The Spanish Polemic on Colonisation
Part three: Bartolomé de Las Casas and Revolutionary Theocracy (1)
Towards the 'Land of Peace'
The Land-Appropriation of a New World is a chapter title in Carl Schmitt’s most ambitious book on international law. (1) It sums up the contacts between European and non-European peoples in the centuries after Columbus’s voyage. They were not always genocidal, and in some cases, for some length of time, they were non-violent. But mostly they were neither consensual nor peaceful, not to mention fraternal. However, it would be untrue to say that no one thought of an alternative and that no determined attempt was ever made to make this alternative happen.
Bartolomé de Las Casas justified a peaceful alternative in countless writings. Much of what he wrote consisted of practical proposals addressed to official persons. He also produced very ambitious works on history, topography and social description, and theology (this was a field which a Spaniard with serious arguments about law and right had no choice but to master). Some of these works were published in his lifetime; most were not, but they had some circulation in manuscript. Apart from that, he himself attempted to pioneer the practice of his theories. As mentioned in Part 2 of this series, in his early days as a campaigner he became a colonial undertaker, attempting to establish a model colonisation of a type which he thought would be non-destructive to the original inhabitants. And in the 1530s he attempted to practise the theory which he argued at length in a book: that the only way to bring the non-Christian peoples to Christianity was the way of peaceful persuasion.
About 1533 Las Casas successfully engaged in a peace process with a rebel Indian lord known as Enriquillo (“Little Henry”) who had held out for a long time in the hills of Hispaniola. (2) Eventually an honourable agreement was made between the Indian and the governor, and Enriquillo in some fashion entered Christian society. Encouraged by this, Las Casas was ready for more ambitious ventures. In 1535 he was one of a group of Dominicans who set sail for Peru with the intention of preaching Christianity in the newly-conquered territory. When problems with the weather became too much, they landed in Nicaragua and attempted to set to work there instead. However, Las Casas soon came into conflict with the governor, who would not accept his demands that no violence be used against Indians. Las Casas tried the effects of moral force, denouncing the governor publicly. When his opponent would not back down, he left the territory and went on to Guatemala.
There he found a more amenable governor, and he set out to preach Christianity in a region which the Spaniards had never been able to conquer and which they called Tierra de Guerra, “The Land of War”. The missionaries went to work systematically to learn the local language, make contact with the lords and win local support. Above all, the Indians had to be convinced that these newcomers weren’t like the other Spaniards. “We sent some of the recent converts who not only loved us but respected us. Those men explained to the others that we were coming to them inspired by the zeal of the House of God. We wanted to awaken them from the ignorance in which they had been immersed for so many centuries – not to rob them of their properties and liberty, as the other Spaniards had been doing.” (3) The experiment was a relative success over fifteen years or so, so much so that the Land of War was officially renamed Vera Paz, “true peace”.
Vera Paz has been seen as a model for the more famous experiments of later times. “Las Casas aimed to have free Indian communities under the leadership of monks. Here the Indians would learn the most important trades and a rational mode of agriculture. We can well see Las Casas as the father of the reducciones founded by the Jesuits (in Paraguay) in the 17th century.” (4) The reasons for the problems and ultimate failure in Guatemala all boiled down to one. As Bernard Lavallé puts it, “peaceful preaching was opposed to colonial practice; it was actually its absolute contrary in all respects”. (5) This was the problem which Las Casas kept tackling in theory and practice, in various parts of America and in Spain, with an energy that is beyond belief. In quite recent times ten years have, apparently, been lopped off his life (born in 1484 instead of 1474), which makes him a bit more humanly credible.
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