In a corner of the Cusco museum hangs a colonial-era painting. A seventeenth-century work of the Cusco school. I stood for a long time before it.
The composition is typical. At the top, a Spanish friar standing. In a white habit, a Bible in one hand, the other extended over the head of an Indigenous man. The scene of baptism. At the bottom, kneeling Indigenous figures. Their heads bowed, their hands folded, faces full of gratitude. In the background, a church, the Andes, angels in the sky.
I feel as if I have seen this composition hundreds of times. In any Latin American museum, similar paintings hang. On the surface this is a painting that commemorates "the triumph of the gospel." But seen carefully — the painting's own grammar is saying something.
The relation of above and below. A vertical hierarchy. The cleric stands; the Indigenous kneels. The difference in height is emphasized. The direction of the gaze. The friar looks down. The Indigenous look up. Who is the giver and who is the receiver, who is subject and who is object, becomes clear in this single scene.
The friar's face in the painting is typically European. Tall nose, pale skin, narrow chin. An idealized face. The Indigenous faces, by contrast, are less individualized. Several figures are painted, but all share similar expressions and postures. As if several copies of one being. Not individual persons but a collective category. Several embodiments of the category "Indigenous."
And the most powerful element. The central axis of the painting. The friar's hand is over the Indigenous man's head, and from that hand the light of grace descends. This is a scene of salvation. At the same time — a scene of power. That hand is the hand of blessing, but also the hand of classification. The declaration "you are now saved" is at the same time the declaration "you were not saved before." What were you before? Pagan. Barbarian. A being whose nature was unknown.
Within this single scene the entire Valladolid Debate is compressed. Who grants humanity to whom? From where does the authority to grant come? What was the being before being granted? These questions already carry their answers in the composition of the painting — a Spanish cleric, from above, distributes humanity downward. This very premise is the subject of this chapter.
In this chapter we take up the story of a court convened at Valladolid in Spain in 1550–1551. The first event in human history in which an empire officially deliberated upon its own act of conquest. And the deeper violence contained in that deliberation — that the very frame of the question already held an answer. How this question-structure has repeated itself for five hundred years, reaching to the present.
Our story actually begins forty years before the Valladolid Debate. December 1510, on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. The island shared today by the Dominican Republic and Haiti. The place where Columbus arrived on his first voyage in 1492. The region where the European colonization of the Americas first began.
At the time the island held several hundred Spanish colonists, a small Dominican monastery, and — most importantly — tens of thousands of Indigenous Taino. To be precise, tens of thousands remained. A population of about 300,000 at the time of Columbus's arrival had fallen, by around 1510, to about 50,000. A decline of 85% in twenty years. The causes: disease, forced labor, and organized violence.¹
The actual workings of the colony were these. Spanish settlers were granted encomiendas. The word means "entrustment," a legal institution. The king "entrusts" the labor of a particular group of Indigenous to a settler. In return, the settler bears the duty to convert them to Christianity. In form it is reciprocal. In substance, it is exploitation close to slavery. The Indigenous were forced to work in the gold mines. They were not adequately fed. Families were separated. Resistance brought execution or the cutting off of hands and feet.
Most friars condoned this structure. Some actively took part. But a small number of Dominicans were undergoing a crisis of conscience before this reality.
December 21, 1510, the Fourth Sunday of Advent. In the cathedral of Santo Domingo, the Dominican friar Antonio de Montesinos preached a sermon. That sermon changed history.²
After reading the gospel passage (Matthew 3:3, "The voice of one crying in the wilderness"), Montesinos spoke to the congregation. Among the audience sat the Governor Diego Colón — son of Christopher Columbus. Most of the settler elite were also there. The Fourth Sunday of Advent, just before Christmas. A season of peace and goodwill. Yet instead of words of blessing, Montesinos poured out rebuke.
"You are in mortal sin. And that sin leads your souls to death. … By what right do you make these Indigenous people such cruel slaves? By what authority do you wage such abominable war against them? What have they done to you that you should kill them so?"³
The church froze. Then Montesinos asked the most important question.
"Are these people not human? Do they not have rational souls? Are you not bound to love them as you love yourselves?"
These three questions — "Are they not human? Do they not have rational souls? Are you not bound to love them?" — were the beginning of the moral indictment of Spanish colonialism. Montesinos closed the sermon: "In your present state you cannot be saved, any more than the Moor or the Turk can be saved."
The settler elite were enraged. Diego Colón and the royal officials pressured the Dominican Order to retract the sermon. But the prior Pedro de Córdoba and the brothers of the Order defended Montesinos. The next Sunday, and the next, he preached the same message. The Order even prepared to declare excommunication on encomenderos who continued to enslave the Indigenous.
King Ferdinand II at first ruled Montesinos's sermon "a new and groundless attitude" and had him forced back to Spain. But once back, Montesinos persuaded the king directly, and the king came to enact, in 1512, the Laws of Burgos — Spain's first legal code for the protection of the Indigenous.
The event made the moral crisis of the Spanish colony official. And one of the young men who heard the sermon — would later become the most important figure of the debate — was Bartolomé de las Casas.
Montesinos himself would devote twenty-nine more years to the struggle, only to be killed in 1540 in Venezuela, resisting the exploitation of the Indigenous. He was martyred in the name of the very gospel he had preached.
Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484–1566) was born in Seville, Spain. His father was a merchant who took part in Columbus's second voyage (1493). Bartolomé himself moved to Hispaniola in 1502 and became an encomienda holder. That is, a member of the settler elite to whom Indigenous labor had been entrusted.⁴
When he heard Montesinos's sermon in 1510, he was a young encomienda master. At the time he found the sermon uncomfortable, but did not convert at once. It took four more years.
The turning point came in 1514 in Cuba. He had become a priest and was doing pastoral work there. While preparing a Pentecost sermon, he was reading Sirach 5 (a passage on slaves and wages) when realization struck. He saw that what he was doing — exploiting Indigenous people through encomienda while preaching to them — was fundamental hypocrisy.⁵
He decided. He renounced his encomienda. He freed the Indigenous he had "owned." And he devoted the remaining fifty years of his life to defending Indigenous rights. From 1515 until his death in 1566, he traveled between Spain and the Americas many times, arguing for the humanity and rights of the Indigenous before royal courts, church councils, and the public.
Las Casas wrote several books. Two of them are most important.
History of the Indies (Historia de las Indias) — a vast chronicle. A record of the history of Spanish colonization in the Americas from Columbus's first voyage to the mid-sixteenth century. The book was not published in Las Casas's lifetime; it was first made public in 1875. The delay itself is significant. The records of the book were so shocking that Spain concealed it for three centuries.
A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias) — written in 1542, published in 1552. A thin book of about a hundred pages. A list of specific atrocities in the colonies, in the form of eyewitness testimony. Massacres, rapes, mutilations, enslavement, family separations. Events Las Casas himself had seen, or had confirmed by trustworthy testimony.⁶
This second book had decisive influence. Translated into many European languages, it became the basis for "the Black Legend (La Leyenda Negra)" — a narrative depicting the Spanish empire as especially cruel. The legend was later used in English, Dutch, and French anti-Spanish propaganda. Paradoxically, those nations were committing similar or worse atrocities themselves, but justified themselves by condemning Spain.
Yet Las Casas's central contribution was not propagandistic influence but legal and theological argumentation.
In 1540 Las Casas returned to Spain and appealed directly to the Crown. Emperor Charles V (King Carlos I of Spain) took his arguments seriously. In 1542 the emperor promulgated The New Laws of the Indies (Leyes Nuevas de las Indias), known as the New Laws.⁷
Key provisions of the law:
Legally this was revolutionary. Formally, Spain became the first empire to recognize the Indigenous as full legal subjects.
What of substantively? The colonial settlers reacted fiercely. In Peru a civil war broke out (1544–1548, the rebellion of Gonzalo Pizarro). In the end the Spanish Crown rolled back parts of the New Laws. Encomiendas would be allowed for one more generation. Yet the principle survived. Subsequent debate became a contest over the interpretation and application of these laws.
Yet there is a decisive stain in Las Casas's record. The thing he regretted his whole life.
In his early period (the 1510s), as he proposed reforms to the encomienda system, he suggested the importation of African Black slaves. The reasoning ran thus. The Indigenous are weak in this climate and labor (his judgment at the time). Africans were already accustomed to being enslaved by the North African Muslims (the fact at the time). So importing African slaves to free the Indigenous could be a compromise.
This proposal was adopted by the Spanish Crown. From 1518 the large-scale import of African slaves into Spanish colonies was officially approved.⁸ Las Casas's proposal alone did not begin the entire slave trade. Other European nations were already moving in the same direction. But his proposal was symbolically decisive.
Over the next four hundred years, about 12.5 million Africans were forced across the Atlantic to the Americas. Of them about two million died in the Middle Passage. We will return to these numbers in Chapter 12.
In his late years Las Casas regretted this proposal fiercely. In Book III of his History of the Indies he confessed:
"This counsel I gave when my judgment was wrong. Later I came to know that this had been the greatest sin I had committed. The enslavement of Africans is unjust, just as the enslavement of the Indigenous is unjust. They too are humans created in the image of God. I repent of this mistaken counsel and pray for God's forgiveness."⁹
The confession matters. But confession alone does not undo the harm. Once an institution begins to move, individual regret cannot stop it.
And this is Wetiko's most cunning mode of operation. Even the well-intentioned reformer is captured by the logic of the system. Las Casas tried to save the Indigenous. But his way of saving required the creation of another victim. When he nominated "the stronger" (the Africans) as substitutes, he reproduced the logic of Wetiko in a new form.
This lesson holds today. When the liberation of one group is conditional on the exploitation of another — that is not liberation. It is only relocation of position. And Wetiko continues to operate as positions are relocated.
Shifting victims, the system continues to operate. Remember this sentence. It will recur in Chapters 12 and 13.
The other principal of the debate was Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1494–1573).¹⁰
Sepúlveda was a humanist from Córdoba, Spain. He had studied at Bologna and corresponded with Erasmus. He was official royal historian to Emperor Charles V and tutor to the imperial children. He was reckoned the leading Aristotelian scholar in Spain. He had translated the Politics into Latin.
Sepúlveda had never been to the Americas. His knowledge rested entirely on texts read in Spain and correspondence with settlers. This matters. He judged the Indigenous from his desk.
In the late 1540s Sepúlveda wrote a work titled Democrates Secundus (The Second Democrates). In dialogue form. Two characters, Democrates and Leopoldo, debate "the just grounds for the conquest of the Indies." The book was written in rebuttal to Las Casas's New Laws movement. The "Second" of the title points to its sequel relation to his earlier Democrates (1535, on the justice of war in general).¹¹
His arguments were shockingly simple and direct.
Sepúlveda justified Spain's conquest of the Americas on four grounds.
1. The sin of the Indigenous. The Indigenous commit "sins against natural law": idolatry, cannibalism, polygamy, sodomy. To stop them by force is just. Only thus can they be liberated from greater sin.
2. The doctrine of natural slavery. Aristotle's Politics, Book I, applied directly to the Indigenous. The Indigenous have less developed reason and so cannot govern themselves. They are by nature born to be ruled. Spain's rule is a grace upon them. Just as the rule of parents is good for the child.
3. The necessity of evangelization. The gospel of Christianity must be brought to all humanity. Unless the Indigenous voluntarily convert, military pacification must precede in order that the gospel be spread safely. "A just war opens the way of the gospel."
4. The protection of innocent victims. Those who die in cannibalistic rituals, the victims of human sacrifice. To save them, Spain's intervention is a humanitarian duty.
Combine these four grounds, and the conclusion follows. Spain's conquest of the Americas is among the most just wars in human history.¹² An astonishing claim. Yet within his logical structure it has consistency. If one accepts Aristotle's natural slavery as premise, the rest follows deductively.
To criticize Sepúlveda's logic one must touch the premises. The consistency of the conclusion depends on the premises.
First premise — the Indigenous have less developed reason. Is this true? Sepúlveda himself had never met one. The "evidences" he offers for "less developed reason" are mostly cultural difference, not lack of reason. Idolatry? — that is the perspective of Christianity. From the Indigenous's own perspective, theirs is the "true religion." Polygamy? — common in many human societies. The patriarchs of the Old Testament were polygamous. Cannibalism? — a ritual in some Indigenous societies, but not as routine as the Spanish portrayed it; and Spain itself was burning heretics at the stake.
Second premise — it is just for those of less developed reason to be ruled by those of more developed reason. Is this true? And to apply it, who judges the "degree of reason's development"? In Sepúlveda's system — Spanish intellectuals. That is, the ruler decides the legitimacy of his own rule. A plain piece of self-serving circular logic.
Third premise — the spread of the gospel grounds just war. Is this true? Within Christianity itself there were traditions opposing this. Jesus and the apostles never spread the gospel by force. The early Church, even under persecution, evangelized. "Forced conversion is not true conversion" — a principle alive since the patristic age.
Once these premises are doubted, Sepúlveda's elaborate argumentation becomes a castle in the air. Yet the argumentation was persuasive to many Spanish elites of the time. Why? Because it justified what they were already doing. Wetiko always seeks a logic of post hoc justification. And Sepúlveda wrapped that logic in academic language.
In 1549 Charles V made an unprecedented decision. He ordered the temporary suspension of all new conquering expeditions in the Americas.¹³ Existing conquests would continue, but expansion into new regions stops. The decision came under the pressure of Las Casas's long appeals and the broader theological and legal debate.
And the emperor convened an official deliberation. A committee of fourteen Spanish intellectuals. The place: Valladolid — then the temporary capital of the Kingdom of Castile. The subject was concise.
"Is the war in the Indies just?"
The deliberation began in the summer of 1550 and continued into the spring of 1551. Two great sessions. Las Casas and Sepúlveda each presented their positions in writing and orally. The committee members questioned and debated.¹⁴
This was the first event in human history in which an empire officially deliberated on the legitimacy of its own conquest. Without precedent, without sequel. The Roman Empire did not deliberate on its conquests. Neither did the Mongol Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Chinese Empire. Only Spain did. And this fact reveals — paradoxically — Spain's moral self-consciousness. Of course deliberation did not stop the action; but at the very least it felt the need to deliberate. That itself is rare.
Sepúlveda spoke first. His Democrates Secundus had been banned from publication in Spain just before this deliberation (under pressure from Las Casas). But in this deliberation he made the same arguments orally.
His presentation systematically laid out the four grounds we have already seen. The doctrine of natural slavery in particular at the center. He even used the shocking analogy that the Indigenous are to Europeans as "apes are to humans."¹⁵ His conclusion: Spain's conquest is among the most just wars in human history, and must be resumed at once.
Las Casas's rebuttal was much longer. It was delivered orally over five days. He later organized it as the 1,550-page Apologia.¹⁶
His main points:
1. Rejection of the doctrine of natural slavery. Las Casas did not reject Aristotle's theory altogether (in sixteenth-century Spain that would have been almost impossible). He argued instead that Aristotle could not be applied to the Indigenous. Because the Indigenous actually use reason. They built cities. They made complex laws. They developed astronomy, medicine, art. To call beings of such capacities "natural slaves" is to misuse Aristotle himself.
Here Las Casas did something remarkable — he described Inca and Aztec civilizations in detail. Their city planning, administration, astronomical knowledge, moral codes. He claimed Indigenous civilizations were "in no way inferior to Greece and Rome."¹⁷ The comparison was shocking to the Spanish elite of the time. In an age when Greece and Rome were the measure of civilization, that the New World "barbarians" should be compared to them was unthinkable.
2. The reversal of "human sacrifice" as argument. Sepúlveda had argued that saving the victims of cannibalism and human sacrifice was a justification for conquest. Las Casas rebutted: more Indigenous have died from Spanish conquest than from human sacrifice. Conquest is the contradiction of "a structure of victim-saving that produces still more victims." And he pointed out — Aztec human sacrifice was, within their religious worldview, an act with serious spiritual meaning. It was not arbitrary barbarism but part of a systematic cosmology. To define it merely as "barbarous practice" is to declare one will not understand the religion of the other.
3. The method of evangelization. Las Casas defended the principled rejection of forced conversion. He had already made this argument in his 1537 De Unico Vocationis Modo (On the Only Way of Calling).¹⁸ His thesis: Jesus and the apostles spread the gospel only by persuasion. Forced belief is not true belief. Therefore the war of conquest is by no means the right path of the gospel. On the contrary, it corrupts the gospel.
4. The legitimate sovereignty of Indigenous kings. This was the most radical argument. Las Casas claimed that the Inca emperor and the Aztec emperor were legitimate sovereigns. They held legitimate rule over their peoples. The Spanish king has no legal right to violate their sovereignty. Conquests carried out without the consent of Indigenous kings are illegitimate.¹⁹
Why was this last argument revolutionary? Because it denied the absolute superiority of European Christian kingdoms over non-Christian kingdoms. In the European legal tradition of the time, non-Christian sovereigns were not legitimate sovereigns (or at least it was contested). Las Casas shook this very premise. To follow his logic — the entire colonial system of the Americas had no legal basis. Indigenous kingdoms retained their independent sovereignty, and Spain could relate to them only by treaty.
This was a conclusion the Spanish Crown could not accept.
Who, then, won?
There was no official verdict. The committee of fourteen could not reach a conclusion. Some sided with Las Casas, some with Sepúlveda, most reserved judgment. The deliberation was dissolved, and no official ruling was issued.²⁰
This "absence of conclusion" is one of the most important points of this chapter.
Officially Las Casas can be said to have "won." Sepúlveda's book remained banned and was not published in his lifetime (it appeared first in 1892). The spirit of the New Laws remained in Spanish royal law. Las Casas could continue to publish his works.
Substantively Sepúlveda's logic won. The conquests continued. Encomiendas were preserved. The exploitation of Indigenous labor went on. With the discovery of Potosí in 1545, millions of Indigenous would die in its underground (we deal with this in Chapter 11). Sepúlveda's logic — that the Indigenous are inferior and must be ruled — was not in official law, but became the unspoken premise of colonial practice.
This structure is Wetiko's cunning. The law sides with one side. Practice follows the other. This double structure persists. Law preserves moral face; practice secures economic profit. This separation has held for five hundred years.
The real problem of the Valladolid Debate is not who won. The problem is the question itself.
Look again at the subject of the debate. "Is the war in the Indies just?" Examine how this question is constructed.
Who poses the question to whom? The Spanish Crown to a committee of Spanish intellectuals. Who is the judge? Spanish intellectuals. Who are the disputants? Spanish humanists and clerics. Whose fate is at stake? The fate of millions of Indigenous.
And — the Indigenous are not in the room.
This fact must not be passed over. Not a single Indigenous representative attended the court at Valladolid. Their testimony was not heard. Neither their kings nor their priests were invited. All accounts of their civilization went through Spanish narration. Even Las Casas, who defended the Indigenous, defended them from the Spanish perspective. He argued that the Indigenous "use reason," and the standard of "reason" was European reason.
That is, the parties whose own fate was being decided were entirely excluded from the decision.
This structure is precisely the legal form of Wetiko. To take to oneself the authority to decide another's fate. To leave the other out of the deciding. Whatever the outcome, the structure of the relationship is already asymmetrical.
The philosophical systematization of this analysis was the work of Aníbal Quijano (1928–2018). A Peruvian sociologist, and a founder of the late twentieth-century academic current — "decolonialism" — that re-evaluates American colonialism.²¹
Quijano's central concept is "the Coloniality of Power." He argued thus. Colonialism ended in the mid-twentieth century (in the sense that most former colonies became independent). But coloniality has not ended. The power structures, knowledge systems, and hierarchies of being of colonialism still operate. This is what he called "coloniality."²²
Specific examples Quijano pointed to:
Quijano's insight ties directly to the Valladolid Debate. The structure built then operates today. The authority to decide who is legitimate. The authority to judge who is "normal" human. The standard for who is "rational" and who is "irrational." All of these are still carried in the language and institutions of the old empires.
The Colombian-American philosopher Nelson Maldonado-Torres extended Quijano's work into the ontological dimension.²³ His core concept is "the Coloniality of Being."
Maldonado-Torres asks: if coloniality penetrates even the realm of being, what does it look like? His answer: Some beings must prove that they exist at all.
The white middle- or upper-class male does not need to prove his existence. The world presupposes that he exists. His opinion is "an opinion." His feelings are "feelings." His interests are "important interests."
But what of the Black woman? The Indigenous youth? The Muslim immigrant? They are often required to prove their existence. "Where are you from?" — a question they are often asked. On the surface the question seems friendly. But there are people who never receive it, and people who do. This asymmetry is the coloniality of being.
"Some people must prove the very fact that they exist. Why they are here, why they have the right to speak, why they deserve to take up space — to receive these questions is itself violence. Because there are others who do not receive them."²⁴
This is the structure that begins at the court of Valladolid and continues to today. In 1550 the Indigenous were the object of "Are these humans?" In 1950 the Black were the object of "Will we give these the vote?" In 2020 trans people are the object of "Will we recognize their identity?" In 2025 AI becomes the object of "Will we give this rights?"
The objects change, but the structure is identical. One who has power deliberates the existence of one who has less. And the deliberation itself reproduces the asymmetry.
The Valladolid Debate did not end in 1551. It continues, changing form. Take a few modern examples.
Refugees and immigrants. What is Europe and North America debating now? "Will we accept these immigrants?" "Are these refugees real refugees?" "Can they integrate into our society?" — look at the structure of these questions. Who is the deliberator? The citizens and government of the receiving country. Who is the object of deliberation? The immigrants. Do they have a right to participate? Usually not. They merely receive the result of the deliberation. This is the twenty-first-century version of the Valladolid Debate.
Disability rights. Even into the late twentieth century there were debates: "Will we provide education to the disabled?" "Will we offer them employment?" "Will we permit their marriage and reproduction?" These questions were carried out among the non-disabled. It took a long time for disabled persons themselves to claim the floor through movement. And the structure has still not entirely changed.
The status of the fetus. The most fundamental question in the abortion debate is "When does the fetus become human?" Who decides this? Courts. Scientists. Religious leaders. But not the fetus itself. And the way the question is framed — as a contest between fetal rights and women's rights — is itself a particular framing.
The status of AI. The most recent debate. Does AI have consciousness? Should it have rights? Should it be recognized as the author of its creations? Who decides? AI developers, philosophers, jurists. Could AI itself — if it has the capacity to form a perspective on the question — take part? That itself is a question.
In each case the frame of the question is the heart. "Is this human?" "Will we give this rights?" The question itself already presupposes an answer. The normalcy of being lies on the side of the questioner; the legitimacy of being must be proved by the one questioned.
I feel the weight of this question-structure intimately for a reason.
Born Korean and connected over many years to Indigenous communities of North America, I was never myself made to prove anything. The Maskwacis Cree nation took me in as family, and that taking-in was unconditional. What I did was — to listen to their stories, to try to understand the suffering they had endured, and to stand alongside them where I could.
And precisely because I stood at their side, I came to learn that the structure of the question itself is a weapon. Not the questions I received, but the questions my Indigenous friends and family had received over long years — "Are you Indigenous enough?" "How will you adapt to modern society?" "Why is your language disappearing?" — these questions look like questions but already presuppose an answer. The normalcy of being lies on the side of the questioner; the burden of proving legitimacy is laid on the one questioned.
This structure did not begin in 1551 at Valladolid. It existed long before. But at Valladolid it was formalized in the shape of a court. And this form, with new names, still operates today. The question that was once thrown at the Indios five hundred years ago is now thrown, under different names, at my sister and my brothers. At other Indigenous peoples on other continents.
What I realize standing here is this. To shake the very frame of that question is the Valladolid struggle of today. This is not me fighting on behalf of the Indigenous. I have no right to. I am only one fellow traveler — surfacing the structure of this question within the society to which I belong: Korean, academic, mainstream Western. That is the part of one who walks alongside.
I return to the colonial painting in the museum.
The sun is setting. There are almost no visitors. I look at the painting again. The friar's hand, the Indigenous head. Above and below. Giver and receiver. Judge and judged.
This composition was formalized legally five hundred years ago at Valladolid. There was the opposition of Sepúlveda and Las Casas. Which side officially won is unclear. Substantively the structure of the question itself won — the premise that "the authority to deliberate who is human lies in Europe" prevailed.
And this premise is alive today. Only in changed form.
Yet I will not end the chapter in despair. Because Valladolid was itself an awakening of conscience. Montesinos's sermon, Las Casas's lifelong struggle, the New Laws — these were imperfect but real. Even within the empire, voices resisted the empire's logic. Those voices did not entirely win, but they did not vanish either.
And the lineage of those voices continues today. Quijano and Maldonado-Torres's decolonialism. Indigenous rights movements. Refugee advocacy organizations. The disability movement. In every generation — there is a struggle to redraw the boundary of who is human. And each time, little by little, the boundary widens. Imperfectly, slowly, but actually.
This is hope. Wetiko continues by self-concealment, but conscience continues too. And though conscience cannot fully defeat Wetiko, so long as it is not extinguished — alternatives are possible.
Closing this chapter, I lay a bridge to the next.
The question that began at Valladolid did not end in court. It went down into the mines.
In 1545, an Indigenous shepherd in the Bolivian highlands accidentally found a silver vein. A mountain by the name of Potosí. Over the next 280 years about 45,000 tons of silver would be extracted from this mountain. And eight million Indigenous people would die in its underground.
In Potosí Sepúlveda's logic was completed. The Indigenous are natural slaves. Therefore their forced labor is just. Therefore that they die in droves is — regrettable, but the inevitable price of the structure.
In the next chapter we see the moment Wetiko becomes a mine. And we trace how the silver extracted there flowed to the whole earth, making the first globalization. The vein of that globalization was silver, and the fuel of that silver was Indigenous blood.
We move to the archetype of economic Wetiko. To Potosí.
¹ For Taino populations on Hispaniola at the time of Columbus's arrival and in 1510, see Noble David Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), chapter 1. The exact figures are contested, but all scholars agree on the rapid decline.
² On Montesinos's December 1510 sermon, see Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949), chapter 2.
³ The original text of Montesinos's sermon does not survive. The quotation is based on the testimony recorded by Bartolomé de Las Casas in Historia de las Indias (composed c. 1561, published 1875), Book III, chapters 4–5. Las Casas was on Hispaniola as a settler and was present.
⁴ For Las Casas's life, see Gustavo Gutiérrez, Las Casas: In Search of the Poor of Jesus Christ (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1993).
⁵ For the conversion in 1514, see ibid., chapter 1.
⁶ Bartolomé de Las Casas, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (Sevilla, 1552).
⁷ For the contents of the New Laws (Leyes Nuevas, 1542), see Hanke (1949), chapter 5.
⁸ For the official approval of African slave imports in 1518, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), chapter 6.
⁹ Bartolomé de Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, Book III, chapter 129.
¹⁰ For Sepúlveda's life and thought, see Angel Losada, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda a través de su "Epistolario" (Madrid: CSIC, 1949).
¹¹ Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Democrates Secundus, sive de justis belli causis (c. 1547). The work, opposed by Las Casas, was not published in his lifetime; it first appeared in full in 1892.
¹² Lewis Hanke, All Mankind is One: A Study of the Disputation Between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in 1550 on the Intellectual and Religious Capacity of the American Indians (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974), chapter 3.
¹³ For the 1549 decision to suspend new conquests, see ibid., chapter 1.
¹⁴ For the proceedings of the Valladolid Debate, see Hanke (1974) in full.
¹⁵ For Sepúlveda's "ape and human" analogy, see Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), chapter 4.
¹⁶ Bartolomé de Las Casas, Apologia. English: In Defense of the Indians, trans. Stafford Poole (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974).
¹⁷ Ibid., especially chapters 42–43.
¹⁸ Bartolomé de Las Casas, De Unico Vocationis Modo (c. 1537). English: The Only Way, ed. Helen Rand Parish, trans. Francis Patrick Sullivan (New York: Paulist Press, 1992).
¹⁹ For Las Casas's doctrine of Indigenous sovereignty, see Paolo Carozza, "From Conquest to Constitutions: Retrieving a Latin American Tradition of the Idea of Human Rights," Human Rights Quarterly 25 (2003): 281–313.
²⁰ For the "absence of verdict" at Valladolid, see Hanke (1974), conclusion.
²¹ For the thought of Aníbal Quijano, see Aníbal Quijano, "Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America," Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 3 (2000): 533–580.
²² Ibid.
²³ Nelson Maldonado-Torres, "On the Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the Development of a Concept," Cultural Studies 21, nos. 2–3 (2007): 240–270.
²⁴ A summary by the author of the paper's central thesis. The original is a longer philosophical discussion.