Part 4, Las Casas Details the Genocide of the Indigenous Men, Women, and Children of Nicaragua
On April 17 2023, the modern day country of Nicaragua honored their Indigenous Ancestors - Diriangen and Nicarao - by officially recognizing them as ‘Indigenous Heroes of Our Anti-Imperialist Struggles’. Both Diriangen and Nicarao were chiefs of two separate rival nations, in present day Nicaragua, before the arrival of the Spanish. After the arrival of the Spanish and their attempt to force both Diriangen and Nicarao to give up all of their gold, surrender to the Spanish, and convert to Chrisitanity these two chiefs decided to put aside their differences and unite to fight against Spanish imperialism, which forced the Spanish to retreat to Panama. Unfortunately, the Spanish regrouped and with the help of thousands of Native allies, horses, and iron swords defeated the Indigneous people, continuing the era of the Native American Genocide.
Bartolome De Las Casas, in a portion of his letter titled “Kingdom of Nicaragua”, details the enslavement, abuses, and further pacification committed against the indigneous peoples of Nicaragua by the merciless imperialists from Spain. This is the fourth part of our condensed version of Las Casas’ Account.
“This same tyrant set out in 1522 or 1523…to add to his fiefdom the very fertile province of Nicaragua. It would be impossible to express in words the beauty and fertility of this region, its healthy climate and the prosperity of its many people. The sheer number and size of the towns in the area was truly astonishing…and the quality and abundance of the local produce was sufficient to support a huge population. The terrain here is flat and level and there are no mountains for the locals to hide in…
These people are also naturally gentle and unaggressive. The despot himself and his tyrannical companions proceeded to wreck this region just as they had wrecked others…this they did on the flimsiest of pretexts, accusing their victims of not coming quickly enough when they were summoned, or of not having brought enough cargos of maize (which is to the region what wheat is to Europe), or of not surrounding sufficient of their kinsmen as slave either to the governor himself or to one another of his henchmen.
These men were driven by the Devil and not a single native managed to escape, what with the land being as flat as it was and the Spaniards having horses. He sent expeditionary forces (that is, raiding parties) to other provinces and permitted his accomplices to take off as slaves as many of these harmless and peace-loving natives as they chose…the impressed natives would set out on such a trip with tears running down their cheeks, sighing and bemoaning their fate…
The natives did not get a chance to sow some of the fields, and consequently there was not enough grain to go round. The Christians seized all the maize the locals had grown for themselves and their own families and, as a consequence, some twenty or thirty thousand natives died of hunger…
Each of the settlers took up residence in the town allotted to him (or encommended to him as the legal phrase has it), put the inhabitants to work for him, stole their already scarce foodstuffs for himself and took over the lands owned and worked by the natives and on which they traditionally grew their own produce. The settler would treat the whole of the native population - dignitaries, old men, women and children — as members of his household and, as such, make them labour night and day in his own interests, without any rest whatever; even the small children, as soon as they could stand, were made to do as much as they could, and more. Thus have the settlers exterminated the few indigenous people who have survived, stripping them of their houses and all their possessions and leaving them nothing for themselves (and these abuses continue to this day)…
The most insidious pestilence dreamed up by this governor was the system whereby he granted licenses to Spaniards to demand slaves from native caciques and nobles…The demand was always accompanied by the threat that, if the requisite number of slaves was not produced, the noble concerned would be burned alive or thrown to the wild dogs. Since slavery is practically unknown among the local population, even their caciques having at most two or three or four of them, the lords would themselves have to find the slaves…the whole region was devastated within the space of a few years, for during six or seven of the years between 1523 and 1533 five or six slain vessels patrolled the coast and carted off vast numbers of these innocents to be sold in Panama and Peru, where they all perished.
Indeed, experience shows time and time again that these people die very quickly once you remove from their native lands, especially as they often are forced to go without food while still being made to do a full day’s work, those who buy and sell them having no other thought in their heads but the work these slaves can be forced to undertake. In this fashion, more than five hundred thousand poor souls, each of them as free as you or me, have been taken from their homelands…
in the whole of the province of Nicaragua today, once (as I have said) among the most densely populated places on the face of the earth, there remain only four or five thousand people and every day sees even some of these succumb to the work they are made to do, and the personal abuses to which they are subjected every day of their lives.”