The fascination for Francisco de Vitoria's ideology led Santiago Muñoz Machado (Pozoblanco, 1949) to study in depth the emotional, ideological and economic reception of the conquest of America. The result is to civilize or exterminate the barbarians (Planet). An accurate and illuminating essay on the black legend that accompanied the discovery.

Why the need to justify the conquest of America that the Spaniards have? That begins in 1493 or 94, shortly after the return of Columbus from his first trip. He had dreamed of a land full of precious stones, gold, spices ... But he doesn't find that, but the Caribbean islands are almost a ruin. There is nothing but parrots and overwhelming vegetation. He was going to do a half-deal business with the Catholic Monarchs, but before what he finds he sends to the court a letter full of falsehoods and before the impossibility of offering anything else, he sends slaves, people who can work for free. Queen Isabel is frightened. And she distrusts Columbus. Let's say she is not satisfied with the purpose of the trip. And neither does King Ferdinand. They wonder what we do there and, above all, what we can take advantage of. Columbus lands in Lisbon and interviews the king of Portugal, who claims these lands because in the papal bulls a line is established that determines what Columbus had discovered, the first islands, would be for Portugal. King Ferdinand, who was very clever, sends a diplomat to dispatch with the Pope and gets a papal bull where it is said that these new lands are for Spain in exchange for them being evangelized. And that's where it all begins. That's when the discovery of America changes its registry: from economic to religious purposes. And on the second voyage Columbus already embarks with friars and priests. The English did something similar in North America, how did they manage to preserve themselves from their black legend? They were in England. And with the sole intention of establishing peacefully. In the first years it was like that, because they came to inhospitable lands, bad for cultivation, and they were tameing them. They got along well with the Indians - who were very few compared to Central and South America - until the first conflict arrived. Then he changed the conception of his presence there. They occupied new lands, tried to deceive the Indians and if they did not accept the deception they killed them. They armed the legend of the bad Indian who kills farmers. That falsehood has lasted until beyond the second half of the twentieth century, until the 1970s movie Little Little Man by Arthur Penn. They knew how to sell better. And they had the support of people like Montaigne or Tocqueville, who called us barbarians and they were exemplary. But our brutality is undeniable. It is. There were massacres, submission and slavery. I don't want to deny that with this book. The Antillean period of the parcels was tremendous, thousands of Indians died, many victims of epidemics. And there were two very bloody conquests, the Mexican and the Peruvian. The Spanish monarchy tried to make the conquest and colonization evangelizing. That printed more violence? Not exactly. The religious, in many cases, were intermediaries between the Crown and the Indians. They understood each other with the natives. That must be valued. We were not peaceful people, but no colonization is. We carry the best we had: the best of our culture and our religion, with an integrative spirit. The English were more brutal because the ultimate end of their adventure was exterminating. In fact, in North America they almost did not leave an Indian standing. Castle was not deprived either ... But our colonization was, fortunately, mestizo. In fact the next Congress of the Language, which will be in Arequipa, in four years, we will dedicate it to miscegenation. In the book, you opt for the version of the facts of Francisco de Vitoria versus that of Bartolomé de las Casas. full Franco Fray Bartolomé was a symbol of the left because he had proclaimed the freedoms of the Indians over the empire, and had dared to embarrass Carlos V writing against what was done in America. He did it with a lot of bravery, but he said he did it to put himself at the head of the colonization demonstration. What do you think they wanted? Well, let the soldiers come out and it was the religious who were in charge. All the ideas of Bartolomé de las Casas in this regard failed. And the denunciation that Spain did not have any title to be in America and that it demanded to undo the walk, is something that Vitoria corrects, saying that there were reasons for evangelization and colony, appealing to the inhumanity of those communities. But Vitoria also denounces excesses. He was more than brave. When the king passes through Salamanca and knows about Francisco de Vitoria's lessons at the university, he writes to the prior of the convent where he lived and demands that he be abstained from commenting on what is happening in America. The king is worried about the role of Vitoria. What he proposes. Concepts that remain essential in international law today. It is not comparable with the dry protest of Bartolomé de las Casas. Who won in this 'encounter of civilizations'? It is difficult to value that. What is better, let those backward civilizations follow their own history? They had right. How much later would they have become a developed civilization like the European? It is necessary to put in value what the fusion of cultures means, and in the Spanish America it existed, without forgetting that there was a lot of punishment and pain. It was a great leap of progress for everyone. Spain won from the material point of view, of course. Although the same can be said of England. Has the legend of the conquest been politically abused? Political manipulation has been constant. In the sixteenth century, which is the time in which I focus my book, the conquest generates a lot of intellectual tension. The altarpiece of the crisis of 98 is plaintive, with the idea of ​​our damn luck as a country. In the Franco dictatorship it was used as a return to the best glories of a nation at a time when we could not boast of anything else. And now we go back to the matter, trying to shake the black legend. We Spaniards enjoy feeding our misfortunes. The concepts of conquerors and oppressed have returned, for example in Catalonia. It is no accident. The independence victimism is connected with the conditions that are required in the results of the UN to have the right to self-determination. There we talk about oppressed peoples, where the oppressor is an entity that does not respect universal rights. So nothing is innocent. In the case of independence Catalonia there is too much artifice. And there is the vocabulary of the oppressed, of the conquered. The independentistas want to apply their own black legend with what is happening in Catalonia. That, transferred to the language, also has its perversions when Spanish is considered the language of the barbarians. Tuning with Latin America has been one of the purposes of the SAR in recent decades, overcoming the dialectic of historical confrontation. In that sense, the SAR has been a valuable exception. The language is not ours, from Spain, but common. When Spain makes a mistake in this and makes operations like global Spain produces a terrible outrage. What do you expect from the Congress of the Association of Language Academies (Asale) to be held in Seville during the first week of November? Strengthen the ties that They join us. We are an extraordinary diplomatic force. How to keep the strength of Spanish in such a technified moment, where the main language (and almost unique) is English? You have to fight against that. Spanish must have a presence and place in new technologies. We must try to stop the process of occupation of English in this area. I have contacts with the most important technology companies in the world and I appeal to the cultural importance of what we do, and what a market of 580 million speakers means. Given this, global technology companies are sensitive. What machines do they contribute to the quality of the language? According to a report by Telefónica, 90,000 words have been lost because they are not in digital proofreaders or machines. Now there are more machines that speak, and that speak more. What will the SAR do? Make available to companies, in a selfless way, the linguistic instruments that the Academy has set up to program their machines. We already have the support of Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Google ... How did you get the Government to be sensitive again with the purposes and problems of the SAR? We have reached an almost in extremis agreement with this Government to continue working. The former Executive [Mariano Rajoy's] was not very sensitive to the things of the Academy. When the current president arrived, I called him to tell him that this was sinking. There was no money to pay the payroll of the 85 workers in this house two months before. They listened to us and gave us the money we needed [five million euros]. We are now establishing links in the private sector to find sponsorships. We have removed the SAR from the situation of serious crisis in which it was.

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