Bartolomé de las Casas O.P. (c. 1484[1]
– 18 July 1566) was a 16th-century Spanish historian, social reformer and
Dominican friar. He became the first resident Bishop of Chiapas, and the first
officially appointed 'Protector of the Indians'. His extensive
writings, the most famous being A Short Account of the Destruction of the
Indies and Historia de Las Indias, chronicle the first decades of colonization
of the West Indies and focus particularly on the atrocities committed by the
colonizers against the indigenous peoples.
Arriving as one of the first settlers in the New World
he participated in, and was eventually compelled to oppose the atrocities
committed against the Native Americans by the Spanish colonists. In 1515, he
reformed his views, gave up his Indian slaves and encomienda, and advocated,
before King Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, on behalf of rights for the natives.
In his early writings, he advocated the use of African slaves instead of
Natives in the West-Indian colonies; consequently,criticisms
have been leveled at him as being partly responsible for the beginning of the
Transatlantic slave trade. Later in life, he retracted those early views as he
came to see all forms of slavery as equally wrong. In 1522, he attempted to
launch a new kind of peaceful colonialism on the coast of Venezuela, but
this venture failed causing Las Casas to enter the Dominican Order and become a
friar, leaving the public scene for a decade. He then traveled to Central America undertaking peaceful evangelization among
the Maya of Guatemala and participated in debates among the Mexican churchmen
about how best to bring the natives to the Christian faith. Traveling back to Spain to
recruit more missionaries, he continued lobbying for the abolition of the
encomienda, gaining an important victory by the passing of the New Laws in
1542. He was appointed Bishop of Chiapas, but served only for a short time
before he was forced to return to Spain because of resistance to the
New Laws by the encomenderos, and conflicts withSpanish settlers because of his
pro-Indian policies and activist religious stances. The remainder of his life
was spent at the Spanish court where he held great influence over
Indies-related issues. In 1550, he participated in the Valladolid debate in which Juan Ginés
de Sepúlveda argued that the Indians were less than human and required
Spanish masters in order to become civilized. Las Casas maintained that they
were fully human and that forcefully subjugating them was unjustifiable. Bartolomé
de las Casas O.P. (c. 1484[1] – 18 July 1566)
Bartolomé de las Casas spent 50 years of his life actively fighting slavery
and the violent colonial abuse of indigenous peoples, especially by trying to
convince the Spanish court to adopt a more humane policy of colonization. And
although he failed to save the indigenous peoples of the Western Indies, his
efforts resulted in several improvements in the legal status of the natives,
and in an increased colonial focus on the ethics of colonialism. Las Casas is
often seen as one of the first advocates for universal human rights.[2]
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