abandoned as all the Spaniards who’d settled there moved
to the new town.
Buenos Aires, the “Paris of South America,” a city of
wide European-style boulevards based on the great
agricultural wealth of the Pampas, was not resettled until
1580. The abandonment of Buenos Aires and the conquest
of the Guaraní reveals the logic of European colonization of
the Americas. Early Spanish and, as we will see, English
colonists were not interested in tilling the soil themselves;
they wanted others to do it for them, and they wanted
riches, gold and silver, to plunder.
F ROM C AJAMARCA …
The expeditions of de Solís, de Mendoza, and de Ayolas
came in the wake of more famous ones that followed
Christopher Columbus’s sighting of one of the islands of
the Bahamas on October 12, 1492. Spanish expansion
and colonization of the Americas began in earnest with the
invasion of Mexico by Hernán Cortés in 1519, the
expedition of Francisco Pizarro to Peru a decade and a
half later, and the expedition of Pedro de Mendoza to the
Río de la Plata just two years after that. Over the next
century, Spain conquered and colonized most of central,
western, and southern South America, while Portugal
claimed Brazil to the east.
The Spanish strategy of colonization was highly effective.
First perfected by Cortés in Mexico, it was based on the
observation that the best way for the Spanish to subdue
opposition was to capture the indigenous leader. This
strategy enabled the Spanish to claim the accumulated
wealth of the leader and coerce the indigenous peoples to
give tribute and food. The next step was setting themselves
up as the new elite of the indigenous society and taking
control of the existing methods of taxation, tribute, and,
particularly, forced labor.
When Cortés and his men arrived at the great Aztec
capital of Tenochtitlan on November 8, 1519, they were
welcomed by Moctezuma, the Aztec emperor, who had
decided, in the face of much advice from his counselors, to
welcome the Spaniards peacefully. What happened next is
well described by the account compiled after 1545 by the