some, as i understood the object to be, then i submit that it is probably better to hold the shares of companies that stand a chance of making money than to hold the shares of those that don't ... a company with market cap of 35 billions US, well that would be fine if it's making five or six billions US profit, sure ... on the other hand, a company with a market cap of 22 millions US that should have about 10 millions US in its kitty at this point [that's an estimation, FY01 not out yet] and another ~20 millions US coming in this year and for years of the immediately foreseeable future just might be the better deal, that's all
If you really have a strong thing against gold, well other long-neglected opportunities exist - there is more to life than electronics, M ... base metals, good cheap stout stuff from which we make pipes and wires and suchlike - aur.to, imn.to .... platinum for the muffler of the SUV in which you drive around to show off that CDMA cellphone - suf.to .... all these with decent looking prospects for the near term ..... there's a big big wide world out there outside of cellphones, M ..... now maybe qcom will make that five billions US in 2002, well if so then that's fine, we shall see .... cheers |
