The colonization of America was one of the most significant chapters in the recent history of human civilization. Although the wars of conquest and the process of exploitation of indigenous populations are well known, little is said about the impact that the epidemiological factor had on it, and even less that it was this that, to a large extent, allowed the colonizers to take over vast territories and control natural resources. In the context of the unstoppable advance of the Covid-19 pandemic around the world, it is worth asking who are the most vulnerable and what consequences their potential extinction may have in the short and medium term.
The diseases imported by Europeans into the Americas (typhus, smallpox, measles and the bubonic plague) decimated up to 95% of the population of the hemisphere during the first 130 years of the Conquest. To give an example, the smallpox epidemic was what really defeated the Aztecs, after the failure of the first Spanish attack in 1520, the new Aztec emperor after the death of Moctezuma, Cuitláhuac, had reinforced himself militarily and had put Cortés himself on the ropes. However, smallpox, brought by Panfilo de Narvaez's expedition, would be the invisible and unforeseen weapon that really destroyed the Aztec empire, brutally liquidating the population, starting with the feared and warlike Emperor Cuitláhuac, who was infected with smallpox and would die at the end of this 1520.
Thus, in a little more than a century, the Amerindian population had been reduced to a tiny fraction of its size. Colonization was strengthened and it continued until the arrival of the new Latin American republics. A time when what was left of the same Amerindian peoples and their territories changed hands, but the looting, exploitation and racism of these peoples has continued to this day.
