A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies

In Guatemala a Spanish commander (Pedro de Alvarado) summoned and captured the king. When the king did not produce gold, as Guatemala does not naturally have it, he was burned at the stake. At this, the lords of the region went into hiding and instructed their people to surrender to the Spanish but not reveal their leaders’ hiding places.

When Cortés began raiding cities, some Guatemalans raised defenses, constructing pits with spikes in the streets to kill Spanish horses. The Spanish discovered the pits and cast all natives captured, including “pregnant women, mothers of newborn babes, children and old men,” into them (60). Other natives were impaled, stabbed, or thrown to dogs. Las Cases writes, “This inhumane butchery continued unabated for a full seven years, from 1524 until 1530 or 1531” (60).

De Alvarado and his brothers moved on the city of Cuzcatlán. Discovering that the country had very little gold, they took as many inhabitants as they could as slaves and left; “[t]hese poor wretches went unprotestingly, like lambs to the slaughter […] doing everything their new master asked of them and treating him almost as a god” (60). When the islanders mounted an attack on the departing Spanish, they were massacred.