Page:Historia Verdadera del Mexico profundo.djvu/224

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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

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