Don’t Be Unreasonable

Humane treatment doesn’t extend to those who aren’t human. The justification for the cruel treatment of indigenous Latin Americans and the seizure of their possessions by the conquistadors was that they were not endowed with reason, humanity’s defining characteristic, which ranked them in some nether region between man and beast. In this way the doctrine of natural servitude developed – that there was a category of people whose reasoning powers were defective and could aspire to nothing greater than servitude to a master who would govern them with the sound judgment they lacked.

The gap between Europeans and Latin Americans on the scale of humanity began to close as the justifications for conquest were publicly debated. Las Casas, for example, discredited the idea that the indigenous people were ignorant and incapable of governing themselves with his firsthand accounts to the contrary. He presented them as having a great capacity for learning and the power of self-determination. He also refuted prejudices with the amusing deduction that if an entire continent of beings, who showed all indications of being human, were actually defective in some crucial aspect, it could only mean that Nature and God had screwed up rather badly. This preposterous and blasphemous idea certainly couldn’t be true – which proved that the inhabitants of the New World must be human after all.

This debate eventually reached the consensus that the indigenous were indeed people, albeit in a lesser stage of development. There are numerous metaphors for this stage – their minds were uncultivated land, wild but fertile for the planting of orderly and productive crops – they were also eager pupils and the Europeans were their patient instructors – or children who need an adult to responsibly manage their affairs and finances until they come of age.

There are various motivations behind recognizing in the indigenous people the faculty of reason. If the mental capacity of the indigenous people was doubted, so too would their ability to adopt Christian principals, depriving the Church of its reason to expand its influence into the New World. Another motivation behind allowing indigenous Latin Americans into the club of reasonable peoples was so that they could become useful economic actors for the Spanish monarchy. This was Joseph Campillo’s argument – give the indigenous people the stamp of reason so that they may become labouring cogs in the international money-making machine of the colonial powers.

That the people of Latin America lacked the faculty of reason was the initial justification for the abuse of their rights and freedoms. However, when this idea was discredited by religious and scholarly debate, the exploitation of this land and its peoples, and intervention in their affairs continued, sometimes under new pretexts, often under old ones.

“I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its people.”
– Secretary of State Henry Kissinger commenting on the election of Salvador Allende as president of Chile in 1970.

Reading:
Zavala, Silvio. The Defense of Human Rights in Latin America. Paris: UNESCO, 1964.
Quote:
Gill, Lesley. The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004.

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