The Spanish liberated the Amerindians oppressed, enslaved, sacrificed and cannibalized by Aztecs and Incas. The indigenous peoples supported Spanish Conquistadors with whom they formed an alliance that defeated those evil empires.
From the historical essay Cortés & the Fall of the Aztec Empire:
The [Spanish] Conquistadores immediately found willing local allies only too eager to help topple the brutal Aztec regime and free themselves from the burden of tribute and the necessity of feeding the insatiable Aztec appetite for sacrificial victims, and so within three years fell the largest ever empire in North and Central America. [Emphases added]
The Aztec Empire had been expanding for a long time, as it incorporated more and more new territories through wars of aggression and military conquest. The conquered were made captives and taken for ritual sacrifice to Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital, later to become Mexico City.
Tenochtitlan fell to the Spaniards when some of them, commanded by Pedro de Alvarado, were killed after they tried to interrupt a ritual of human sacrifice in the city.
Cortés and his Conquistadors were only waiting for an opportunity to end the war: Cortes’ return to the capital led to the fall of Tenochtitlan.
An important element in the final victory of the Conquistadors, who were relatively few in number although far more advanced in warfare weaponry, technology and strategy than the enemy, over the Aztec Empire was the Spanish-led coalition, which was itself composed primarily of indigenous nations, among whom was the Tlaxcalan people (the image of this page title depicts Spanish Conquistadors with their Tlaxcalan allies as they enter Tenochtitlan).
That is not in question.
The Aztecs waged constant wars against other populations but they didn’t kill their enemies in battle. Instead, they captured them alive, made them slave and ritually sacrificed them in the Aztec temples.
The president of the International Council of the International Society for Human Rights Thomas Schirrmacher quoted:
“The scale of human sacrifice is appalling. Some 70–80,000 victims were sacrificed at the dedication of the main pyramid in Tenochtitlan in 1487. Whereas earlier estimates had pointed to an average annual sacrifice of about 15,000 human victims in central Mexico (out of a population of two million), recent population estimates push the total as high as 25 million, and suggest that as many as 250,000, one percent of the total population were sacrificed each year.”102
This involved above all the offering of the heart: “The Mesoamerican human sacrifices were mainly carried out by the excision of the heart.”103 The Latin-Americologist and journalist Patrick Tierney underwent great dangers to unearth contemporary evidence for human sacrifice in the Andes.104 He states that the authorities and justiciary seek to ignore the problem. [Emphasis added]
Some of these higher figures of victims of sacrifice by the Aztecs are also supported by the BBC History Magazine:
The Spanish invaders were shocked to find that the Aztecs carried out huge numbers of human sacrifices at their temples…
It is possible that around 20,000 people were sacrificed a year in the Aztec Empire. Special occasions demanded more blood – when a new temple to Huitzilopochtli was dedicated in 1487, an estimated 80,400 people were sacrificed.
For the Indios, who in pre-Columbian America lived in constant terror of being captured by a stronger tribe (the film Apocalypto by one of the best brains of Hollywood, Mel Gibson, superbly and vividly renders the idea and feeling of what these forest-dwellers’ lives must have been, under the nightmare of the diabolical Aztecs’ domination) and sacrificed to pagan idols then torn to pieces to be devoured by cannibals, the Christian message was an explosion of liberation.
They discovered that their torture and death were not necessary for the sun to keep shining its light, because the true God was a Father who provided for His children.
They discovered a new world of love and hope, education and reason, faith and trust from the Spanish missionaries.
They converted in huge numbers to the Church of Christ, who saved them in this world as well as in the next, and formed something like 80 percent of the army, led by the Spanish Conquistadors, that defeated the Aztecs and Incas.
Spain’s Queen, devout Catholic Isabella, in accordance with the Church teachings prohibited slavery of Indios, and punished Christopher Columbus who had briefly succumbed to it.
Native Americans Helped the Conquerors Because They Were Their Liberators
That the alliance which defeated Aztecs and Incas was composed mostly by native Americans who had been subjugated, oppressed and submitted to the worst atrocities by them is a well-established historical fact.
But this aspect has been constantly underplayed by the popular narrative propagandized and transmitted by the mass media, highly politicized to make Europeans always appear in a bad light and non-Europeans in a good light, so much so that most people don’t know a crucial fact: the oppressed Indios supported the Spanish conquerors because they were liberators.
The astounding victories of a few dozen Spaniards against thousands of warriors were not determined by the few guns which those climates rendered unusable because humidity neutralized the gunpowder nor by the cavalry, as horses could not be charged into the forest.
Italian writer Vittorio Messori wrote in his book Pensare la storia. Una lettura cattolica dell’avventura umana:
Those triumphs were primarily due to the support of the indigenous people oppressed by the Incas and Aztecs. Therefore, more than as “usurpers”, the Iberians were hailed in many places as liberators.
And we are still waiting for the “enlightened” historians to explain to us why in over three Hispanic centuries there were no revolts against the new rulers, albeit very few in number and exposed, therefore, to the danger of being swept away at the slightest change. The image of the invasion of South America immediately vanishes if we look at the figures: in the fifty years between 1509 and 1559, therefore in the period of conquest from Florida to the Strait of Magellan, the Spaniards who reached the West Indies were just over 500 (yes: five hundred!) a year. In total, 27,787 people in all, in that half a century…
A help which the Indians particularly needed; as we mentioned (but as is often not mentioned) the peoples of Central America had fallen under the horrible rule of the Aztec invaders, one of the most ferocious peoples in history, with a dark religion based on mass human sacrifices. On the solemnities, which were still practised when the Conquistadores came to defeat them, up to 80,000 young people at a time were sacrificed to the Aztec gods on the great pyramids that served as altar. Wars were determined by the need to always procure new victims.
The Spaniards are accused of causing a demographic collapse which we have seen to be largely due to the “viral shock”. In reality, without their arrival, the population would have been reduced even more to the minimum terms, given the mass slaughter of the youth of the subjugated populations performed by the rulers. The intransigence, sometimes the fury of the first Catholics who landed, can be well explained in the face of this obscure idolatry in whose temples human blood always flowed.
There are those who would like to restore those slaughters …
It is indeed very difficult to lament “the destruction of the great pre-Columbian religions”.
As if what has been described above were not enough, no-one in pre-Columbian America knew iron, bronze, how to use the wheel (except for religious purposes), or how to use horses or any other beast of burden or draft animal.
For a long time it was believed that horses were not native to the American continent, only imported by Europeans, but new research has shown that the opposite is closer to the truth: horses originated in North America, but all the wild horses were killed by early hunters, except some who stole to Asia before the disappearance of the Bering land and ice bridge between the two continents, linking modern-day Siberia to Alaska. They were domesticated by Asians and then Europeans, who reintroduced horses to the Americas.
Contrary to the popular belief that Amerindians were some sort of conservationists ante litteram, nature-loving ecologists before Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, the reality offers a slightly different view:
By about 7,200 B.C. in the New World, however, ancient hunters had completely eliminated herbivores suitable for domestication from the area anthropologists call Mesoamerica, the region of the future high civilizations of Mexico and Guatemala. [Emphasis added]
What happened to horses in America during the time interval between the last Ice Age and the continent’s discovery by Christopher Columbus, namely from 14,700 BC to 1492 AD? It seems that horses existed in North America when the Spaniards arrived, maybe living in some wild areas, although it is not certain if they lived in Mesoamerica. At any rate, natives did not know how to tame them nor had they invented harnesses.
Everything that needed transportation, even in mountainous areas, including for the construction of the rulers’ enormous palaces and temples, was carried on the shoulders by throngs of slaves.
Killer Epidemics Native, Not Brought by Europeans
Writer Vittorio Messori, in the quotation above, mentions “demographic collapse which we have seen to be largely due to the ‘viral shock'”.
This is the “genocide” we hear so much about: it is tantamount to saying that, if nowadays you are positive to Covid-19 without knowing it and you, still unconsciously and unintentionally, infect someone who then dies *from* it (not just *with* it, as today all deaths of people tested positive are attributed to Covid, never mind if they had drowned or got run over by a truck), you are a homicidal maniac.
However, not only there was no genocide, but also the theory of European diseases transmitted to Amerindians is now in serious doubt.
New studies and evidence reveal that the worst epidemic which followed the conquest was not brought by Spaniards, but was native to Central America.
The Aztecs already knew the disease because they had experienced it before and gave it the name “Cocoliztli”.
Mexican epidemiologist Rodolfo Acuña-Soto calls this the time of “megadeath.” Acuña-Soto has carried out in-depth research with dendrochronologists, who study tree rings to date changes in climate. From the Douglas firs they investigated it emerges that during the 16th century central Mexico not only lacked rain but also suffered the most severe and sustained drought in 500 years, one that encompassed nearly the entire continent.
But that’s not all. The most important discovery by Acuña-Soto was that the tree-ring records show wet interludes setting in around the years 1545 and 1576, the years of the cocolitzli:
Cocolitzli had been caused by a hemorrhagic fever virus that had lain dormant in its animal hosts, most likely rodents. Severe drought would have contained the population of rodents, forcing them to hole up wherever they could find water. Initially, only a small percentage may have been infected, but when forced into close quarters the virus was transmitted during bloody fights. Infected mother rodents then passed the virus to their young during pregnancy. When the rains returned, the rodents bred quickly and spread the virus—through their urine and feces—as they came into contact with humans in fields and homes. Once infected, humans transmitted the virus to one another through contact with blood, sweat, and saliva. Acuña-Soto’s trips into the woods with Stahle and the Mexican researchers continue to fill in epidemiological details. “I have evidence from 24 epidemics from 1545 to 1813,” he says. “I am comparing the tree-ring data with each of them.” In each case, he sees the same pattern.