First European Colonization Wave - Destruction of The Amerindian Population

Destruction of The Amerindian Population

The arrival of the conquistadores caused the annihilation of most of the Amerindians. However, contemporary historians now generally reject the Black Legend according to which the brutality of the European colonists accounted for most of the deaths. It is now generally believed that diseases, such as the smallpox, brought upon by the Columbian Exchange, were the greatest destroyer, although the brutality of the conquest itself isn't contested. As late as in the 19th century, Juan Manuel de Rosas, Argentinian caudillo from 1829 to 1852, openly pursued the extermination of the local population, an event related by Darwin in The Voyage of the Beagle (1839). He was then followed by the "Conquest of the Desert" in the 1870-80s.The result was the death of a lot of the mapuche and arauccan population in the Patagonia. After the Amerindians' quasi-total disparition, the mines and the sugar cane plantations thus led to the booming of the Atlantic slave trade, especially apparent in the Caribbean where the largest ethnic group is of African descent.

Contemporary historians debate the legitimacy of calling the quasi-disparition of the Amerindians a "genocide". Estimates of pre-Columbian population have ranged from a low of 8.4 million to a high of 112.5 million persons; in 1976, geographer William Denevan derived a "consensus count" of about 54 million people.

David Stannard has argued that "The destruction of the Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world", with almost 100 million Amerindians killed in what he calls the American Holocaust. Like Ward Churchill, he believes that the American natives were deliberately and systematically exterminated over the course of several centuries, and that the process continues to the present day.

Stannard's claim of 100 million deaths has been disputed because he makes no distinction between death from violence and death from disease. In response, political scientist R. J. Rummel has instead estimated that over the centuries of European colonization about 2 million to 15 million American indigenous people were the victims of what he calls democide. "Even if these figures are remotely true", writes Rummel, "then this still make this subjugation of the Americas one of the bloodier, centuries long, democides in world history."