The Colonial Encounter: Las Casas and the Valladolid Debate

The Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566) arrived in the Caribbean in 1502 as a young encomendero and, after witnessing the massacre at Caonao in Cuba in 1513, underwent a documented conversion around 1514 that turned him into the most persistent early critic of Spanish colonial violence. His Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1552) catalogued, colony by colony, the killings, enslavement, and forced labor inflicted on Taíno, Nahua, and Andean peoples, offering casualty estimates that modern historians treat as polemical exaggerations meant to move the Spanish crown to action rather than as demographic data. Las Casas held the title Protector de los Indios, granted by Cardinal Cisneros in 1516, and spent decades petitioning the Council of the Indies and the Spanish court, producing dozens of treatises, including the Historia de las Indias, left unpublished at his death and only printed in full in 1875-76. His activism was not peripheral moralizing but drew on scholastic natural-law theology, particularly the Thomist tradition transmitted through Francisco de Vitoria (c. 1483-1546) at Salamanca, whose Relectio de Indis (1539) had already argued that Indigenous peoples possessed natural dominion (dominium) over their persons and property prior to any papal or royal grant.