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Of course.

We used to read in all our history books that the Spanish Conquistadores were evil men who killed off all the Indians. Whereas the American Puritans were good men.

Catholics were evil, Protestants were good & noble. That was the basic story line, inherited from England and what has been called The Black Legend of the evil Spanish Catholics, the Inquisition, and so forth.

A couple of years ago someone, usually an intelligent guy, said as much to me at dinner one day. His assumption was that the Spanish enslaved and slaughtered their Indians whereas we were nice to ours.

Then how come, I asked, the Spanish intermarried with the Indians, and most of the inhabitants of Latin America are mostly of Indian ancestry? Whereas in North America there are relatively few Indians, and there has been relatively little intermarriage?

In actual fact, the Pope outlawed slavery, and after the earliest days the Conquistadores reluctantly complied. And most of the Indians later converted—largely by the influence of Our Lady of Guadalupe—and became at least nominal Catholics, giving up human sacrifice and other similar customs they used to practice. So, yes, there are a few relatively pure-bred hispanics still left at the top of the social food chain, but not really very many. Most are more Indian than Hispanic.

History is always a bit more complex than the Cliff Notes version.

And the history of latin america a lot more interesting than what most of us get in high school.

Slavery hung on quite late in Brazil, but throughout the rest of the continent, under pressure from the church, it died out.

You are right. Except in Argentina and that region, catholic settlers always intermarried rather freely with the indigenous, and their kids were brought up catholic.

Just as an aside, in Ecuador the blacks seem to fall generally into two cultural groups. One group, living in the highlands, are descended from a group protected by the jesuits. They tend to be very catholic and proper. The second group, descended from shipwrecked slaves who swam ashore and lived independently, have preserved some of their african roots. In Venezuela, something similar occurred; the africans didn’t remain slaves, but took off for the interior where they built their own communities back in the bush and lived independently.

You forget a very salient point about Spanish and Portuguese colonization: The Spanish (and to a greater extent) the Portuguese did not send women during the early era of colonization. For the first century of Portuguese rule in Brazil, settlers were almost exclusively male, and had no choice but to engage in relations with the native Indians, to say nothing of the Africans who were imported from west Africa. Some of these relations were "blessed" by the church, most were not.

It wasn't until the late 18th century that Portuguese settlers began bringing wives, an a large wave of immigration from Europe in the late 19th/early 20th century served to increase the population of whites in Brazil. Nevertheless, the fact that Brazil has a multi-racial plurality says more about the fact that white female immigration was nil in the first century and a half of settlement than anything else.