The Tears of the Indians: Las Casas and the Invention of the Human Rights Debate

Bartolomé de las Casas was born in Seville, Spain, in 1484. His father sailed with Columbus on the second voyage to the Americas. Las Casas himself arrived in Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in 1502, at the age of 18. He participated in the conquest of Cuba in 1512 and, as a reward, was given an encomienda — a grant of indigenous labor that was, in practice, a license to enslave. Las Casas was a priest, a slaveholder, and a participant in the colonial system.

Then he saw what the system was doing. The indigenous population of Hispaniola — estimated at 300,000 to 1,000,000 when Columbus arrived in 1492 — had been reduced to approximately 30,000 by 1514. The people were being worked to death in the mines and on the plantations, subjected to brutal violence, and dying from European diseases at a catastrophic rate. Las Casas, who had been trained as a Dominican priest, was tasked with preparing a sermon. He chose as his text Ecclesiasticus 34: "The bread of the needy is the life of the poor; he that defraudeth them thereof is a man of blood." He freed his own slaves, renounced his encomienda, and began the campaign that would define the rest of his life.

Las Casas's transformation was genuine and profound. He would spend the remaining 52 years of his life fighting for indigenous rights — writing, petitioning the Spanish crown, crossing the Atlantic multiple times, and ultimately facing the Inquisition for his views. He was not a perfect man. He was a man who had been complicit in the system he later fought against, and who carried the moral contradiction of that position for the rest of his life. But his conversion was real, and it produced the most important early critique of European colonialism ever written.

In 1552, Las Casas published Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias — "A Very Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies." The book is not a work of philosophy or theology. It is a series of eyewitness accounts, organized by region, describing what Spanish colonizers did to the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, and South America. The accounts are specific, detailed, and horrifying.

He describes the Spanish entering a village, killing the men, raping the women, and impaling infants on lances. He describes the encomienda system working people to death in the mines, where they were fed starvation rations and beaten if they stopped. He describes the mass suicides of indigenous people who preferred death to Spanish rule. He describes the Spanish hunting people with dogs trained to disembowel. He describes the torture of caciques (chiefs) to extract the location of gold. He describes the burning alive of captured leaders. The accounts are not sensationalized. They are clinical. Las Casas was a witness, and he wrote what he saw.

Las Casas's central claim was that the destruction of the Indies was not a side effect of colonization — it was its purpose. The Spanish were not "bringing civilization" to the Americas. They were extracting wealth, and they were willing to exterminate the entire population to do it. His estimate of the death toll: "above twenty million" — a number that was considered fantastical at the time but that modern historians recognize as within the range of the demographic catastrophe that actually occurred.

In 1550, the Spanish crown — under pressure from Las Casas's relentless campaigning and facing a crisis of conscience over the morality of its colonial project — convened a formal debate at the Colegio de San Gregorio in Valladolid. The jury consisted of fourteen of the most eminent theologians, jurists, and scholars in Spain. The question before them: were the indigenous peoples of the Americas fully human, and did the Spanish crown have the right to wage war against them and enslave them?

Arguing for the affirmative — that indigenous peoples were "natural slaves" in Aristotle's sense and that Spanish conquest was justified — was Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, one of the most respected humanist scholars in Europe. Sepúlveda's argument was based on Aristotle's theory of natural slavery: some people are born to rule and some are born to be ruled. The indigenous peoples, Sepúlveda argued, were barbarians — lacking written language, organized religion, and civilized government. They were, in his view, as inferior to the Spanish as children were to adults, women to men, and monkeys to humans. Their subjugation by a superior civilization was not only legal but morally necessary.

Arguing for the negative — that indigenous peoples were fully human, that they possessed reason and souls, and that the Spanish had no right to enslave them — was Las Casas. His argument was radical for its time: all human beings are created in the image of God and possess the same capacity for reason and salvation. The indigenous peoples were not barbarians. They had complex societies, languages, and cultures. The Spanish had no right to impose their rule by force. The only legitimate way to spread Christianity was through peaceful persuasion — the same method the apostles had used.

The Valladolid debate did not produce a clear winner. The jury never issued a formal verdict. Both sides claimed victory. In practice, the Spanish colonial project continued largely unchanged. But the debate itself was a landmark: it was the first time a European empire had formally questioned whether its treatment of non-European peoples was morally justified. The arguments Sepúlveda made — that some people are naturally inferior, that their subjugation is for their own good, that they are incapable of self-government — became the foundation of every subsequent racial ideology. And Las Casas's arguments — that all people are equally human, that cultural difference does not imply natural inferiority, that conquest is unjust — became the foundation of every subsequent human rights movement.

In 1656, more than a century after its original publication, Las Casas's Short Account was translated into English by John Phillips (a nephew of the poet John Milton) and published under the title The Tears of the Indians: Being a Historical and True Account of the Cruel Massacres and Slaughters of Above Twenty Million of Innocent People. The timing was not accidental. England was competing with Spain for colonial dominance in the Americas. The book was a propaganda weapon — a way of painting the Spanish as uniquely cruel and the English as a more humane alternative.

The "Black Legend" — the narrative of Spanish exceptional cruelty in the Americas — was built on Las Casas's accounts. English colonists and propagandists reprinted Las Casas's descriptions of Spanish atrocities to argue that English colonization was different: more humane, more just, more respectful of indigenous peoples. The irony, of course, was that the English were engaged in the same project — the dispossession and extermination of indigenous peoples — and would soon surpass the Spanish in scale. Las Casas's book was used to justify one colonial project by condemning another. The "Tears of the Indians" were turned into a weapon in the very system that had produced them.

This is the deep irony of the Black Legend: it was not wrong about Spanish atrocities. Las Casas's accounts were accurate. But the use of those accounts to justify English colonization was a lie — not about the Spanish, but about the English. The English were not better. They were later. And when they had their chance, they committed the same atrocities against the same peoples, using the same justifications, with the same result. The Black Legend did not end colonial violence. It simply rebranded it.

This is the part of Las Casas's story that cannot be ignored. In 1516, early in his campaign for indigenous rights, Las Casas proposed to the Spanish crown that African slaves be imported to replace the dying indigenous population. He believed that Africans were stronger and more resistant to European diseases, and that their enslavement — while regrettable — was less morally problematic than the enslavement of indigenous peoples because Africans were already enslaved in their own societies and had been exposed to Christianity.

Las Casas later came to regret this position profoundly. In his later writings, he explicitly repudiated the African slave trade, arguing that it was as unjust as the enslavement of indigenous peoples. He wrote that "the same law applies to the Negro as to the Indian" — that all human beings, regardless of origin, possessed the same natural rights and could not be justly enslaved. But the proposal had been made, and the damage had been done. Las Casas's 1516 proposal was cited by defenders of the African slave trade for centuries.

This contradiction is not a reason to dismiss Las Casas or his work. It is a reason to understand him as a human being, not a saint — a man who was shaped by his time, who made terrible mistakes, and who nevertheless accomplished something extraordinary. The Short Account remains the first great work of human rights literature. The Valladolid debate remains the first formal recognition that the treatment of non-European peoples is a moral question that must be answered, not merely a matter of power. But the African slavery proposal is a reminder that the European human rights tradition was born in the same moment as the Atlantic slave trade — and that the two cannot be separated.

The Valladolid debate is a foundational moment in the intellectual history of the caste system — not because it settled anything, but because it revealed the two poles of the argument that would define the next five centuries. Sepúlveda's argument — that some people are naturally inferior and that their subjugation is therefore justified — did not originate with him. He was drawing on Aristotle. But Valladolid was the moment when this argument was formally applied to the peoples of the Americas and endorsed by the most powerful empire in Europe. It became the template for every subsequent racial ideology, from the "scientific racism" of the 19th century to the eugenics movement of the 20th.

Las Casas's argument — that all people are equally human, that cultural difference does not imply natural inferiority, that conquest is unjust — was equally foundational. It was the seed of the modern human rights movement. The argument that Las Casas made before the Valladolid jury in 1550 is the same argument that would be made at the United Nations in 1948, in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and in every human rights struggle since. The terms are different. The structure is the same.

For Chain, the Valladolid debate is the intellectual origin point of the caste system as an ideology — the moment when the question of whether some people are naturally inferior to others was formally posed and debated at the highest level of European power. The answer was not clear. The question has never been resolved. Every subsequent debate about race, hierarchy, and human rights has been a continuation of the debate that began in Valladolid in 1550.