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Thanks for your replies! Sorry for getting so annoyed, but I do hate attacks upon Spain! Certainly, I am not defending many things about Spanish civilization, then or subsequently, but I think an enormous amount of good was done by Spain's colonization of the New World. Latin America has, however, never done as well as North America for two reasons: one was the somewhat medieval Spanish economic system, and the other was the very fact that they converted the indigenous population and included them in the society rather than exterminating them. This has, to some extent, been a handicap, particularly now, when the politically correct view of the virtues of the noble savage have arisen to defeat things such as Spanish literacy programs, etc. It somehow seems to run together with a sort of Che Guevara poster Marxism. Look at Chiapas for a view of this.

The Spanish treated the Indians they way they treated their own poor and working classes. This means they didn't treat them very well, but it was more of an economic thing than anything else. And the Spanish were very much into analyzing their ethnic backgrounds, originally because of taxation (various groups paid more or less, Jews did not pay certain taxes, etc.), and then later because of the Inquisition. Again, the Inquisition had two phases, the first one religiously motivated, and the second one (under Felipe II) entirely political, but so out of control that Rome was unable to stop it, even though the Pope repeatedly tried to do so.

And yes, Bartolome de las Casas certainly added much fuel to the leyenda negra, for reasons of his own (the Spanish have always responded to drama, and he felt he would get more money and assistance through this pitch). Somehow, in the popular mind, this all became a stew of misinformation. The Spanish, for example, never hunted "witches" - witch hunts were something that, for some reason, occurred almost entirely in Protestant areas, particularly Germany - yet the Spanish often get blamed for it. And of course, the new Spain, where even the center-right party would be left-wing by our standards, has many Spaniards all too eager to reject their past and declare that before 1968, they were all miserable benighted wretches.

In any case, yes, you're right, it is off topic. But it was an entertaining sally!