SOURCE: A foreword, translated by Robert R. Barr, to Witness: Writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas, edited and translated by George Sanderlin, Orbis Books, 1992, pp. xi-xxii.

Gutiérrez is a Peruvian priest who works with the poor in Lima and who is considered one of Latin America's foremost liberation theologians. In this excerpt, he describes the theological grounds for Las Casas's argument opposing the use of armed force against the indigenous peoples of the New World.

For a full nineteen years, the inhabitants of the so-called West Indies had suffered occupation, mistreatment, exploitation, and death at the hands of those who, from their European viewpoint, considered themselves the discoverers of these lands. The newcomers dealt with the Indians, says Las Casas, "as if they had been good-for-nothing animals," since they only sought to "grow rich on the blood of those poor wretches." This induced the Dominican religious of...