Pestilence and Genocide - 2

I

In the area around the town of Barquicimeto, in the lowlands near the northern coast of Venezuela, a mysterious fire like a will o' the wisp sometimes seems to be burning in the marshes. It is, tradition has it, the "soul of the traitor Lope de Aguirre [who] wanders in the savannahs, like a flame that flies the approach of men."¹

Aguirre's 1561 expedition from Peru, across the Andes and down to the Venezuelan seacoast, has become "a byword for sensational horror," writes one historian, adding that "no pirates who infested the Caribbean before or since proved more rapacious and merciless," and no military campaign was more "notorious for its atrocities" than the one driven by "Aguirre's mad rage."² In fact, Aguirre's rampage through South America was a good deal less destructive than those of any number of long-forgotten conquistadors. What has made it so memorable, so worthy of evocation in books and poems and films, was Aguirre's propensity for killing Spaniards as well as Indians. This is what made him "the traitor Aguirre" — a traitor to nothing less than his race.

For this reason there never has been any doubt that Aguirre was an evil man. For this reason also, when he was captured, Aguirre's fellow Spaniards cut off his head and placed it on display in an iron cage. Beyond Aguirre, however, debate has gone on almost non-stop for four centuries about the behavior of other conquistadors — about what in some quarters has come to be called the "Black Legend." Proponents of this idea hold that the Spanish have been unduly and unfairly criticized for their behavior in the New World. They base this contention on two general principles: first, that the stories of Spanish cruelties toward the Indians, almost entirely traceable, it is said, to the writings of Bartolome de Las Casas, are untrue, or at least are exaggerations; and, second, that the cruelties of other European nations against the native peoples of the Americas were just as condemnable.³

The first of these charges has now largely fallen into disuse as historian after historian has shown not only that Las Casas's repons were remarkably accurate (and often, in quantitative terms, even underestimates) but that they were supponed by a host of other independent observers who, like Las Casas, spent a good deal of time in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central and South America during the sixteenth century.⁴ It is the second of the complaints by Black Legend advocates that remains worthy of consideration — that is, as one supporter of this view puts it, that "the Spaniards were no more and no less human, and no more and no less humane" than were other Europeans at that time.⁵ Of particular concern to those who hold this position is the behavior of the British and, later, the Americans. To be sure, on occasion this line of Spanish defense has been stretched to the point of absurdity. One historian, for example, has suggested quite seriously that — apart from their murderous treatment of the Indians — the Spaniards' public torture and burning of Jews and other alleged heretics and heathens was simply "pageantry," comparable, albeit on a different level, to American Fourth of July celebrations.⁶ But the larger argument that the Spanish were not unique in their murderous depredations — that others of European ancestry were of equally genocidal temperament — is, we shall see, both responsible and correct.