One word for two opposite things. Under the Inca, the mit'a was a rotating labor obligation — reciprocal, because the state fed and supplied the workers — that built roads, terraces, and storehouses across the Andes. The Spanish kept the name and rotational form but stripped the reciprocity, converting it into a forced-labor draft conscripting indigenous men by the thousands for the silver mines of Potosí and mercury mines of Huancavelica, where poisoning and exhaustion killed at rates no one recorded. Men fled villages to escape it: colonizers seizing an indigenous institution and inverting its meaning.
The Inca had no money. To run an empire across the Andes, they used labor instead: every community owed the state a rotating turn of work, and they called that turn the mit'a. It built the roads, the terraces, and the storehouses, and it was reciprocal, because the state fed and supplied the people while they served. Then the Spanish arrived, and they kept the word. They revived the rotating draft while stripping away much of the reciprocity that had made the Inca system function. Under colonial rule the mita conscripted the men of Andean villages and marched them, often for weeks, to the silver mines of Potosí and the mercury mines of Huancavelica, where mercury poisoning and cave-ins and exhaustion killed them in numbers no one could count. Men fled their homes to escape it. Whole communities were ruined. The same word named both: an institution that once bound an empire together through mutual obligation, and the death sentence the conquerors made of it.