From La Ciudad de Mexico, the Spanish overlords dispatched hundreds of expeditions, numbering from a few soldiers to thousands, to search for other cities with wealth to loot.
To the south and west, they found more lands and peoples to conquer and rape and enslave.
But to the north, the Spanish found desert lands and peoples they could not conquer: the Yaquis, the Comanches, the Apaches.
The Spanish turned to the slavery and exploitation of Mexicans to sustain their wealth. In the mountains where the Spanish found gold or silver, Mexicans broke the stone and carried the ore from the mines. Mexicans slaved day after day, endlessly, without any hope of release but death. The Spanish overlords watched the carrion birds feeding on the emaciated bodies of Mexicans who had been Knights of the Eagle and Jaguar before the destruction of Tenochtitlan, and they called it' 'God's justice.''
Where the Spanish found no precious metals, only fertile land, the conquerors created haciendas. Mexican slaves worked the vast estates. They had no rights, no future but slavery, no hope. They suffered through a life lower than animals, because the animals knew only pain and death, while the Mexicans remembered Mexico before the Spanish and despaired.
Finally, after years of debate between the Spanish and the Catholic Pope, the Church ruled that los indlgenashad human souls and could receive the Mercy of Christ. The Mexicans received the religion of the Spanish, but the suffering continued.
Spanish colonists flooded Mexico. Year after year, the Spanish overlords exacted wealth without measure from Mexico. The king and queen of Spain appointed viceroys to rule "New Spain." Generations passed as kings and queens of Spain ruled through their viceroys.
By the terms of the First Audiencia, no Spaniard born in Mexico could hold imperial office. The Spanish born in Mexico, called the Creoles, resented this dictatorial ban. Pure Castillian blood flowed through their veins, they spoke the language of the court, they attended universities in Europe, and yet they did not enjoy the opportunity for prestige and enrichment offered by the Imperial Office of Viceroy.
Centuries passed without change. Then, in Spain, King Ferdinand VII lost his throne to Joseph Bonaparte of France. The Creoles, who had tolerated the rule and taxation of a Spanish emperor for generations, refused to share the wealth of Mexico with a French emperor. The Creoles demanded independence for New Spain.
Mexicans also demanded independence. In a decade of civil turmoil, an alliance of the Creole elite the Church, the army, and the landowning "families" defeated armies oundigenasand mestizos Mexicans of mixed European and Indian blood who wanted national independence, freedom from slavery and the distribution of land to the people. Mexico gained independence from Spain, but now the Spanish Creoles ruled the Mexicans.
One hundred years of violence and dictatorship passed before the Revolution. But the traditions of slavery and feudal domination did not end. The Creole elite never forgot their Spanish birthright of wealth and privilege.
Though the blond hair and fair skin of the Spanish had been darkened through the generations, the Creole elite continued to rule from Mexico City. They spoke Castillian. They honored the European conceits of racial superiority. They sent their children to European universities. They never surrendered their control of the government.
This aristocracy of modern Mexicans who traced their ancestry to Castille continued the tradition of the exploitation of Mexico. Their Spanish forefathers stole the gold of Tenochtitlan. The Creoles stole the land and enslaved the Mexicans. The modern elite exploited the "liberated" campesinos and workers. The elite found foreign co-conspirators North Americans and Europeans to rob Mexico of natural resources. The elite made illegal contracts for the delivery of minerals, wood and oil, then invested their foreign earnings in Swiss banks and political bribes.
Indigenasand mestizos sometimes held the presidency of Mexico, but the elite always held the government. Campesinos received plots of land, but the elite held vast, fertile valleys, watered by rivers, financed by its own banks. Indigenasfound work in industry, but the elite owned the factories. Some villages received water and electricity, but the elite enjoyed Cancun and Paris. Mexicans voted, but the elite selected the candidates.
Then, in 1970, the intensely nationalist administration of President Luis Escheverria threatened the control exerted by the wealthy. Land reforms cut into the vast holdings of the leading Creole "families." Taxes took a share of their profits to provide schools and hospitals for the people of Mexico. The emergence of a distinctly Mexican culture, proud and strident, hateful of the Spanish rape of their ancient nation and the invasions of other foreign forces, challenged Castillian domination.
In this resurgence of Mexican culture, artists glorified the mysteries of pre-Conquest America. Film directors made movies with actresses who had dark hair and indigenafeatures. Federal attorneys found the prosecution of corrupt millionaires to be a stepping stone to political recognition by the Mexican people.
The Castillians struck back at the people of Mexico with the traditional weapons of Latin oligarchies: corruption and deceit.
The elite, in their demand for power to ensure wealth and privilege, had through the centuries developed corruption to an art. They instinctively knew the formulas for determining, at what price and in what circumstances, gold or dollars would break an oath of office.
They knew the techniques of the invisible manipulation of local officials.
They knew when to apply dollars and when to apply violence.
As the term of President Escheverria ended, hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes ensured the nomination and election of a new leader faithful to Castillian traditions.
Though the administration of President Lopez Portillo appeared to continue Escheverria's policy of promoting Mexican nationalism, the new leaders only mouthed meaningless slogans. These new leaders who bragged of their pure geneology dating back to the Conquest, born into privilege, with Castillian names blatantly exploited the nationalistic prejudices and misconceptions of the Mexican people by condemning the United States for its wealth and history of dominating the nations of Central and South America.
Simultaneous with their campaigns of denunciation of the United States, and of NATO and world capitalism, the Lopez Portillo Administration received a gift from deep beneath the rich soil of Mexico.
Oil.
President Portillo launched an ambitious national development program. But the president declared that petrodollars could not fund the creation of a socialist state as quickly as he wished.
With the oil beneath Mexico as collateral, the Lopez Portillo regime borrowed billions of dollars from American and European banks to finance the development of Mexico.
But these billions of dollars never reached the people of Mexico.
The wealthy elite became even more fabulously wealthy. Banks in the United States and Europe reported year after year of record deposits as Mexican leaders looted their nation.
But when the price of oil fell, when Mexico no longer had the flow of petrodollars to meet the interest payments, the orgy of greed ended.
Inflation attacked the value of the peso. The price of corn and beans, the staple foods of the common people, doubled then doubled again. Campesinos by the millions went north to work in the fields and factories of the United States.
In the cities of Mexico, mobs demanded an accounting of the stolen billions.
Leaving the crisis to his newly elected successor, President Lopez Portillo retired to his fifty-million-dollar mansion outside Mexico City. In a final ceremony, the departing president stood before the Mexican senate and accepted the praise and applause of the elite of Mexico. For he had already set in motion something that would buttress the fortunes of the Castillians through the years of his successors. He had begun the resurrection of the heroin syndicates of the sixties and early seventies.