A Latin American friend of mine has just read one of my recent posts about the role of religion in the Spanish Conquest of Mexico and has reasonably suggested that the atrocities of the Spanish Catholics and the Aztec priests might have been somewhat exaggerated, especially when you consider the collateral damage and murder and pillage during the Second World War of the Twentieth Century, and in the so-called War on Terror in the Twenty-First. Fair enough.
I replied that the level of brutality is indeed debatable and of course there are no reliable stats to tell us for sure. That said, I would suggest that there were still sufficient atrocities taking place thanks to the Spanish Inquisition (one form of human sacrifice) and the ritual human sacrifices of the Aztecs to leave a lasting impact of trauma on the founding of that first nation of Latin America, New Spain, later Mexico.
The Aztecs, as a conquered people, went through all the humiliations and endured all the suffering that happens anywhere in the world and in history because of war. Their population is decimated from systematic slaughter and disease; women, and on occasion men, are raped and mistreated; prisoners are taken and tortured; children, along with women, suffer horrendously; almost nothing is said or documented about the disabled, the desperately poor, the socially marginalized.
It is those people I particularly want to write about and focus on in this whole study. History, they say, is written by the victors, and often those victors are white Europeans or North Americans, and always they are men, always from privileged backgrounds. You rarely if ever get a sense of what conquest and colonization must have been like, how it would have been experienced from the perspective and sufferings of a woman, of a very old person, a child, a homosexual, or someone afflicted by cerebral palsy.
Why these people? Because they are the first and most tragic victims of war and conquest. They are the ones whose stories are almost never heard, read or written. they are all but statistically invisible. And their experience will speak volumes of what a cruel species we really are and of how our inability to treat humanely the most vulnerable among us unleashes the most toxic domino effect that will echo and resound and afflict us in future generations until we have really come to reckon with our bestial human nature.
Why am I singling out Latin America, you ask? I suppose I could come up with a whole variety of answers. Primarily, my zeal for achieving full fluency in the Spanish language has opened quite a few doors to me. I have been privileged with the friendship of many wonderful people from such diverse countries as Peru, Venezuela, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico, and Chile, to name but a few. I have met and been befriended by the most incredible range of human beings, ages, stages of life, occupations, social class, personality. Every one of these people in some way bear the stamp of the legacy of colonization. I see and hear in them faint reflections, echoes and whispers of trauma. Many of these are very successful and high-achieving adults, by the way. There is nothing in their lives or personality that would even hint that they might be somehow designated as losers in life. Still, there is a depth, a warmth, a complexity and a capacity for compassion and empathy that makes for a very unique and inebriating cocktail in the Latino personality. I have also found these friendships, especially a couple in particular, to be particularly healing to me personally.
Of course this is also to be taken into consideration along with the shadow side of the Latino character: the incredible capacity for social injustice as manifested in some of the brutal dictatorships that have traumatized these countries, and the violence unleashed in such countries as Colombia during the fifty year civil war with the FARC, Peru while struggling and coping with the Sendero Luminoso, and Mexico with its current drug wars and a current body count that might already have reached or surpassed one hundred thousand murdered.
My other reason for singling out Latin America? I believe that the Hispanic American cultures, with their wealth of spirituality synthesized from the best qualities of their Catholic and Indigenous spiritual heritage, along with how their character has been forged and developed through great suffering, hold some secrets, some vital keys to the healing of the nations and to our global and individual wounded and broken humanity.
I expect to be working on this project for many years to come!
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