Bartolome De Las Casas was born the son of Pedro De Las Casas in 1474. Pedro became a lowly foot soldier with Columbus on his first voyage to the New World, but he acquired so much booty from the expedition that was able to set himself up as a wealthy merchant in Seville..

Pedro was rich enough to be able to send his son to study at the famous University of Salamanca in Seville, where he read law and divinity. Bartolome graduated in law. But he decided not to join a religious order.

In 1502, at the age of twenty-eight, Bartolome joined a Spanish military expedition to Cuba, and in return for his services, was given an ‘ecomiende’ with ‘repartimento’. ‘Ecomiende’ was the land ‘commended’ or to a settler and ‘repartimento’ was the right to demand native peoples work their land virtually as slaves.

In 1506 Bartolome, who was becoming increasingly religious, traveled to Rome where he was ordained as a deacon. In 1510, at the age of thirty-six, Bartolome became the first priest consecrated in the New World.

On Pentecost Sunday, August 15 1511, Bartolome listened to a sermon preached by Father Antonio de Montesinos, who took for his text ‘I am a voice crying in the wilderness’ and then proceeded to denounce Spain’s barbaric conquests on behalf of the native peoples. His words rang in Bartolome’s ears for years.

The very next year Bartolome accompanied the expedition that set out from Hispaniola to occupy Cuba. It was there that Bartolome was finally forced to face the terrible cruelty of the occupation – and his own complicity with it. A native chief, named Hatuey, who had led the resistance against the invasion, was captured. He was ordered to be burnt alive. Bartolome tried to save him. But his protests were dismissed. Bartolome tried to ‘save his soul’ so he could ‘go to heaven’. The chief asked Bartolome whether there would be white men in his heaven. When Bartolome told the chief there would be, Hatuey replied, saying: ‘Then I will not be a Christian, for I would not again go to a place where I must find men so cruel.’[1] .

Bartolome was never the same again. He was determined to take up the fight for human rights on behalf of native peoples for the rest of his life. In 1515 he sailed to Spain to plead their cause before King Ferdinand. When he arrived, he found that the king had died and his successor was out of the country. But the regent was Cardinal Jimenez and when Bartolome told him situation he became a strong, sympathetic supporter.

In 1516 Bartolome De Las Casas returned to the Americas with a commission as ‘Protector of the Indies’.

After investigating the plight of the ‘Indians’ in the Indies, Bartolome returned to Spain to report in 1519. Bartolome argued against military conquest and asked for permission to set up an alternative model colony.

Bartolome eventually got the authorization he needed and, in 1520, traveled to Venezuela to establish his experimental colony of farm communities comprised of free settlers and free natives working side by side.

However, in 1522,after continuous opposition and intermittent violent attacks incited by the ‘ecomendoros’ whose vested economic interests would have been threatened by a successful experiment, the colony failed.

Profoundly discouraged, Bartolome took refuge in Dominican monastery and turned to writing as the only way he had left to continue to advocate for the rights of the native peoples. He began to write his classic three-volume Historia de Las Indies and the Apologetica historia de las Indies. He also wrote his treatise on gentle nonviolent evangelism translated as ‘The Only Way of Drawing Peoples to the True Religion’.

In spite of voices to the contrary, Bartolome managed to convince Pope Paul III to recognize the rational soul and property rights of native peoples promulgated in the groundbreaking papal bull ‘Sublimis Deus’.         

In 1530 Bartolome returned to Spain to obtain a royal decree prohibiting the practice of slavery in Peru, which he delivered to the colony personally. In 1542, after visiting Mexico, Nicaragua and Gautemala and writing his by far most influential work – ‘A Brief Report on the Destruction of the Indians’ – Bartolome returned again to Spain, where he persuaded the king to sign off on the ‘Nuevas Leyes’ or ‘New Laws’ for the ‘New World’ which prohibited the enslavement of any native peoples in any of the Spanish colonies.

In order to enforce the ‘Nuevas Leyes’, Bartolome, by then a member of a Dominican Preaching Order, was appointed Bishop of Chiapas. Upon arrival in 1544, Bartolome proclaimed that any Spaniard who refused to release his ‘Indians’ would be denied absolution.  Bartolome not only faced opposition from the colonists, but his own clergy refused to follow his orders. He tried to allay people’s fears – that he would destroy the economy – by advocating the importation of ‘Negro’ laborers as a substitute for ‘Indian’ laborers. But he made it clear that they were to be treated as free laborers – not slaves – insisting ‘the same law (of 1542) applies equally to the Negro as to the Indian’.[2]

But the planters wanted to keep their slaves and threatened kill Bartolome if he continued to demand their manumission. In 1547, Bartolome was forced to flee in fear of his life. He never returned to the Americas. But Bartolome continued lobby on behalf of his beloved ‘Indians’ at court in Spain until his death in 1566.