The Spanish colonist turned Dominican friar who spent fifty years telling the crown that its conquest of the Americas was mass murder. He had arrived in the Caribbean as a young settler and grown rich on a grant of forced Indigenous labor, until around 1514, sickened by the slaughter he had witnessed, he gave it all up. He became a founding figure in the idea of universal human rights, defending the Indigenous peoples as fully human and legally free — though his record carried a grave contradiction he later condemned: his early proposal to import enslaved Africans to relieve the Indians.
Bartolomé de las Casas spent fifty years telling the Spanish crown that its conquest of the Americas was mass murder — and he began as one of the profiteers. As a young settler he held an encomienda, a grant of Indigenous labor, and grew rich on it, until around 1514 the slaughter he had watched turned him into his own nation’s most relentless accuser. He was no spotless saint: he once urged shipping enslaved Africans to spare the Indians, a proposal he later damned as sin. The founder of a human-rights argument had first to unlearn the cruelty of his own age.