During the Atlantic slave trade, Latin America was the main destination of millions of African people transported from Africa to French, Portuguese, and Spanish colonies. Slavery's legacy is the presence of large Afro-Latino populations.
After the Gradual Emancipation of most black slaves, slavery continued along the Pacific coast of South America throughout the 19th century, as Peruvian slave traders kidnapped Polynesians, primarily from the Marquesas Islands and Easter Island and forced them to perform physical labor in mines and in the Guano industry of Peru and Chile.
Encomienda was a labor system in Spain and its empire. It rewarded conquerors with the labor of particular groups of subject people. It was first established in Spain during the Roman period, but used also following the Christian conquest of Muslim territories. It was applied on a much larger scale during the Spanish colonization of the Americas and the Philippines. Conquered peoples were considered vassals of the Spanish monarch. The Crown awarded an encomienda as a grant to a particular individual. In the conquest era of the sixteenth century, the grants were considered to be a monopoly on the labor of particular groups of Indians, held in perpetuity by the grant holder, called the encomendero, and his descendants.
With the ouster of Christopher Columbus, the Spanish crown sent a royal governor, Fray Nicolás de Ovando, who established the formal encomienda system. In many cases natives were forced to do hard labor and subjected to extreme punishment and death if they resisted. One conquistador, Bartolome de las Casas, was sent to the Caribbean in order to conquer the land in the name of the Spanish crown. He was rewarded an encomienda for the effort he gave in honor of the crown, but after years of seeing the poor treatment of indigenous people, he refused to allow such treatment to continue. Las Casas sailed back to Spain, asking King Ferdinand and his wife Isabella to ban indigenous slavery. In return, he suggested the use of African slaves for the hard labor of the new farm lands in the Caribbean. The Spanish by this time had already been using African slaves for some of their hard labor in Europe. Due to the persuasion of Las Casas, Queen Isabella of Castile forbade Indian slavery and deemed the indigenous to be "free vassals of the crown". Various versions of the Leyes de Indias or Laws of the Indies from 1512 onwards attempted to regulate the interactions between the settlers and natives. Both natives and Spaniards appealed to the Real Audiencias for relief under the encomienda system. This caused a greater divide between the Spanish and the lower classes of the indigenous people and the Africans, who maintained the most amount of hard labor. According to the new laws set in place by the Spanish crown, the indigenous people gained some status, albeit still lower than a Spanish citizen. This allowed the Spanish to maintain control over the indigenous people by allowing them to assume they would have some power coming from these new laws. These laws, however, only tricked the indigenous to agreeing to the encomienda system. They were allowed to live a more 'civilized' life among the Spanish, but were under the impression they would eventually gain the ability to own land for themselves, which was never the intention of the Spanish citizens.
The encomienda system brought many indigenous Taíno to work in the fields and mines in exchange for Spanish protection, education, and a seasonal salary. Under the pretense of searching for gold and other materials, many Spaniards took advantage of the regions now under control of the anaborios and Spanish encomenderos to exploit the native population by seizing their land and wealth. It would take some time before the Taíno revolted against their oppressors — both Indian and Spanish alike — and many military campaigns before Emperor Charles V eradicated the encomienda system as a form of slavery. Raphael Lemkin (coiner of the term genocide) considers Spain's abuses of the Native population of the Americas to constitute cultural and even outright genocide including the abuses of the Encomienda system. He described slavery as "cultural genocide par excellence" noting "it is the most effective and thorough method of destroying culture, of desocializing human beings." He considers colonist guilty due to failing to halt the abuses of the system despite royal orders. Recent research suggests that the spread of old-world disease appears to have been aggravated by the extreme climatic conditions of the time and by the poor living conditions and harsh treatment of the native people under the encomienda system of New Spain.
