Salvador Gómez de Espinosa, a 17th century fighter for natives’ rights

THE imperial context of the 16th and 17th centuries conceived as natural, desirable and utilizable something that, for us, is completely unacceptable and even evil for a very long list of reasons. Conquering new lands and putting the conquered subject to the rule of a foreign king was a very common practice, and reading today, the justifications of those Europeans for those bloody military actions sound to us like very bad excuses.

In the Philippines, even during the early Spanish period, several friars and public servants dared to risk their lives, their careers and their reputations in order to voice out that the behavior of many officials, landowners and even priests was completely unacceptable. The issue was not only moral. By committing abuses and taking advantage of the natives, those colonizers were being unlawful and were insulting the explicit decrees of the King, which ordered the good treatment of the natives; to teach them the Gospel and to demand from them small taxes. Even worse was the case of some friars, whose behavior was completely counterproductive in relation to their goal: to make religious conversions.