[af_vet_rr]

Can you site any evidence for the Conquistadors torturing children, women and the elderly - let alone sacrificing them.

It is truly amazing how political correctness infects even Free Republic.

I never denied the natives didn't have some brutal practices, I was pointing out that the Spanish were no saints (not even close). Let's face it though, if the Americas didn't have riches that Spain had wanted, you can bet their presence there would not have been as big and as brutal as it was. And if Spain thought they could have easily handled the military fallout, they would have wiped out all of the English and French colonies and tried to hold on to both continents for themselves.

[vbmoneyspender]

I never denied the natives didn't have some brutal practices . . .

For God's sake, the Indians were sacrificing infants and children on a routine basis. Fernando de Alva Cortés Ixtlilxochitl who lived the in the late 16th century and was the great-great-grandson of an Aztec emperor, estimated that up to 20% of the children from captive populations were sacrificed by the Aztecs.

Anyone who stopped that is a good guy in my book.