THE COLONY. I

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As of August 13, 1521, in what is now Mexico; laws, institutions and authorities, product of more than seven thousand five hundred years of cultural development and civilization; that served to stimulate the development of our old grandparents, were discarded and outlawed. Instead, the conqueror first and then the colonizer, imposed their own laws, institutions and authorities, that were not those of Spain. This new judicial and social order was specifically designed to regulate exploitation of the defeated and the degradation of their natural resources, held by spaniards and for the spanish crown. This colonial order is maintained up to this day with some make up, but just as effective.

The indigenous people, defeated and allied to the invaders, soon realized their grave mistake, but it was too late. Hispanic colonial society was born in Mexico, represented by the conquerors. Yesterday the most ruin slag of Medieval Spain, ignorant adventurers, greedy miserable; now converted in great "gentlemen", in some cases, with more wealth and people at their service than the own spanish nobility. The fights and intrigues will be common among the same conquerors first, and then with the royal bureaucracy and traders and investors, that immediately began to arrive, displacing the conquistadors and their descendants.

These stories are a "tragedy" for many conquerors that were displaced by bureaucrats and courtesans who began to arrive in the New Spain. The most obvious case is that of Hernán Cortés himself. His problems with Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, his excesses and his enemies, caught up with him at the end of his life. He died in Spain on December 2, 1547, at the age of 62 without any glory, poor and persecuted by justice, since his enemies pressed charges that led to a long and bureaucratic "trials of residence".[1] Dispossession, injustice, illegality, violence, were the foundation with which the Colonial Mexico was built; and this, not only against indians and blacks, but the own creole spaniards, those that three centuries later would declare a war of independence, between Creoles and Spaniards.

"The Spaniards were also deeply harmed [gold], if not physically, morally. Cortes not just stole everything he could from his own soldiers, as already noted, but also found the way of extorting from his own allies, to whom he owed everything. Fernando Alva Ixtlixóchitl attests that when his namesake great-grandfather requested the release of his brother Coanacochtzin, Cortés refused, claiming that he was prisoner of the king, and when he begged that at least the shackles were remove as were causing blisters, Cortés agreed, but for a fee in ?cash? or gold." (Jose Luis Guerrero. 1990).

During these three hundred years, the anahuaca peoples were treated, first as animals, until it was judicially demonstrated at the Vatican that they had souls, and later as defeated primitive beings, who did not have any rights in the new colonial order. They were tried to be exterminated, not just physically, but fundamentally tried to destroy their cultures and civilization.

"Sepulveda utilized the works of the early Indies chroniclers, particularly those of Oviedo, to demonstrate the superiority of the Spanish civilization over the American cultures and to denigrate the indigenous. With data from Oviedo and humanistic conceptions about civilized peoples, he showed that the native americans lacked science, writing, and humanitarian law, making them unable them to construct fair and rational societies. On the contrary, he asserted that they were addicted to idolatry and practiced human sacrifice and cannibalism, accusations which today would be considered as crimes against humanity. As they lacked qualities indicative of civilized life, they deserved to be subjugated and governed by the spaniards." (Enrique Florescano. 1987)

The anahuacas lost their freedom, the right to an education, maintaining their culture, their language, the land property and all their material and spiritual possessions; women were systematically raped and men and children were forced to work to death without any pay, other than evangelization. Laws, authorities and institutions rarely were on their side. These are the deepest roots of the country created by the creoles later in 1821 and that explain until the present time, the poverty and injustice that Mexico lives.

"In Chichicapan, they not only tired the Indians with the working of mines and the apportioned, but destroyed sown fields, grazed the fields and took control of livestock and other property of the few neighbors [Indian] that survived. When the mines tillage ceased, the Church and the convent were almost in ruins, the seat of the town turned into swamps and fields spread among miners [Spaniards], that were used for cattle farms. Even much later, Burgoa had to sue a Spaniard, owner of one of these farms, because not satisfied with the land he had usurped, overtook the livestock of some miserable Indians under the pretext that 'the mules of these [the Indians] were sons of his donkeys' which was not true either.

Abuses of the apportioned land were not proprietary in the Valley of Oaxaca, as in the same or different ways the Indians interests were always abused in the Sierra and the Mixtec. The easy and lucrative trade invented by the Spaniards, of selling their goods, distributing by force among the Indians, although they did not needed them, at mandatory prices set at the discretion of the seller, was widespread and persevered until the last century of spanish domination." (José Antonio Gay. 1881)

The spaniards did not cancel the aztec tribute system, on the contrary, made it heavier and gradually spread it to all corners of Mexico. From the 16th century native peoples have been condemned through injustice to dispossession, marginalization and physical exploitation, and of their natural resources, in favor of their colonizers. It is assumed that in 1521 to 1621, the Spanish committed one of the greatest humanity genocides, exterminating with a knife, forced labor and particularly with diseases brought from Europe, 20 million human beings. Mexico did not get this population back, until the 1940s.

"These Indians, chastened by the sufferings experienced, came to collect great hatred against whites, also including priests in a common malevolence. They concluded that gold was the only motive of the first; and thus, they resolved to fill their hands of riches, outwardly keeping all christian formalities and to continue in private their old practices." (José Antonio Gay. 1881)

However, the old grandparents, despite everything, and in a prodigious and heroic resistance struggle, managed to keep alive their ancient culture, in the variegated and complex cultural syncretism; not only in the indigenous and peasant communities of the present, but in the mestizo society itself. We can assume that in the 16th century, instead of having a "discovery" there was a "cover-up". That the Spanish structured with a strong colonial system, to extract the wealth of Mexico and very seldom, to develop and improve its original inhabitants and its ancient civilization. However, despite the adversity, old grandparents started a massive and intelligent system of cultural resistance, by submitting the laws, authorities and institutions to corruption.[2] Indeed, the project of creating the New Spain, from the Anahuac remains, never was fully complied, because of the corruption in which they lived.

"This is how the corrupt manner in which the colonial order was implemented, both among the spaniards as against the indians, allowed the permanent non-consolidation of the new civilization project. The spaniards themselves corrupted law, institutions and authority; this somehow allowed the survival of indigenous culture, whom implemented an elaborate and complex resistance strategy, which had two major aspects. The first was to try to preserve "disguised or camouflaged", the most important values of their ancestral culture in the new colonial order; and the second was corrupting as much as they could laws, institutions and authorities of their oppressors, knowing that it was the only means at their disposal to deal with the spaniards, and sabotage the construction of the new Spain project, where they had no place." (Guillermo Marín. 2001)