One of my cousins married an archaeologist-a Paleo-Indian expert who showed my husband and I lots of sites, and even let us work on some digs-so at the risk of spoiling the notion of noble Spaniards-my ancestors, unfortunately-engaging in bloody, righteous extermination of evil heathens-it was not the slaughter or the disease that pretty much wiped most of those Native Americans in Mexico and points south off the map, although the survivors either decamped with haste, or ended up as indentured servants or slaves-it was more subtle and not so bloody...
Unlike the American colonies immigrants, most of the early immigrants from Spain were single men-soldiers mostly, looking for adventure and a new place. They were encouraged by the Spanish colonial government to take native women as wives and concubines-being regular guys, they did-after a few hundred years the ethnic lines got really blurred, so most people were mestizos-still are. The tribal identities got pretty much lost, so you don’t meet many people who can say they are Maya, Chichimec, Aztec, etc.
Tribal warfare, overcrowding and cyclical drought/crop failure were already taking a harsh toll on the Native population before the Spanish arrived, and cities were being abandoned-the Spanish were nasty, brutal people too, but they were not responsible for the wholesale fall of Native culture.
Just about every culture in every country worldwide has practiced human sacrifice and cannibalism at some point in their history-even in the Balkans, England, the Middle East, etc-we were all savages at one time...
/bingo
HMMMmmm...
I know of a church today that claims to eat the flesh and drink the blood of their God.