The conquest of Latin America was out of greed and search for power and fame. Many civilizations nearly or did get wiped out due to the search for gold and other riches. It started out with Columbus looking for a faster water route going to the east that went to the Indies, for a more profitable way to trade, but instead he landed in a whole different (new) world that he didn’t know about and destroyed the whole civilization of the natives that were on Hati by working some to death and taking others as slaves to sell for money.
In 1521 Hernan Cortes, a Spanish explorer destroyed one of the most powerful group of people in America, the Aztecs. When he first arrived, the people showered him with many gifts, and they thought that he was a white god. So Cortes took advantage of this and tries to get more gold from them. One day he takes captures Montezuma and tries to rule himself, but that doesn’t work so he decided to lay a 3 month seige on the city and with the help of some other tribes and the smallpox disease, Cortes is able to take over and establish Mexico City.
The Incan Empire was one of the biggest empires in Latin America, it was located in the Andes Mountains. They were very wealthy in that they had lots of gold and silver. Since the Incas were weakened by small pox and a civil war, it was an easy target for Francisco Piazrro to take. He took the Incan king into captivity and held him for a ransom for a roomful of silver and gold, and when the ransom was paid off Piazrro killed him anyways. There were also hundreds of other groups of Natives that lived in Latin America, besides the Incas and the Aztecs, they are just smaller.
And there were explorers who went in selfishly for gold and destroyed many smaller civilizations in Latin Amereica. I think that the European explorers were very greedy and selfish. One of the reasons that they went to the New World was to convert people to Christianity, but instead they just killed them off or made them into slaves. They saw them as pagans and believed that they were doing God a favor by killing them off. Many of the natives had great civilizations that ended out of the European explorers’ greed for gold and wealth.
