When the Europeans saw how the natives were starting to get out of their control, they decided to make an organization plan called “la encomienda”.
This program was formed with the intention of “administrating” the natives, who were no longer allowed to live in their own communities. They were forced to live in towns which, by law had to have “una iglesia, plaza y calles bajo la administracion de un cacique y su poblacion no debia superar los 300 vecinos” (Colombia: imágenes de su diversidad pg 76). What this program made was represing the natives and stopping them from having any kind of control over their lives and way of living.
The number of population of the natives decreased dramatically with the Colons arrival to America, because they thought of them as “disposable” by two reasons, one, because to the Europeans, the natives were a kind of sub-race, they were not human, they were more like pets rather than people. And second, because they died “like ants”. That happened because, as the Colombian territory is so productive, there was never reason for the natives to translade very far away from where thy lived, and when they were forced by the Europeans to go from warm lands to cold ones, they caught flues and died. Though, if they survived the hard work, change of food and psicologic traumas killed them.
As the colons didn’t care about the massive deaths of the natives, soon the mines and constructions were running low on people to work on them, so the colons brought black people and started using the “mestizos” to replace them, which showed (again) what little intention the Europeans had on protecting the former identity of America.
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