Cortés and Pizarro: conquest, thanatopolitics and imperial memory. From Abya Yala to contemporary Spain

Introduction. The return of the conquistadors

In July 2026, during celebrations in Spain following the men’s Football World Cup, Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro reappeared in a seemingly unlikely setting: chants, street statements and interviews broadcast on free-to-air radio and television in which their names were invoked as signs of Spanish greatness. In the scenes that prompted this study, the presence of young men was particularly visible. That observation does not constitute a representative sociological sample and does not justify speaking of “Spanish youth” as a homogeneous bloc. It does, however, raise an unusually fertile historical question: what makes it possible for two protagonists of the sixteenth-century Castilian conquests to continue functioning, five centuries later, as positive emblems of identity, masculinity and national victory?

The question immediately shifts the object of study. Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro matter because of what they did, but also because of what they wrote, or had written, about themselves; because of the political and economic structures their campaigns helped to establish; and because successive generations selected particular aspects of their biographies and turned them into national memory.

In Cortés’s case, the production of the character began almost in real time. The Cartas de relación were not written for researchers five centuries later, but for Charles V. The conquistador had to justify his decisions, neutralise Diego Velázquez’s accusations, obtain political recognition and demonstrate that an initially irregular venture could be interpreted as an exceptional service to the monarchy. The Cartas are therefore a historical source of enormous value and, at the same time, a political intervention and an exercise in self-representation. Aracil Varón (2009) has examined precisely this literary construction of the hero: Cortés was a protagonist of the conquest and, simultaneously, one of the first makers of the myth of Cortés.

The traditional scene of Pizarro at Cajamarca produced a similar effect. The number of members of the Spanish contingent —168 in the celebrated capture of Atahualpa— retrospectively acquired an almost mythical function: to demonstrate that a small group of Europeans could defeat a vast empire by virtue of an alleged technological, military, cultural or even racial superiority. Yet the number ceases to explain the conquest as soon as Huáscar and Atahualpa’s succession war, the epidemics, the tensions among different societies incorporated into the Tawantinsuyu, and the Indigenous alliances that made the subsequent expansion of the new power possible are brought back into view.

This essay therefore begins from a first hypothesis. Cortés and Pizarro were extraordinarily effective political-military entrepreneurs of conquest, simultaneously interested in wealth, social advancement, service to the monarchy and Christian expansion, but the success of their ventures was inseparable from the agency of Indigenous societies, pre-existing political conflicts, cultural mediation and epidemiological contingencies that the narrative of the exceptional conquistador eventually suppressed.

The second hypothesis concerns consequences. It would be historically illegitimate to attribute personally to Cortés or Pizarro everything that happened over the following centuries. Pizarro died before colonial exploitation of Potosí began, and Cortés did not design the whole institutional order of New Spain. Nevertheless, their campaigns decisively helped to open spaces upon which durable systems of sovereignty, taxation, territorial appropriation, coercive labour, evangelisation and extraction were organised.

To analyse certain dimensions of that process, these pages use the concept of thanatopolitics. It is worth stating from the outset why. The term necropolitics, formulated by Achille Mbembe (2003), is now more widely used and allows us to think about forms of sovereignty that produce spaces in which some populations are radically exposed to death. Here, however, thanatopolitics is deliberately used following Juan Carlos Sánchez-Antonio (2020), because his work addresses the conquest of the Americas specifically and relates colonialism, enslavement, capitalism and epistemic racism. The two categories are in dialogue, but they are not equivalent. Choosing thanatopolitics is not intended to attribute the concept to Cortés, Pizarro or Palacios Rubios —that would be anachronistic— but to use a contemporary analytical tool to ask what structures made it possible for some lives to be exposed to war, enslavement, hunger, the mine, mercury or public punishment under conditions that would not have been considered acceptable for others.

The third hypothesis definitively turns a problem of the Early Modern period into one of Contemporary History. The Cortés and Pizarro who reappear in 2026 do not come directly from the sixteenth century. Five centuries of reinterpretation stand between them and the present. The nineteenth century turned them into national figures; Spain’s imperial crisis added new meanings; Francoism incorporated conquest, Catholicity and Hispanidad into its symbolic system; and social media have now created another material regime for the circulation of those narratives.

The purpose of these pages, then, is not to deliver a moral verdict that replaces heroes with demons. It is something more demanding: to restore to these figures what heroic construction has had to erase in order for them to be admired without conflict.

Conquest, Indigenous agency and the making of the victor

The fall of Tenochtitlan is one of the clearest examples of the way heroic biography can distort a war. For generations it was narrated as an extraordinary victory by Hernán Cortés and a few hundred Spanish combatants over a vastly more numerous empire. The narrative remains culturally powerful because it contains an almost perfect heroic structure: a small contingent, an unknown territory, extreme adversity and an apparently impossible victory.

Contemporary historiography has dismantled much of that structure. Restall (2003) made the invisibilisation of the thousands of Indigenous combatants and agents without whom the European expeditions are unintelligible one of the central problems of Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest. Tlaxcalans, Totonacs and other groups were not extras in a Castilian epic. They took part for political reasons of their own. The relations of domination constructed by the Mexica Triple Alliance, tribute, rivalries among political entities and wars predating Cortés’s arrival are all part of the explanation.

Recognising this requires correcting two images at once. The first is that of the supernaturally superior conquistador. The second is that of a homogeneous, peaceful and passive Indigenous population across the continent. Mesoamerican societies did not constitute a nation called Mexico waiting for a foreign invasion. The Mexican state did not exist. Nor was there a shared continental identity that would allow Tlaxcala to be interpreted as the “traitor” of a future national community.

This is particularly important for understanding Malintzin. Retrospectively transformed into “La Malinche” and a symbol of betrayal, she can only be understood within far more complex circumstances. She had been enslaved before entering Cortés’s circle and possessed linguistic and cultural knowledge that made her indispensable to political communication. She translated words, but also political systems, intentions, alliances and threats. The conquest would not have been the same without her.

Recognising that capacity for intervention does not require romanticising her situation. Historical agency does not imply absolute freedom. People make decisions from profoundly unequal positions.

In the Andes we find an analogous configuration. Pizarro arrived in a Tawantinsuyu that had just endured a devastating succession conflict and in which different societies maintained ambivalent relationships with Inca authority. Atahualpa’s capture at Cajamarca was a military operation of enormous political effectiveness, but it did not by itself constitute the “conquest of Peru”. The histories of Cañaris, Huancas, Chachapoyas and other peoples must be incorporated precisely because they break the myth of a binary confrontation between “Spain” and “the Incas”.

This does not turn the Spanish conquest into the liberation of peoples oppressed by Mexica or Inca rule. Political alliances do not contain guarantees about the world that will exist after victory. A society could consider it useful to fight alongside Cortés against Tenochtitlan and later discover that the new colonial order did not meet its expectations either. The same could happen in the Andes. Restoring Indigenous agency therefore means restoring uncertainty to history.

It also requires clarifying the use of Abya Yala. The term comes from the Guna language and was adopted by contemporary Indigenous movements as an alternative to “America”. Its continental use became consolidated during the twentieth century and gained particular political density in the context of Indigenous mobilisation around the 500th anniversary in 1992. Its use here is therefore a contemporary political and epistemological choice, not a claim that pre-Columbian societies collectively called themselves by that name. Speaking of Abya Yala reminds us that continental history does not begin when Europe names it, but it must not retrospectively manufacture a unity that did not exist.

Indigenous sources are fundamental precisely because they reveal differences. Book XII of the Florentine Codex preserves Nahua memories of the conquest within a complex work created by Bernardino de Sahagún together with Nahua principals, authors and artists (Sahagún, 1577; Digital Florentine Codex, 2023). Tlaxcalan traditions produce a different memory, that of a community claiming its own role. In the Andes, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala constructed in his Nueva corónica y buen gobierno a monumental critique of colonial order from within his own textual forms.

These sources do not provide transparent access to an intact pre-colonial voice. They were produced under colonial conditions, through translations, alphabets and categories that must themselves be analysed. But they prevent us from continuing to treat conquered societies as silent objects.

The comparison with Zheng He also introduces an important question about the inevitability of conquest. Gavin Menzies’s 1421: The Year China Discovered the World does not provide a valid historiographical alternative: the claim that Ming fleets circumnavigated the globe and reached the Americas lacks the evidence that such a thesis would require. Finlay (2004) demonstrated the serious documentary and methodological problems in that proposal.

Zheng He’s expeditions between 1405 and 1433 did exist. They were enormous naval ventures of the Ming dynasty aimed at projecting power, tributary diplomacy and trade, and should not be idealised as purely peaceful enterprises, since they could exercise force and coercion (Wade, 2020). The historically interesting difference is elsewhere: the capacity for oceanic navigation does not necessarily produce territorial colonisation. The Ming project did not create in the Indian Ocean an institutional structure comparable to the American viceroyalties, the encomienda, plantations or Potosí. Maritime expansion does not automatically determine the political form of expansion.

Bodies, land and wealth: from demographic catastrophe to Potosí

The question of the victims of conquest probably requires more caution than any other aspect of this research.

Koch, Brierley, Maslin and Lewis (2019) conducted an extensive review of regional estimates and proposed a pre-1492 population for the Americas of approximately 60.5 million people, with a very considerable range of uncertainty. Their reconstruction suggests that by around 1600 the decline had reached roughly 90 per cent, a fall on the order of 56 million inhabitants.

This is not a census. It is a synthetic estimate. Historiographical debates have produced much lower and much higher pre-contact figures, from the tradition associated with Ángel Rosenblat to the high estimates of Henry Dobyns. For precisely that reason, Koch et al.’s figure should be used as an order of magnitude, not as an exact tally of bodies.

Still less can it automatically be transformed into the sentence “Spain killed 56 million people”. Disease was the principal agent of mortality in many regions. Smallpox, measles and other Old World infections encountered populations with no prior immunological experience of them. But a biological explanation does not automatically turn the phenomenon into a natural catastrophe. Epidemics affect societies. A population simultaneously subjected to warfare, displacement, destruction of crops, breakdown of community networks, hunger or coercive labour does not have the same capacity for resistance and recovery as one that is not.

The Mexican case allows the regional scale to be observed with greater precision. Acuña-Soto et al. (2002) estimated between five and eight million deaths during the smallpox epidemic of 1519–1520 and placed the major cocoliztli epidemics of 1545 and 1576 among the most devastating in the history of New Spain. Figures should not, however, simply be accumulated as though they were independent segments of a single continental counter: the reference populations change, the sources are incomplete and the epidemiological causes remain a subject of research.

Indeed, early twenty-first-century studies proposed haemorrhagic fevers favoured by extreme climatic conditions as an explanation for cocoliztli, whereas later analyses of ancient DNA identified Salmonella enterica serovar Paratyphi C in victims associated with the 1545–1550 epidemic at Teposcolula-Yucundaa and proposed it as an important candidate, not as a definitively closed explanation for the entire continental outbreak (Vågene et al., 2018).

Precision changes the argument. It was not “one disease”. It was a setting of pathogens, climate, conquest and social disruption whose proportions varied by region and moment.

The catastrophe even had detectable consequences for global ecology. Koch et al. (2019) estimate that approximately 55.8 million hectares of previously used land may have been abandoned, enabling vegetation recovery and the sequestration of approximately 7.4 petagrams of carbon. This is one of the factors used to analyse the decline in atmospheric CO₂ around the seventeenth century.

This produces an apparent paradox. Colonisation generated reforestation through depopulation in some places while, at the same time, unleashing new and extraordinarily intensive forms of exploitation elsewhere.

Sugar allows us to observe that second trajectory. Cortés does not disappear from our investigation once Tenochtitlan is conquered. In Cuernavaca he developed sugar interests and participated in a process that Gisela von Wobeser (2004, 2019) has studied in order to explain the formation of the hacienda and the growing appropriation of land and water.

A plantation is not simply a field containing an imported crop. It requires land, water, fuel, mills, animals, credit, transport and labour. The environmental history of sugar is therefore also social history. Across different parts of the Caribbean and the continent, its expansion became deeply bound up with the enslavement of African and Afro-descendant populations. Funes Monzote (2008) has shown for Cuba the long-term relationship between sugar expansion and forest loss, although that transformation passed through different phases and reached especially extraordinary intensities in later periods.

Archaeological and historical-ecological research at Betty’s Hope, Antigua, offers a useful methodological caution. Three centuries of sugar monoculture left a profoundly transformed landscape, but present-day degradation cannot be attributed exclusively to the plantation, since later destabilisation following the abandonment of agricultural infrastructure also played a part (Pratt et al., 2020). This complexity is preferable to manufacturing a figure for “colonial erosion” that cannot be defended.

Pizarro’s history leads towards another material: metal. Atahualpa’s capture at Cajamarca generated an extraordinary transfer of gold and silver. Objects that held political, ceremonial or religious functions within the Andean world were gathered as ransom, melted down and transformed into divisible matter.

Melting has an extraordinary symbolic dimension. The object disappears. The metal remains. A particular piece, embedded in specific social relations, becomes a homogeneous quantity that can be weighed, divided, taxed and transported.

Pizarro never knew colonial Potosí. He died in 1541; Cerro Rico was incorporated into the great Spanish mining system from 1545 onwards. Yet Potosí belongs to the history of the political order opened by conquest. The colonial mita, reorganised by Viceroy Toledo from 1573, compelled communities across broad regions of the Andes to provide labour for the mining complex. Cole (1985) reconstructed the evolution of that system between 1573 and 1700 in detail, including Indigenous strategies for avoiding a service that could be devastating for families and communities.

This point helps to clarify the use of Michael Taussig. Taussig should not become our demographic source for Potosí. His importance is different and perhaps more interesting. In The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, Taussig (1980) analyses how certain working populations interpret economic relations that turn land, labour and life into commodities. The figure of the Devil or the Tío in Andean mining worlds does not appear merely as a superstitious survival, but as a cultural reflection on relations of production in which wealth seems to acquire a logic alien to communal reciprocity.

Economy has a cosmology.

And the mine also has a toxicology.

Robins and Hagan (2012) estimate approximately 18,000 metric tonnes of silver produced in the city of Potosí between 1574 and 1735, including an estimate of unregistered output. For 1736–1760 they add approximately 1,600 tonnes.

But the figure that radically alters the gleaming image of silver is mercury. The same authors estimate approximately 39,000 metric tonnes of mercury released as vapour during silver refining in Potosí between 1574 and 1810, in addition to around 17,000 tonnes emitted during mercury production at Huancavelica. The historical record contains descriptions consistent with mercury poisoning (Robins & Hagan, 2012).

Silver could leave the Andes. Part of the damage remained there.

This is where thanatopolitics acquires its full significance. An authority does not need formally to pass a death sentence for there to be a differential politics of exposure to death. A system may need the working body alive and simultaneously accept that certain populations endure levels of risk, illness and exhaustion that would not be tolerated for others.

That structure allows us to understand more clearly what it means to turn bodies into economic inputs.

It also helps explain why any attempt to translate Potosí into contemporary dollars must be made with extreme care. Taking the COMEX settlement of US$64.873 per troy ounce on 13 August 2026 as a benchmark, the 18,000 tonnes estimated by Robins and Hagan would be worth roughly US$37.5 billion as metal alone. If the approximately 1,600 additional tonnes estimated through 1760 are included, the order of magnitude is more than US$40 billion (The Wall Street Journal, 2026).

Volatility immediately demonstrates the contingency of the exercise. In January 2026 silver briefly exceeded US$100 per ounce. Had the same calculation been made then, the “valuation” would have been tens of billions higher. The historical silver did not change; our market did.

That is why the figure does not mean that “Spain stole forty billion dollars”. It does not measure seventeenth-century purchasing power, Crown revenues, smuggling, the financing of European wars, circulation towards Asia, mercury, the rupture of communities or human lives. The conversion is useful as an exercise in scale and, paradoxically, demonstrates the inadequacy of reducing colonialism to a monetary figure.

The frigate Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes reinforces this conclusion. The assemblage recovered after the litigation with Odyssey Marine Exploration contains 212 gold coins and more than 574,000 silver coins, according to Spain’s institutional cataloguing (Instituto del Patrimonio Cultural de España, n.d.). The figure of “500 million dollars” circulated during the case should be attributed to commercial and media estimates linked to the collection’s numismatic potential, not to an institutional Spanish valuation.

The judicial outcome adds another dimension. In September 2011, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit confirmed that the Mercedes was a Spanish warship and that both the wreck and its cargo were protected by sovereign immunity from judicial arrest and Odyssey’s salvage claims. In 2012, the US Supreme Court rejected applications for a stay and later the petition for review, after which the cargo was delivered to Spain (Odyssey Marine Exploration, Inc. v. The Unidentified Shipwrecked Vessel, 2011, 2012). The litigation therefore reinforced the application of sovereign immunity to a historic warship and showed that even the contemporary conversion of a colonial wreck into a commodity is subject to disputes over sovereignty, heritage and jurisdiction.

And that distinction is precisely what matters. A coin can have metallic, numismatic, archaeological, documentary and heritage value.

History is not a bullion bar.

Law, religion and thanatopolitics: the Requerimiento

Conquest did not require soldiers alone. It also required an explanation of why people who had just arrived possessed the right to rule societies that had never recognised them.

The debates arising from the Junta of Burgos culminated in an especially revealing instrument: the Requerimiento, formally prepared by Juan López de Palacios Rubios and used from 1513 onwards. Its logic lays almost bare a juridical technology for legitimising violence.

The version reproduced below is a complete normalised reading transcription, based on the tradition disseminated by Hanke (1959) and comparable with the documentary variants edited in the Corpus Hispanorum de Pace. It is not a diplomatic edition of a specific manuscript.

Editorial note: the textual tradition contains variants, including in Fernando’s titulature; the expression “King of Spain” found in some modernised versions should therefore not be projected uncritically onto the legal structure of the Iberian monarchies in 1513.

REQUERIMIENTO

On behalf of the most high and powerful and most Catholic defender of the Church, always victorious and never defeated, the great King Don Fernando V of Spain, of the Two Sicilies, of Jerusalem, of the Islands and Mainland of the Ocean Sea, and so forth, conqueror of barbarous peoples, and of the most high and powerful Lady Queen Doña Juana, his most dear and beloved daughter, our sovereigns, I, [name of captain], their servant, messenger and captain, hereby notify you and make known to you, as best I can:

That God our Lord, one and eternal, created heaven and earth, and one man and one woman, from whom we and you and all the people of the world were and are descended and begotten, as will be all those who come after us. But because of the multitude of generations that has proceeded from them in the five thousand and more years since the world was created, it became necessary that some people should go one way and others another, and that they should be divided among many kingdoms and provinces, since in one alone they could not be sustained or preserved.

Over all these peoples God our Lord placed one who was called Saint Peter, so that he should be lord and superior over all the people in the world, whom all should obey, and that he should be head of the whole human lineage wherever people might live and dwell, and under whatever law, sect or belief; and He gave him the whole world as his lordship and jurisdiction. And although He commanded him to establish his seat in Rome, as the place most suitable for governing the world, He also allowed him to be and place his seat in any other part of the world and to judge and govern all peoples: Christians, Moors, Jews, Gentiles and those of any other sect or belief. This person was called Pope, which means admirable, greatest father and guardian, because he is father and governor of all people. Those who lived at that time obeyed this Saint Peter and accepted him as king and lord and superior of the universe; and likewise they have regarded all those who after him were elected to the pontificate; and so it has continued until now and will continue until the world comes to an end.

One of the past pontiffs who succeeded to the seat and dignity I have described, as lord of the world, made a donation of these islands and mainland of the Ocean Sea to the said Kings of Spain, our sovereigns, together with all that is in them, as is set out in certain documents made concerning the matter, as has been stated, which you may see if you wish. Thus Their Highnesses are kings and lords of these islands and mainland by virtue of that donation; and as such kings and lords, some islands, and indeed almost all those to whom this has been notified, have received Their Highnesses and have obeyed and served them, and continue to serve them, as subjects are bound to do; and willingly and without any resistance or contradiction, immediately and without delay, once informed of the foregoing, they obeyed and received the religious men whom Their Highnesses sent to preach and teach them our holy faith; and all of them, of their own free and willing choice, without reward or condition, became Christians and remain so; and Their Highnesses received them gladly and kindly and ordered that they be treated like their other subjects and vassals. And you are bound and obliged to do the same.

Therefore, as best I can, I ask and require you to understand well what I have told you, and to take such time as is just to understand and deliberate upon it, and to recognise the Church as mistress and superior of the whole world, and the supreme pontiff called the Pope, in her name, and Their Highnesses in his place, as superiors and lords and kings of these islands and mainland, by virtue of the said donation; and that you consent and allow these religious fathers to explain and preach the foregoing to you.

If you do so, you will do well and fulfil that to which you are bound and obliged; and Their Highnesses, and I in their name, will receive you with all love and charity, and will leave your women and children and property free, without servitude, so that you may freely do with them and with yourselves whatever you wish and deem proper; and you will not be compelled to become Christians unless, once informed of the truth, you yourselves wish to convert to our holy Catholic faith, as almost all the inhabitants of the other islands have done; and in addition His Highness will grant you many privileges and exemptions and bestow many favours upon you.

If you do not do so, or maliciously delay in doing so, I certify to you that with the help of God I shall enter powerfully against you and make war upon you in every way and manner that I can, and I shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and of Their Highnesses; and I shall take your persons and those of your women and children and make slaves of them, and as such I shall sell and dispose of them as His Highness commands; and I shall take your goods, and I shall do to you all the evils and injuries that I can, as to vassals who do not obey and refuse to receive their lord and who resist and contradict him. And I declare that the deaths and injuries that arise from this shall be your fault, and not that of His Highness, nor mine, nor that of these gentlemen who have come with me; and as evidence that I have told and required this of you, I ask the present notary to give me a signed record thereof, and I ask those present to be witnesses to it.

The document is extraordinary because it allows us to observe the entire mechanism of legitimation. First it formulates a universal history grounded in Christianity. It then attributes universal jurisdiction to Saint Peter and the papacy. Next it claims that this jurisdiction has made it possible to transfer territorial authority to the monarchy. Only then does it offer the populations addressed a supposed choice: obey or suffer war, dispossession and enslavement.

The most revealing point lies in the final sentence: future deaths and injuries will be the fault of those who are to suffer them.

Thanatopolitics finds an especially fertile formulation here. The text does not merely authorise violence: it distributes in advance the moral responsibility for dying. Power decides that it may kill and, simultaneously, turns the victim into the cause of their own death.

This does not mean that the Requerimiento was applied identically in every campaign. It does show that violence required a juridical technology in order to represent itself as just.

And it demonstrates something else of importance. Not everyone “thought the same way” in the sixteenth century.

Antonio de Montesinos had delivered his famous 1511 sermon on Hispaniola before Cortés’s expedition and two decades before Cajamarca. The reconstruction transmitted by Bartolomé de las Casas explicitly asks by what right Indigenous populations were being kept in cruel servitude.

Between Montesinos’s sermon and the Requerimiento of 1513, the Crown also responded through regulation. The Laws of Burgos of 1512 constituted the first colonial code of modern Europe and the first written body of rules to regulate labour relations in general between conquerors and conquered populations in the Americas. Although they contained provisions intended to limit certain abuses, they entrenched the encomienda and articulated a broad programme of compulsory labour and forced acculturation (Pizarro Zelaya, 2013). Moral criticism therefore did not abolish the system: the institutional response regulated it juridically and sought to make it compatible with the Crown’s legitimacy.

Las Casas is even more interesting because of his contradictions. He had initially participated in the colonial system, had been an encomendero and, for a period, proposed the importation of enslaved Africans as an alternative to Indigenous labour, a position he later rejected. His Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias likewise cannot be used as modern statistics. It is a polemical and political intervention. Its figures require corroboration. But its very existence destroys the idea that violence only becomes visible from contemporary values.

Francisco de Vitoria took the debate into legal theory. In De Indis he denied that religious unbelief deprived Indigenous populations of dominion over their goods and questioned the papacy’s capacity simply to transfer temporal sovereignty. Yet Vitoria should not be turned into a contemporary defender of self-determination either. His theory of ius communicationis and other titles could open new justificatory avenues for European presence and intervention.

The importance of Montesinos, Las Casas and Vitoria lies precisely in their ability to dismantle a contemporary apologetic refuge: colonial violence was contestable within the very world that was producing it.

The Catholic Church occupies a structurally complex position here. It was a fundamental agent of evangelisation and cultural discipline and was closely articulated with the Crown through the Royal Patronage. At the same time, it produced some of the most important challenges to colonial domination.

But its power was not merely spiritual. The Church also became a major property owner, administered assets, tithes and rents, and participated in credit circuits through chaplaincies, convents and other foundations (Schwaller, 2016). The economic dimension matters because it demonstrates that the Church was not simply a theological voice standing opposite colonial power: it formed part of the material structures of that world.

It is therefore not enough to say that “the Church evangelised” or that “some religious figures defended Indigenous populations”. Power, property, jurisdiction and conflict within the institution must all be studied.

From Túpac Amaru to the modern manufacture of the conquistador

The conquest did not end with Tenochtitlan or Cajamarca. Castilian occupation produced institutions that continued to change over centuries. The rebellion led by José Gabriel Condorcanqui, Túpac Amaru II, and Micaela Bastidas in 1780–1781 allows us to observe this longue durée without imagining an immutable continuity.

Micaela Bastidas must appear here as a leader and strategist, not merely as “Túpac Amaru’s wife”. Historiography has demonstrated her capacity for organisation, recruitment, communication and decision-making. The executions of 18 May 1781 were designed as political spectacle.

Micaela and Túpac Amaru witnessed the death of their son Hipólito and other people close to them. Micaela Bastidas’s sentence ordered the amputation of her tongue before execution. Her death by garrotte was particularly brutal. Túpac Amaru came afterwards. An attempt was made to tear his limbs apart with four horses. It failed. He was executed and his body was subsequently dismembered. The body parts of those who led the rebellion were distributed among numerous localities as a warning. The documentation places Túpac Amaru’s head at Tinta, one of his arms at Tungasuca and other remains at Carabaya, Livitaca and Santa Rosa; parts of Micaela Bastidas’s body were likewise displayed at different points within the insurgent territory. Walker (2014) shows that by the end of May 1781 remains of both were still publicly displayed in places such as Tinta, Tungasuca and Pampamarca. The corpse thus became a cartography of sovereignty: wherever authority had been challenged, the consequence of challenging it had to be made visible.

The difference between the legend of “live quartering” and the documented sequence does not diminish the violence. It makes it more historical. The body was deliberately turned into a medium of communication.

The execution was not meant to end when life ceased: the corpse itself had to continue governing, extending sovereign punishment across the territory through its public display.

It is difficult to find a clearer example of thanatopolitics: death transformed into territorial pedagogy.

The rebellion took place almost two and a half centuries after Cajamarca. That alone is enough to show why “the conquest” cannot be treated as an event completed within a single generation.

At the same time, however, another process was beginning: the transformation of the conquistador into a national character.

Franco did not invent the heroic Cortés. His celebratory memory had been constructed much earlier. Soriano Muñoz (2019) has examined Cortés’s presence in Bourbon military historical culture at the end of the colonial period. Escribano Roca (2022) subsequently demonstrates how the political cultures of nineteenth-century Spanish Romantic nationalism turned the conquest of Mexico into a repertoire open to different appropriations.

This stage is crucial to our contemporary problem. The conquistador begins to function as a model of national character: courage, initiative, honour, the winning of fortune, military superiority and, especially significantly, virility.

That Cortés can be appropriated by different political cultures because the myth is extraordinarily elastic. It is unnecessary to reproduce sixteenth-century ideology exactly in order to admire the conquistador. It is enough to select certain attributes.

The later imperial crisis, especially around 1898, added another layer. The loss of Spain’s last major colonies encouraged an obsessive reflection on decadence, regeneration and lost greatness. Empire could disappear territorially and yet gain weight as memory.

This process prepared the ground for Francoism.

The dictatorship inherited an image of conquest that had already been profoundly reworked and inserted it into its own conception of Hispanidad. Empire, Catholicity, language and historical mission could be represented as elements of the same Spanish essence.

The operation required extensive selection. Victory, the conquistador, evangelisation, silver and Potosí as wealth remained visible, while Indigenous coalitions, Malintzin, the Requerimiento, mercury and the mita receded from view. That is how heroic memory works: it need not falsify every event, but only manage which events deserve to be remembered.

The relationship between this imaginary and the Spanish Civil War requires particular care in avoiding easy explanations. Cortés did not cause 1936. Neither did Pizarro. The conquest of the Americas did not mechanically produce a military coup four centuries later.

But between historical imperialism and the Spanish Civil War there is a much more immediate and documentarily solid colonial bridge: Morocco.

Balfour (2002) and Balfour and La Porte (2000) show that Spanish campaigns in the Rif produced specific military cultures and that, during the later phases of the Moroccan wars, an Africanist culture characterised by authoritarianism, political interventionism and a particular patriotic mythology gained weight. Central figures in the military rebellion of 1936 were formed within that world.

These were not simply metaphors. The Army of Africa was literally a colonial army. Wright (2020) puts the number of Moroccans who fought in the Francoist army during the Spanish Civil War at 78,504; Spain’s Historical Memory Documentation Centre, drawing on different historiographical calculations, gives a broader range of approximately 62,000 to 85,000. The specific figure must therefore be read as an estimate within a documentary and historiographical range, not as a closed count (Ministerio de Cultura, n.d.).

It is important not to reduce these people to “brutal mercenaries” within an exclusively Peninsular narrative. They came from a colonised society and many enlisted under conditions marked by poverty, pressure and material necessity. Propaganda also used them ambivalently: they could be celebrated as heroic allies of the rebel side and, at the same time, represented through racialised and sexualised imaginaries. Madariaga (2015) has shown precisely how their participation reactivated and reformulated on the Peninsula a long colonial construction of the figure of the “Moor”. This ambivalence reminds us that colonialism was not merely a geographical relationship between metropole and colony, but also a system of hierarchies capable of being transferred to and reformulated within the Peninsula itself.

Badajoz, in August 1936, allows the intensity of these practices of conquest and occupation to be observed without positing a mechanical Rif–Peninsula transfer. Alonso Ibarra (2023) analyses the taking of the city as a paradigmatic episode in rebel dynamics of conquest, occupation and punishment: executions reached several thousand victims and coexisted with looting and other forms of violence. The case permits us to study the circulation of repertoires of violence within an army for which colonial experience was central, but does not in itself justify claiming that every practice at Badajoz was a technique directly “imported” from the Rif.

A defensible continuity therefore takes a more precise form. It is not a straight causal line but a genealogy made up of imperial memories, colonial military culture, Moroccan experience, Africanism, the Army of Africa, the military coup and the subsequent Francoist reappropriation of Hispanidad. That genealogy leads into a past that is still not closed.

In a decision adopted on 28 October 2020 —and circulated in documentary form in 2021— the United Nations Human Rights Committee reproduced the estimate made by Central Examining Court No. 5 of Spain’s National Court of “at least 114,226” victims of enforced disappearance during the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent dictatorship (United Nations Human Rights Committee, 2021, para. 2.2). This is not a definitive official census. The words “at least” themselves, together with the continuing exhumations, investigations and identifications, remind us that the open character of the figure is part of the historical and democratic problem. Graves still exist, and families still do not know the whereabouts of people who were killed. The figure is not an endpoint, but a reminder that the work of truth, identification and memory remains unfinished.

Law 20/2022 on Democratic Memory expressly recognises the right to truth and assigns public authorities responsibilities in the search for people who disappeared during the war and the dictatorship.

This reality changes the moral problem of Francoist nostalgia.

The fundamental question is not whether every expression praising Franco should be criminalised.

A democracy is not exhausted by its Criminal Code.

People live in Spain whose relatives were murdered, forcibly disappeared or buried in graves that remain unidentified. Praise for the dictatorship occurs in front of those people. Its capacity to cause harm does not depend solely on whether a judge can punish it.

This makes possible a deeper criticism of the framework of democratic reparation. A legal system may recognise the right to locate and exhume victims while, at the same time, offering very weak protection against the public normalisation of the regime that produced those violations.

That is not necessarily a legal contradiction.

It may nevertheless be a democratic insufficiency.

The conquistador in 2026: masculinity, disinformation and the attention economy

We thus return to where the essay began: young men chanting or praising Cortés and Pizarro.

Existing research calls for precision. There is no uniformly rightward-moving Spanish youth, nor is there a form of masculinity that automatically leads to a particular political choice. Yet some recent studies do identify specific phenomena among sectors of young men.

León-Ranero and Cheddadi El Haddad (2024) have studied the factors that distinguish the youth vote for Vox from that for the Partido Popular. Pérez Gallo (2025), in a qualitative study of young men in situations of social exclusion in Zaragoza, links precarity, institutional disenchantment and perceived status erosion with subjectivities favourable to Vox. Among the findings are feminism constructed as a “cultural enemy”, homosocial contexts and voting understood as a masculine performance of symbolic resistance. Ranea-Triviño and Brandariz Portela (2025) have likewise analysed the relationship between the radical right, the anti-feminist agenda and performances of hegemonic masculinity.

To this framework it is useful to add the work of the philosopher María Ávila Bravo-Villasante. In “Radicalización violenta y misoginia extrema” (2023), Ávila places the manosphere and, especially, the incelosphere within a longer genealogy of anti-feminism, crises of masculinity and cultural reaction, stressing the intersection between the affective turn and the digital turn. A year later, in “Machosfera, discursos de odio y algoritmización de la esfera pública” (2024), she shifts the analysis towards technological structure: radicalisation cannot be explained solely by the historical existence of anti-feminism, but also by the way those narratives intersect with digital communities and with platform-ranking policies that favour polarisation, radicalisation, anger and violence (Ávila Bravo-Villasante, 2024).

Her contribution is especially useful here because it avoids two reductions. On the one hand, it prevents us from claiming that social media “created” anti-feminism or reactionary masculinity. On the other, it prevents us from treating digital infrastructure as a neutral pipe through which pre-existing ideas simply flow.

None of this allows us to claim that those who chant “Cortés” vote for Vox, participate in the manosphere or consume misogynistic content. It does allow a more precise cultural hypothesis: the traditional conquistador is a symbol exceptionally compatible with certain models of political masculinity, appearing as someone who acts, wins, conquers territory, dominates opponents and does not apologise. The heroic narrative thus turns violence into proof of character. Historiography does the opposite by introducing mediation, doubt, defeat, Indigenous people making decisions, indispensable women, epidemics, contracts, debts, courts, mercury and the dead. Perhaps part of the myth’s contemporary effectiveness lies precisely there: its simplicity is a political advantage.

Social media also provide an infrastructure particularly favourable to simple, emotional and easily recognisable narratives. Martínez Antón and Cano-Orón (2026) analysed 283 historical videos about Francoism on TikTok and found a significant presence of restorative nostalgia: a past not merely remembered, but idealised as a lost order that can be reclaimed.

Francoism can thus become content before it becomes doctrine, through a song, a uniform, a montage, a phrase, a flag or a joke whose supposed irony always offers a retreat when someone challenges the message. The same can happen with Cortés or Pizarro: “A few hundred Spaniards conquered an empire” fits into a ten-second video; historical explanation does not.

Nor did social media invent historical falsehoods. But they radically changed the conditions under which they circulate. Gamir-Ríos and Lava-Santos (2022) analysed disinformation about history, democratic memory and state symbolism debunked by Spanish fact-checkers and showed that the past forms part of the disinformation battles of the present.

What is new in the last decade is scale, speed and automation; corporate responsibility can therefore no longer be explained through the metaphor of a neutral platform. Meta designs the architecture of Facebook and Instagram, Google that of YouTube, and TikTok and X their respective systems. They do not personally produce every message, but they do design systems that determine what is recommended, what can be monetised, what friction exists before sharing, what content is moderated and what data researchers are allowed to analyse.

Ávila Bravo-Villasante (2024) is particularly useful here: the algorithmisation of the public sphere makes platform-ranking policies part of the analysis of hate speech. It is not enough to study who speaks; we must study what infrastructure decides who gets heard.

The European Digital Services Act recognises this dimension by requiring very large platforms to assess systemic risks and examine the influence of their algorithmic systems for recommendation, moderation and advertising (European Parliament & Council of the European Union, 2022).

This does not prove that an algorithm “wants” to promote Francoism, misogyny or colonial glorification. It demonstrates something more relevant: the order of visibility is a technological decision with political effects. A company may not share a discourse and may nevertheless benefit when it generates more dwell time, outrage, comments or reactions.

Generative artificial intelligence finally introduces an additional alteration to the problem of the archive. Traditional falsehoods tended to manipulate existing documents. It is now possible to produce documents that never existed: voices, photographs and videos. A historical figure can appear to utter words they never spoke; a political scene that never occurred can take on documentary form.

Article 50 of the European Artificial Intelligence Act establishes transparency obligations for certain synthetic content and deepfakes, including indications that images, audio or video have been generated or manipulated artificially (European Parliament & Council of the European Union, 2024). These obligations apply, as a general rule, from 2 August 2026. The subsequent Regulation (EU) 2026/1744 —the so-called Digital Omnibus on AI, adopted on 8 July 2026— nevertheless introduced a specific four-month transition for the technical marking required by Article 50(2): providers of generative systems that had already been placed on the market before 2 August have until 2 December 2026 to adapt those systems (European Parliament & Council of the European Union, 2026). The extension does not suspend Article 50 as a whole or remove the transparency obligations concerning deepfakes. Its effectiveness will also depend on technical implementation, traceability, interoperability of marking systems and media literacy: a falsification that reaches mass circulation before it is identified may continue shaping public interpretation even after it has been debunked.

There is no need to turn this issue into another technology essay. Its historical significance can be expressed through a transformation of method: for centuries, when confronted with a document, we asked who produced it, when, for whom and for what purpose; now we must add a prior question, did it ever exist?

AI is not simply “silent” in the face of violent glorification or falsification either. Automated systems already moderate, classify and recommend continuously. The genuinely political question is what they are optimised for.

AI can be used to maximise engagement, detect hate speech, add provenance and context, point out that the statement “168 Spaniards conquered the Inca Empire alone” erases Andean societies that took part in the war, warn that presenting Cortés as the “liberator of Mexico” confuses sixteenth-century political alliances with a nation-state that did not yet exist, and confront an idealisation of the dictatorship with documentation of executions, disappearances, forced labour and the absence of freedoms. None of this requires constructing an algorithmic Ministry of Truth: the distinction between censoring an opinion and contextualising a factual falsehood is fundamental.

Here, perhaps, lies the most important link between History and AI.

History does not have to tell someone what they should feel about Cortés.

It can demonstrate that certain claims about what happened are false.

And a technology capable of amplifying a myth can also be designed to restore the archive that the myth has erased.

Conclusion. Returning Cortés and Pizarro to History

The initial question seemed almost anecdotal.

What are Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro doing in a Spanish football celebration in 2026?

After the path traced here, the answer cannot be found in the sixteenth century alone.

Cortés and Pizarro were decisive actors in violent conquests intended to produce wealth, social advancement, sovereignty and Christian expansion. Their campaigns depended on Indigenous alliances, linguistic mediation, local conflicts and epidemiological circumstances that destroy the image of a few hundred Europeans conquering vast societies by themselves.

Recognising that fact does not rehabilitate conquest.

It restores agency to those whom the heroic narrative erased.

The subsequent demographic catastrophe reached extraordinary proportions. But explaining it requires distinguishing epidemic disease, warfare, displacement, hunger and coercion, and examining how those causes interacted. Saying “56 million people were murdered by Spain” is not history. Saying “56 million natural deaths unrelated to conquest” is not history either.

The transformation also affected territory.

Sugar shows how military conquest, appropriation of land and water, Atlantic economy and enslavement could form part of the same material reorganisation.

Potosí reveals an even more visible relationship between body and commodity.

Eighteen thousand tonnes of silver.

Thousands of tonnes of mercury released.

Communities subjected to the mita.

A global economy under construction.

And a paradox that should remain at the centre of the essay: we can price silver in dollars, but we cannot price Potosí in dollars.

The Requerimiento perhaps provides the primary source that most starkly lays bare the structure of the new order.

Not only because it threatens.

But because it turns that threat into law.

It declares an authority unknown to the societies addressed to be universal, presents submission as choice and transforms in advance those who will die into the people responsible for their own deaths.

This is why thanatopolitics contributes more than a theoretical term.

It allows us to observe a continuity between different forms of exposure to death.

The person who resists militarily.

The enslaved person.

The person coercively sent to the mine.

The community deprived of its means of subsistence.

The body of Micaela Bastidas.

The dismembered body of Túpac Amaru.

These are not equivalent situations.

But all of them compel us to ask who has the capacity to decide which lives may bear costs that other lives should not have to bear.

This is why thanatopolitics is used here rather than only the more widely known necropolitics. Mbembe provides the general horizon of a sovereignty capable of producing worlds of death; Sánchez-Antonio makes it possible to direct the lens specifically towards conquest, enslavement and colonialism in the Americas.

Montesinos, Las Casas and Vitoria also destroy the comfort of absolute relativism.

We do not need retrospectively to impose the twenty-first century upon the sixteenth in order to find criticism.

Criticism was there.

It was contradictory.

It was partial.

And it existed.

The longue durée of colonial order then leads us to Túpac Amaru II and Micaela Bastidas, where the corpse itself becomes a political instrument.

But the second major process in this essay takes place after the colonial period.

Cortés and Pizarro gradually cease to be only historical people and become figures of memory.

The nineteenth century nationalises them.

The myth of Cortés becomes associated with character, courage and virility.

Imperial trauma turns the lost past into a symbolic reserve.

Francoism takes up that tradition and reorganises it within Hispanidad, Catholicity and national mission.

It does not invent Cortés.

It selects him.

And the mechanism of that selection is precisely what explains its effectiveness.

To manufacture the admirable conquistador, parts of history must be removed.

Tlaxcala must be removed.

Malintzin must be removed.

The Requerimiento must be removed.

The mita must be removed.

Mercury must be removed.

Subjugated people must be removed.

Nor does the relationship with the Spanish Civil War require an impossible arrow from Cajamarca to 1936.

It has a much nearer bridge.

Morocco.

The Army of Africa.

Africanism.

Colonial experience transformed into military culture.

And later the dictatorship reusing the imperial imaginary to explain its own legitimacy.

That past remains especially sensitive because its victims do not belong only to a closed archive.

Spain continues to search for disappeared people.

It continues to open graves.

It continues trying to give names to human remains.

In that context, public glorification of Francoism cannot be reduced to the question of whether it is criminally punishable.

A democracy has duties that extend beyond criminal law.

Duties of memory.

Of reparation.

Of recognition.

And of care towards those who continue living with an absence the state has still not resolved.

Social media now add the final layer.

They did not invent the conquistador.

They did not invent Francoist nostalgia.

They did not invent lies.

But they have built extraordinarily effective machines for circulating symbols, affects and falsifications.

The work of María Ávila Bravo-Villasante allows the problem to be defined more precisely: it is not only reactionary content, but the intersection between that content and an algorithmised public sphere. Anti-feminism has a history; digital radicalisation also has an infrastructure.

AI can increase that capacity even further, but it can also do the opposite by restoring provenance, context, disagreement and archive. The choice does not belong to an abstract “intelligence”.

It belongs to the institutions and companies that decide what to optimise.

We therefore return to Cortés and Pizarro. The chants of 2026 do not let us hear voices directly from the sixteenth century; they let us hear five hundred years of work on memory, work that turned victory into identity, conquest into virility, empire into nostalgia and violence into adventure. The craft of History begins exactly there. It does not consist in replacing monuments with demons.

It consists in restoring to Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro what had to be removed in order to turn them into heroes without conflict:

their allies, their victims, their mediations, their interests, their justifications, the resistance they encountered, the territories transformed, the bodies exposed, the wealth extracted and the long-term consequences of the ventures they led.

When all of that returns to the narrative, the icon ceases to work so easily. Cortés and Pizarro are not present at a celebration in 2026 because the sixteenth century has remained intact, but because every age has once again decided what to preserve of them.

And the conquistador becomes a historical problem once more.

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