In 2000 and again in 2004, my wife and I traveled to San Cristobal de las Casas, a beautiful mountain town of about 20,000 people in Chiapas, next to the Guatemalan border in southern Mexico and the last bus stop before the great Mayan ruins at Palenque.
The town was named for Bartolomé de las Casas, its first bishop.
de las Casas was a complex man. His father, a common soldier on Columbus’ first voyage, amassed enough fortune to send Bartolomé to law school at the University of Salamanca. After graduation, de las Casas set sail for the New World in the largest armada Spain had ever launched.
What he found stunned him. Today the bishop is better known---and revered in many quarters---for his humanitarian works, among them a book, Brief Account of the Devastation of the Indies, written half a century after the first Columbus Day.
In honor of that momentous triumph, a few excised excerpts:
(Diego Rivera’s breathtaking murals on the walls of the Palacio Nationale in Mexico City---where the Mexican Congress meets---depict the history of Mexico. The panel above is one of maybe 40 that are open to the public.)
This was the land Columbus found:
...many... islands...all of them... densely populated... perhaps the most densely populated place in the world... a beehive of people... as though God had crowded into these lands the great majority of mankind.
And of all the infinite universe of humanity, these people are the most guileless, the most devoid of wickedness and duplicity, the most obedient and faithful... by nature the most humble, patient, and peaceable, holding no grudges, free from embroilments, neither excitable nor quarrelsome... the most devoid of rancors, hatreds, or desire for vengeance of any people in the world.
They are also poor people, for they not only possess little but have no desire to possess worldly goods... they are not arrogant, embittered, or greedy... they are generally naked, with only their pudenda covered somewhat.
Then came the Spaniards, de las Casa wrote:
...into this land of meek outcasts there came... Spaniards like ravening wild beasts, wolves... that had been starved... killing, terrorizing, afflicting, torturing, and destroying the native peoples, doing all this with the strangest and most varied new methods of cruelty, never seen or heard of before, and to such a degree that this Island of [Haiti] once so populous (having a population that I estimated to be more than three million), has now a population of barely two hundred persons.
This passage sounds like a CNN reporter in a war zone (back when there were real reporters at CNN):
The island of Cuba... is now almost completely depopulated... two of the largest, most productive and attractive islands; both are now deserted and devastated... more than sixty islands... more fertile and beautiful than the gardens of the King of Seville... where lived more than five hundred thousand souls; they are now deserted, inhabited by not a single living creature. All the people were slain or... sold as slaves.
More than thirty other islands... are for the most part... depopulated, and the land laid waste... ruined and depopulated, empty of people.
We can estimate very surely and truthfully that in the forty years that have passed... there have been unjustly slain more than twelve million men, women, and children. In truth, I believe without trying to deceive myself that the number of the slain is more like fifteen million.
Historians---and logic---accept that we cannot judge the morality of past eras by today’s standards. Bartolomé de las Casas, a man not without his own faults (and maybe trying to make up for some of them) measured what happened after Columbus Day by their own standards in their own time.
There will be no tip jar in honor of Columbus Day.