BORIKEN ANTES DEL HOLOCAUSTO

BORIKEN BEFORE THE HOLOCAUST

LLEGAN

THEY ARRIVE

LOS TAINOS LOS RECIBEN COMO GUAITIAO (HERMANOS)

THE TAINOS RECEIVE THEM AS BROTHERS

Cristobal Colon - Christopher Columbus

Juan Ponce de Leon

MOTIVO DEL CRIMEN

CRIME MOTIVE

"ORO" - "GOLD"

"AZUCAR" - "SUGAR"


COMIENZA LA MATANZA

THE SLAUGHTER BEGINS

Testigos de la Matanza de los Tainos

Witensses of the Taino Massacre

Fray Bartolome de las Casas

Todas estas universas e infinitas gentes a toto género crió Dios las más simples, sin maldades ni dobleces, obedientísimas, fidelísimas a sus señores naturales y a los cristianos a quien sirven; más humildes, más pacientes, más pacíficas y quietas, sin rencillas ni bollicios, no rijosos, no querulosos, sin rancores, sin odios, sin desear venganzas, que hay en el mundo. Son así mesmo las gentes más delicadas, flacas y tiernas en complisión y que menos pueden sufrir trabajos, y que más fácilmente mueren de cualquiera enfermedad, que ni hijos de príncipes y señores entre nosotros, criados en regalos y delicada vida, no son más delicados que ellos, aunque sean de los que entre ellos son de linaje de labradores. [...]

En estas ovejas mansas y de las calidades susodichas por su Hacedor y Criador así dotadas, entraron los españoles desde luego que las conocieron como lobos y tigres y leones crudelísimos de muchos días hambrientos. Y otra cosa no han hecho de cuarenta años a esta parte, hasta hoy, y hoy en este día lo hacen, sino despedazallas, mattallas, angustiallas, afligillas, atormentallas y destruillas por las estrañas y nuevas y varias y nunca otras tales vistas ni leídas ni oídas maneras de crueldad, de las cuales algunas pocas abajo se dirán, en tanto grado que habiendo en la isla Española sobre tres cuentos de ánimas que vimos, no hay hoy de los naturales della doscientas personas. [...]

Una vez vide que, teniendo en las parrillas quemándose cuatro o cinco principales y señores (y aun pienso que había dos o tres pares de parrillas donde quemaban otros), y porque daban muy grandes gritos y daban pena al capitán o le impedían el sueño, mandó que los ahogasen; y el alguazil, que era peor que verdugo, que los quemaba (y sé como se llamaba y aun sus parientes conocí en Sevilla), no quiso ahogarlos, antes les metió con sus manos palos en las bocas para que no sonasen, y atizóles el fuego hasta que se asaron de espacio como él quería. Yo vide todas las cosas arriba dichas y muchas otras infinitas.

La causa por que han muerto y destruido tantas y tales e tan infinito número de ánimas los cristianos ha sido solamente por tener por su fin último el oro y henchirse de riquezas en muy breves días e subir a estados muy altos e sin proporción de sus personas; conviene a saber, por la insaciable cudicia e ambición que han tenido, que ha sido mayor que en el mundo pudo por ser aquellas tierras tan felices e tan ricas e las gentes tan humildes tan pacientes y tan fáciles a subjectarlas.

La versión de Las Casas sobre las consecuencias de la conquista de las islas de San Juan y Jamaica es claramente diferente: «(los españoles) hicieron e cometieron los grandes insultos e pecados susodichos, y añadieron muchas señaladas e grandísimas crueldades más, matando y quemando y asando y echando a perros bravos, e después oprimiendo y atormentando y vexando en las minas y en los otros trabajos hasta consumir y acabar con todos aquellos infelices inocentes: que había en las dichas dos islas más de seiscientas mil ánimas, y creo que más de un cuento, e no hay hoy en cada una doscientas personas. Todas [las demás] perecidas sin fe e sin sacramentos» (Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, Sevilla, 1552, ff. 5r y 10v)

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Fray Antonio de Montesinos

... todos estáis en pecado mortal y en él vivís y morís, por la crueldad y tiranía que usáis con estas inocentes gentes. Decid ¿con qué derecho y con qué justicia tenéis en tan cruel y horrible servidumbre aquestos indios?... Estos, ¿no son hombres? ¿No tienen ánimas racionales? ¿No sois obligados amallos como a vosotros mismos? ¿Esto no entendéis, esto no sentís? ¿Cómo estáis en tan profundidad, de sueño tan letárgico, dormidos? Tened por cierto, que en el estado en que estáis, no os podéis más salvar, que los moros o turcos que carecen y no quieren la fe de Jesucristo.

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AN ACCOUNT OF THE HORROR

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They forced their way into native settlements, slaughtering everyone they found there, including small children, old men, pregnant women, and even women who had just given birth. They hacked them to pieces, slicing open their bellies with their swords as though they were so many sheep herded into a pen. They even laid wagers on whether they could manage to slice a man in two at a stroke, or cut an individual's head from his body, or disembowel him with a single blow of their axes. They grabbed suckling infants by the feet and, ripping them from their mothers' breasts, dashed them headlong against the rocks. Others, laughing and joking all the while, threw them over their shoulders into a river, shouting: 'Wriggle, you little perisher.' They spared no one, erecting especially wide gibbets on which they could string their victims up with their feet just off the ground and then burn them alive thirteen at a time, in honor of our Savior and the twelve Apostles, or tie dry straw to their bodies and set fire to it. Some they chose to keep alive and simply cut their wrists, leaving their hands dangling, saying to them: 'Take this letter' -- meaning that their sorry condition would as a warning to those hiding in the hills. The way they normally dealt with the native leaders and nobles was to tie them to a kind of griddle consisting of sticks resting on pitchforks driven into the ground and then grill them over a slow fire, with the result that they howled in agony and despair as they died a lingering death.

It once happened that I myself witnessed their grilling of four or five local leaders in this fashion (and I believe they had set up two or three other pairs of grills alongside so that they might process other victims at the same time) when the poor creatures 'howls came between the Spanish commander and his sleep. He gave orders that the prisoners were to be throttled, but the man in charge of execution detail, who was more bloodthirsty than the average common hangman (I know his identity and even met some relatives of his in Seville), was loath to cut short his private entertainment by personally going round ramming wooden buns into their mouths to stop them from making such a racket and deliberately stoked the fire that they would take just as long to die as he himself chose. I saw these things for myself and many others besides. These mortal enemies of human kind trained hunting dogs to track them down -- wild dogs who would savage a native to death as soon as he looked at him, tearing him into shreds and devouring his flesh as though he were a pig.

And when, as happened on the odd occasion, the locals did kill a European, as, given the enormity of the crimes committed against them, they were in all justice fully entitled to, the Spanish came to an unofficial agreement among themselves that for every European killed one hundred natives would be executed.

The fourth kingdom was known as Xaragua, and was really the heart and core of the whole island. In no other part of the island was the language as refined as here nor the court discourse as cultivated; nowhere else were the people of such quality and breeding, the leading families as numerous and as liberal -- and this kingdom boasted many nobles and great lords. Chief among them was the king, Behechio, and his sister, Anacaona, both of whom rendered great service to the Spanish Crown and gave every assistance to the European settlers, on occasion even saving their lives; after Behechio's death, Anacaona ruled in his stead. Over three hundred local dignitaries were summoned to welcome the then governor of the island when he paid a visit to the kingdom with sixty horse and a further three hundred men on foot (the horsemen alone were sufficient in number to ravage not only the whole island but the mainland as well). The governor duped the unsuspecting leaders of this welcoming party into gathering in a building made of straw and then ordered his men to set fire to it and burn them alive. All the others were massacred, either run through by lances or put to the sword. As a mark of respect and out of deference to her rank, Queen Anacaona was hanged. When one or two Spaniards tried to save some of the children, either because they pitied them or perhaps because they wanted them for themselves, and swung them up behind them on to their horses, one of their compatriots rod up behind and ran them through with his lance. Yet another member of the governor's party galloped about cutting the legs off all the children as they lay sprawling on the ground. The governor even decreed that those who made their way to a small island some eight leagues distant in order to escape this bestial cruelty should be condemned to slavery because they had fled.

After the fighting was over and all the men had been killed, the surviving natives -- usually, that is, the young boys, the women, and the children -- were shared out between the victors. One got thirty, another forty, a third as many as hundred or even twice that number; everything depended on how far one was in the good books of the despot who went by the title of governor. The pretext under which the victims were parceled out in this way was that their new masters would then be in a position to teach them the truths of the Christian faith; and thus it came about that a host of cruel, grasping and wicked men, almost all of them pig-ignorant, were put in charge of these poor souls. And they discharged this duty by sending the men down the mines, where working conditions were appalling, to dig for gold, and putting the women to labor in the fields and on their master's estates, to till the soil and raise the crops, properly a task only for toughest and strongest of men. Both women and men were given only wild grasses to eat and other unnutritious foodstuffs The mothers of young children promptly saw their milk dry up and their babies die; and, with the women and men separated and never seeing each other, no new children were born. The men died down the mines from overwork and starvation, and the same was true of the women who perished out in the estates.

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USTEDES JUZGUEN...

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YOU BE THE JUDGE...