Bartolome de Las Casas 1484 – 1566

Bartolome de Las Casas was a Spanish Dominican friar, bishop of Chiapas in New Spain, and the most outspoken sixteenth-century defender of the rights of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. After participating as an encomendero in the early conquest of Hispaniola and Cuba, he underwent a profound conversion in 1514 and devoted the rest of his long life to documenting and opposing Spanish abuses, advocating for indigenous rights at the Spanish court, and developing a sustained theological argument for the full humanity and freedom of the peoples of the New World. His Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies and famous Valladolid debate with Sepulveda in 1550 to 1551 remain landmarks in the history of human rights thought.

Bartolomé de Las Casas was born at Seville in 1484 into a merchant family with ties to the Indies. He sailed to Hispaniola in 1502, was ordained around 1510 as the first priest in the Americas, served as chaplain at the conquest of Cuba, and held an encomienda himself until a Whitsuntide sermon in 1514 brought him to renounce his Indians and devote the rest of his life to their cause. He entered the Dominican Order around 1522, attempted utopian peasant settlements at Cumaná and Vera Paz, served as bishop of Chiapas from 1543 to 1547, and after returning to Spain lived in the convent of San Gregorio at Valladolid.

His works include the Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1552), the Confesionario for confessors of encomenderos, In Defense of the Indians (the Apologia of the 1550–51 Valladolid debate against Sepúlveda), the long Historia de las Indias begun in 1527, and the encyclopaedic Apologética Historia Sumaria. He was the principal architect behind the New Laws of 1542 abolishing Indian slavery and limiting the encomienda.

Las Casas argued that the indigenous peoples of the Americas were fully rational human beings entitled to liberty, self-government, and just reception of the gospel by persuasion alone, and condemned the wars of conquest as unjust and the extraction of labour as theft and homicide. His denunciation of Spanish atrocities became foundational to modern human rights, anti-slavery thought, and Latin American liberation theology. He died in Madrid in July 1566.