This Incurable Evil: Mapuche Resistance to Spanish Enslavement, 1598-1687 (Atlantic Crossings)

Documents how initial Mapuche-Spanish alliances were built and how they were destroyed by increasingly powerful slave-trading elites operating like organized crime families The history of Spanish presence in the Americas is usually viewed as a one-sided conquest.In Mapuche Resistance to Spanish Enslavement, 1598-1687, Eugene C.Berger provides a major corrective in the case of Chile.For example, in the south, indigenous populations were persistent in their resistance against Spanish settlement.By the end of the sixteenth century, Spanish aspirations to conquer the entire Pacific Coast were dashed at least twice by armed resistance from the Mapuche peoples.By 1600, the Mapuche had killed two Spanish governors and occupied more than a dozen Spanish towns.Chile’s colonial future was quite uncertain. As Berger documents, for much of the seventeenth century it seemed that there could be peace along the Spanish-Mapuche frontier.Through trade, intermarriage, and even mutual distrust of Dutch a