The Spanish conquistadores were ahead for a few decades in making the infamous nightmare of Henri III of France a reality (6.8). As sovereigns of an enormous menagerie of human beings whom they regarded as the very embodiment of alterity, during the first half of the sixteenth century the adelantados turned the Caribbean and much of the American continent—a genuine earthly paradise in terms of variety and abundance of natural resources—into a gigantic hunting park. If the royal Gardens of Montezuma were big compared to the European zoos of the time, the Spaniards turned the “new world” into a park of their own.¹ This paradeisos, however, lacked any walls. As we approach modernity the walls surrounding the hunting park are no longer physical and acquire the capacity of becoming legal fictions.

That the Spanish conquerors saw the American territory as an Eden of sorts is beyond any doubt (6.9). In this regard, in An Account, Much Abbreviated, of the Destruction of the Indies (1552), Bartolomé de las Casas comments:

The kingdom of Yucatán was filled with infinite numbers of people, for it is land in great measure healthful and abundant with foods and fruits (even more than the land of Mexico) and particularly abounding in honey and wax above any other par of the Indies that has been so far… The people of said kingdom were notable among all those of the Indies both in prudence and policy and in their lack of vices and sins more than others, and very fit and worthy to be brought to the knowledge of the Spaniards’ God, and their land a fit place where there could be made great cities of Spaniards and they might live in them as though in an earthly paradise, were they worthy of it—but they were not, because of the ir great covetousness and greed and insensibility and great sins, as they have been unworthy of the many other parts that God had shown them in those indies.²

It is more than obvious that the conquistadores brought forth the more sinister side of the American paradeisos. The character of America during the conquest as a hunting park is particularly evident in a passage that stands out because of its sadism:

In this kingdom, or in a province of the New Spain, a certain Spaniard was going along one day with his dogs to hunt for deer or rabbits, and not finding game, he bethought himself that his dogs were hungry, and he took a little boy from its mother and taking a knife he hacked off its arms and legs, giving each dog its part, and after those pieces had been eaten, he threw the little body onto the ground in among the pack.³

Although it is almost impossible to comment on such cruelty, it is not difficult to see that in legal terms the conquistadors operated in a territory that lacked defined rules, that is, in an zone of exception. This fact is especially evident in the Edict of 1513, better known as the Requerimiento (requirement), which justified in the most absurd and arbitrary way the invasion and extermination of the inhabitants of the American continent by confining them behind a legal wall that was completely incomprehensible to them. This edict, which was to be read aloud before laying waste to a village, contained lines such as these:

Caciques and indians of this Terra Firma of such-and-such village, we do hereby give you notice that there is a God and a pope, and a king of Castile who is the lord of this lands. Come then to give him obedience, &c. For if you do not, know ye that we shall wage war upon you, and shall slay you and capture you, &c.⁴

Reading an edict in Castilian to peoples that had never heard this language was such a perfectly obtuse act that many of those in charge of the task limited themselves to mumbling the words between their teeth and beards before slaughtering a village. Aware of the fact, de las Casas comments that “those who did not come smartly to obey such unreasonable and foolish messages, and to give themselves over into the hands of such iniquitous and cruel and beastly men, the Spaniards called rebels who rose up against the service of your Majesty.” This, of course is preposterous for “no man can be called rebel if he be not first a subject.”⁵ but it is even more absurd that those populations that offered resistance could, from a strictly legal point of view, be considered “rebels” since, during the conquest, the territories discovered by Spain—along with all its peoples—began to belong, immediately and automatically, to the Crown of Castile and were an integral part of it from that moment on.

A legal determination that turned the inhabitants of an entire continent into homines sacri by decree (1.13).

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1. If the estimated world population in 1550 A.D was five hundred million and the number of native american people who died during the first seventy years of barbarism since the discovery of America is around seventy million, the result of the conquest would have been the annihilation of 14% of the human population in less than a century. ↩︎
2. de las Casas, An Account, 47-48. ↩︎
3. Ibid., 49-50. ↩︎
4. Ibid., 23.  ↩︎
5. Ibid., 35-36. ↩︎