Sunday, September 4, 2011

The Province and Kingdom of Guatemala

Spaniards when they arrived to Guatemala, they were received by the chief and the nobles accompanied by trumpets and timbrels and they celebrated the arriving Spaniards with many fiestas at the gate of the capital city of Ultatlan. The Spaniards slept that night outside the city, which seemed safer to them, for they thought they might be in danger had they slept inside the city. Next day, they summoned the chief ruler and many nobles, they were seized and commanded to furnish the Christians with a certain weight of gold. When they revealed that their land lacked gold, the Spaniards burnt them alive without trial or sentencing.

His followers, left the villages and fled to hide in the mountains and ordered their servants to go to the Spaniards and serve them as their lords, but telling them that they must not reveal where their masters were hidden. All the common people came to the Spaniards and said they would serve them.

The captain refused to accept them until they revealed where their masters were hidden and that otherwise he would kill them all. The Indians said they did not know where their masters were, but surely their master's wives and children must know and they were still in their houses, therefore the Spaniards could go there and do with them as they liked. The Spaniards went to the villages and killed women and children with swords cutting them to pieces.

Unable to escape the killings, the Indians decided to fight and since they well knew that being not only unarmed but naked they would be opposing ferocious men on horseback so well armoured that to prevail against them would be impossible, they conceived an idea of digging holes in the middle of the roads, into which the horsemen would fall and have their bellies pierced by the sharp sticks with which the holes would be filled, covered over with turf and weeds. Once or twice horsemen did fall into these holes, but not more than that, for the Spaniards learnt how to avoid them. But they started throwing captured Indians into these holes. Indians were mortally wounded on the sharp sticks. Children, old women, pregnant women were thrown into these holes in a similar manner. It was a pitiful sight, especially women and children.

One captain general used to force captured Indians to invade new Indian settlements. And since he did not provide food for his Indians he gave them the permission to eat the enemy Indians they captured. Thus, he created a butchery of human beings, where, Children were killed, cooked and eaten, and where men were killed merely for their hands and feet which were esteemed as delicacies. And these inhumanities were occuring in other parts of the Indies.

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