"Swearing that all of their encomienda Indians were dead": how the Taíno extinction story was made (Ayiti, 1500s; article 2002)

SUMMARY"Swearing that all of their encomienda Indians were dead": how the Taíno extinction story was made (Ayiti, 1500s; article 2002) [Connections: Latin America & Caribbean, Nov 5, 2026]

RECORDHistorian Lynne Guitar ("Documenting the Myth of Taíno Extinction," KACIKE, 2002) argues Las Casas "exaggerated the Taíno population decline" to get the encomienda abolished, and that encomenderos wrote to the Crown "swearing that all of their encomienda Indians were dead" in order to request African slaves. She writes that "the Spanish censuses, like that of 1514, are inherently misleading," because they counted only Taíno held in encomiendas, not those who had fled; that whether a mixed child was listed "Spaniard or Indian" depended on social factors; and that "mestizo" and "mulatto" did not appear on census records until the 1580s. She reports Governor Ovando wrote in 1502 that Taíno and Africans frequently ran away together, and that runaway Africans joined Taíno maroons during Enriquillo's rebellion (1519–1534). In 1555 a Spanish patrol found four Indian villages "about whom nobody previously knew." Separately, Wikipedia (citing Guitar 2000) says Spanish documents "declared the Taíno to be extinct in the 16th century, as early as 1550."

PATTERNThe extinction claim came from colonists with a motive (more African labor, end of encomienda), written into censuses that didn't count runaways. Taíno and African people fled together into the same mountains

LENS (WW9)"Extinct" was a paper word written by people who profited from it

OPENGuitar paraphrases the archival letters; the original AGI documents need to be located and quoted

SOURCEGuitar, "Documenting the Myth of Taíno Extinction," KACIKE (2002), PDF; Wikipedia, "Taíno".