I sometimes wonder how Latin America would look now had things been done differently five hundred years ago. It is really difficult to imagine this because that was such a different time, when people thought differently and viewed the world through very different lenses. We had nothing of the social democracy or the lovely liberalism we all now take for granted. Human rights did not exist in those days. Everything and everyone existed but at the behest and pleasure of the Monarch and Holy Church. Society, as I've already mentioned, was strictly hierarchical. If you were poor you simply worked hard, went hungry, got sick and died very young. No one would so much as blink an eye over the death of a pauper.
The church interpreted a deeply flawed, corrupted and horribly degraded version of the Christian faith. Jesus of course took a back seat to his mother in the worship and ritual of the church. Christ was accessible only through the good will of the priests as negotiated through the Blessed Sacrament, which not even the people were allowed to partake of. Only through the agency of the priests as controlled by the bishops and the pope could the people partake of the faith through baptism, confession and the Blessed Sacrament. Otherwise they were destined for the eternal torments of hell.
Spain was, in effect, a theocracy, completely controlled by Mother Church. The church must have souls to feed its maw and foreign gold to fatten its coffers. The church reigned victorious, having tossed out the Muslim Moors and the Jews, anyone who would not consent to forced conversion, and even the Conversos (converted Jews) or the Moriscos (converted Muslims) weren't free from persecution and arbitrary death.
In the meantime, in Mexico, other tribes were cowed and subdued by the legendarily cruel and harsh Mexica, or Aztecs, who demanded as tribute human sacrifices, gained either through nonviolent means or through acts of war. It is said that tens of thousands were killed every year on the altar of the sun god, their beating hearts torn out of their still living bodies that were then carelessly thrown down the pyramid stairs.
Like the Spanish, the Aztecs had a theocratic and strictly hierarchical society, ruled without mercy by priests and monarchs. Everyone knew their place. Your only right was your obligation to serve monarch and priest, even if that meant ending your shortened life on the altar on top of the pyramid.
Human sacrifice was particularly problematic to the Aztec religion. It was completely institutionalized as a way of repaying the gods for sacrificing themselves repeatedly in order to ensure the survival of the human race. So their gods demanded this, otherwise the cosmos would shut down and it's schnitzel of you, Tootsie.
In tomorrow's post I am going to hypothesize about how things could have turned out different. Stay tuned, Gentle Reader.
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