From “Much Abuse” to World Domination: How the Los Angeles Times Manages the Memory of Conquest

The Empire Murmurs, and the Paper Calls It Reconciliation

Empire has a funny way of speaking when its crimes become too obvious to deny. It rarely confesses. It rarely names the dead plainly. It rarely says: we built power through blood, theft, fire, forced labor, and the ruin of entire worlds. No, it prefers the language of careful regret, the polished sentence, the royal sigh, the diplomatic half-nod. It speaks just enough to appear civilized, but never enough to disturb the furniture of power. That is the terrain on which this Los Angeles Times piece stands. We are told that Spain’s king has acknowledged “much abuse” in the conquest of the Americas, and already the ideological machinery is hard at work, wrapping a centuries-long catastrophe in the soft tissue of moderation. The article does not thunder. It does not sneer. It performs something more effective than either. It administers the event. It takes a statement soaked in the residue of conquest and presents it to the reader as a measured development in a diplomatic disagreement, a regrettable but manageable question between governments, as though the annihilation of civilizations were now chiefly a matter of tone, protocol, and whether the right invitation was extended to the right palace.

The first trick is one of scale. A whole world-historic process of invasion, subjugation, and destruction is miniaturized into the phrase “much abuse.” That phrase is not merely weak. It is politically useful. “Abuse” is what one says when one wants to acknowledge harm without naming the structure that produced it. It is the language of the courtroom clerk and the public relations office, not the language of a people describing what was done to their ancestors. It drains force from the event. It makes conquest sound like misconduct, like history got a little out of hand, like the Spanish Crown simply wandered too far into ethical controversy. And the article reproduces this language with the cool neutrality that corporate journalism mistakes for seriousness. But neutrality in the face of such wording is not neutrality at all. It is collaboration by arrangement of emphasis. When a king speaks softly of crimes committed in the making of his world, and the press passes along that softness without pressing against it, what is being reported is not only an event. What is being preserved is a hierarchy of permissible feeling.

Then comes the second move: distance. The conquest is repeatedly placed “centuries ago,” which is true in the dead, calendar sense and misleading in every living one. The article does not have to say that the matter belongs safely to the past; it lets the rhythm of the piece accomplish that work. The old violence appears as backdrop to a present diplomatic quarrel. The center of gravity is not the conquered but the contemporary state relationship. Not the broken world, but the bruised etiquette. Not the long scream of colonial domination, but the current “spat” between Spain and Mexico. Even the word “spat” is doing labor here. It domesticates the conflict. It shrinks a struggle over historical truth and imperial refusal into the register of irritation between respectable parties. A “spat” is what neighbors have over a fence. It is not what colonized peoples have with the heirs of empire. But once that word enters the narrative, the temperature is lowered, the stakes are reduced, and the reader is guided away from the magnitude of what is actually being contested.

The king’s own formulation is handled with similar care. We are told that these matters should be understood “in their proper context,” not judged with “excessive moral presentism,” and there again the article does not need to argue openly for him. It need only relay the sentence in a respectful tone and move on. Yet this is where the ideological spine of the whole piece becomes visible. Context here is not an instrument of understanding. It is a shield. It is deployed not to deepen moral clarity but to soften it. The appeal is familiar: yes, terrible things happened, but let us be rigorous, objective, restrained, mature. The rulers always become great lovers of complexity when the bill comes due. Suddenly they are philosophers of nuance. Suddenly they fear anachronism. Suddenly they tremble before the possibility that one might judge mass domination too harshly. The poor, meanwhile, are usually denied such sophistication when they resist. For them, the newspapers discover plain language very quickly. Then it is militancy, unrest, extremism, disorder. Empire reserves ambiguity for itself and clarity for its enemies. That double standard hums quietly beneath this article from beginning to end.

There is also something almost too perfect in the chosen setting: a museum exhibition on women in pre-Columbian Mexico. The article offers this as scene and atmosphere, but the symbolism is not innocent. The conquered are safest for empire when curated. Once placed behind glass, framed by exhibition lighting, and introduced by official remarks, they can be admired without being politically avenged. The museum is one of the favored institutions of respectable memory: sorrow made presentable, civilization converted into heritage, living historical conflict transformed into contemplative culture. The article lingers in that atmosphere. It invites the reader into a chamber of civility where colonial violence appears as an object of thoughtful discussion among dignitaries. This is how the old order launders itself. It does not deny the dead outright. It learns to host them elegantly.

And then, as if to complete the ceremony, the whole performance is framed as a possible “step toward reconciliation.” That phrase carries an entire politics inside it. Reconciliation with whom, on what basis, and on whose terms? The article never asks. It does not have to. In corporate liberal narration, reconciliation is treated as a self-evident good, which means the struggle is quietly shifted from truth to tone. The problem becomes insufficient acknowledgment, not the architecture of denial that shapes the acknowledgment itself. The reader is nudged toward the conclusion that progress is being made because the monarch has uttered a softened regret and because officials may now perhaps resume normal diplomacy. One can almost hear the orchestra warming up for a peace made entirely of words. But the point of the article is not simply to inform us that a king spoke. It is to teach the reader how to feel about the speech: to see it as serious, measured, forward-looking, maybe imperfect but still meaningful. That is how propaganda often works in its refined form. It does not bark commands. It arranges sympathies.

So what do we actually learn from this piece, taken on its own terms and read with care? We learn that the article wants the monarchy to appear reflective without being cornered, chastened without being discredited, historically engaged without being historically indicted. We learn that colonial violence can be admitted in carefully diluted phrases so long as it is folded into a story about diplomacy and mutual respect. We learn that the press, ever loyal to the religion of officialdom, is willing to treat imperial inheritance as a matter of rhetorical management. And above all, we learn that when the old empires speak of the crimes that made them, they still insist on narrating those crimes from above. The crown remains on the speaker’s head. The newspaper keeps the room tidy. The conquered enter the story only as the occasion for someone else’s statesmanlike reflection. That is not remembrance. That is narrative discipline in service of power.

The Machinery of Conquest Beneath the Word “Abuse”

Once the article’s careful language is set aside, the historical terrain it gestures toward comes into sharper focus. The report tells us that Spain’s king acknowledged “much abuse” and that this acknowledgment sits within a diplomatic dispute over apology. Those facts are accurate as far as they go. But what they describe in miniature is not a misunderstanding between states. It is the legacy of one of the most far-reaching processes of conquest and transformation in human history.

The first fact that breaks through the article’s restraint is the scale of demographic collapse. Prior to the Spanish invasion, central Mexico sustained a population estimated at roughly twenty to twenty-five million people. Within less than a century that number fell to between one and two million. Across the Americas, Indigenous populations declined by approximately ninety percent in the first century of European colonization. This was not the result of a single cause but of a convergence: epidemic disease, war, famine, forced displacement, and the demands of colonial labor systems. When the article refers to the death of a “large part” of the population, it compresses one of the most catastrophic demographic transformations in recorded history into a phrase small enough to pass without resistance.

That collapse unfolded within a system that reorganized labor at scale. Spanish authorities did not simply conquer territory; they converted populations into sources of tribute and work. Through the encomienda, settlers were granted the right to extract labor and tribute from Indigenous communities. The repartimiento expanded this system into rotational labor drafts that compelled communities to supply workers for colonial enterprises. In the Andes, the mita conscripted thousands into the mines each year under brutal conditions, including at Potosí where tens of thousands of Indigenous laborers were cycled annually through the mines under conditions of extreme coercion and mortality. These were not temporary arrangements born of conquest. They became the permanent infrastructure of colonial production, binding Indigenous life to the needs of imperial extraction.

At the center of that system stood mining. The Spanish empire in the Americas was not held together by ceremony or faith but by silver, coerced labor, and administrative control over conquered populations. Mines in Zacatecas and Potosí produced extraordinary quantities of bullion beginning in the sixteenth century. Between 1500 and 1800, historians estimate that roughlyone hundred and fifty thousand to one hundred and eighty thousand tons of silver were extracted from the Americas. Potosí alone accounted for a dominant share of global silver production during its peak. This metal did not remain in colonial territories. It moved outward through imperial circuits, entering European financial systems, underwriting state power, and feeding trade networks that linked the Atlantic world to Asia through the Manila Galleons. The mines were not isolated colonial enterprises. They were engines of a rapidly expanding world economy.

Alongside mining, another system of labor was consolidated across the Atlantic world. As Indigenous populations were decimated and colonial agriculture expanded, enslaved Africans were transported in growing numbers to sustain plantation production. Sugar, tobacco, and other commodities entered global markets through systems that depended on coerced labor and racial hierarchy, with sugar plantations in the Caribbean and Brazil becoming some of the most labor-intensive and profitable enterprises of the early modern world and dominating global sugar production. Over time, more than twelve million Africans were forced into this transatlantic system, forming a labor force that underwrote the agricultural wealth of the colonial world, while high mortality rates on plantations required constant importation of enslaved laborers. Conquest, in this sense, did not end with the subjugation of Indigenous populations. It extended into a broader system of labor extraction that spanned continents, linking African labor, American land, and European capital into a single structure of accumulation that fed the expansion of global trade networks.

This transformation was not carried out without justification. It was supported by an ideological framework that presented conquest as lawful and necessary. Papal decrees in the late fifteenth century granted Christian monarchies the authority to claim lands inhabited by non-Christians. Spanish authorities formalized these claims through declarations such as the Requerimiento, which demanded submission to imperial rule and Christian conversion. Refusal was taken as grounds for war, enslavement, and dispossession. Violence was thus framed not as excess, but as enforcement of a divinely sanctioned order.

Nor was this system accepted without resistance. From the siege of Tenochtitlan to the uprisings that followed across the colonial world, Indigenous communities repeatedly challenged Spanish authority. The Mixtón War in the 1540s, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, and the long resistance of the Mapuche in southern Chile demonstrate that conquest was a process of continuous conflict. Colonial rule was not secured once and for all; it had to be imposed, defended, and reasserted over generations.

What unfolded across the Americas was therefore not simply conquest in the military sense. It was the violent reorganization of land, labor, and nature for a new world market. Indigenous territories were transformed into imperial property, populations were subordinated to systems of tribute and forced work, and extracted wealth began moving outward through expanding commercial circuits. What later political economy would identify as primitive accumulation was already taking shape in blood, silver, and coerced labor.

When measured against this historical terrain—demographic collapse, institutionalized labor extraction, global flows of silver, the expansion of plantation slavery, and the continual resistance of the colonized—the phrase “much abuse” no longer reads as description. It reads as reduction. A linguistic narrowing of a process that reshaped the world.

The World Built in Conquest, Remembered as Regret

Once the full historical machinery of conquest is brought into view, the narrative presented in the article begins to contract under its own limits. What is described there as “abuse” and “controversy” was not a deviation from the normal course of history. It was the process through which a new world was made. The conquest of the Americas did not simply alter the fate of particular societies. It reorganized the relationship between continents, economies, and populations on a global scale.

When Columbus crossed the Atlantic in 1492 he did not simply open a route between distant lands. He entered into a process already unfolding within European expansion, one that would bind conquest, labor coercion, and resource extraction into a single system. The campaigns that followed in Mexico, the Andes, and across the Americas established not just imperial territories but the foundations of a new kind of economy—one in which land could be seized, labor compelled, and nature reorganized to serve distant centers of accumulation.

What emerged from this process was not merely an empire, but a system of accumulation built on extraction at scale. The mines and plantations of the Americas functioned as engines of that system. Silver extracted from Zacatecas and Potosí did more than enrich the Spanish Crown. It entered European banking networks, financed imperial wars, and circulated through trade routes that linked Europe, Africa, and Asia. In doing so, it helped sustain an expanding web of exchange that would come to define the early modern world economy. The wealth produced in the Americas did not remain where it was generated. It moved outward, concentrating power in imperial centers while binding colonized regions into dependent roles within a growing global system.

The labor regimes that sustained this extraction were not incidental. They were structural. Indigenous tribute systems, forced labor drafts, and the later expansion of African slavery formed a continuous field of coerced labor that underwrote the entire colonial economy. These systems converted human lives into units of production and tied entire populations to the demands of imperial accumulation. What later theorists would describe as the formation of a capitalist world economy took shape through these arrangements, not in abstraction but in the daily realities of forced work, displacement, and social reorganization.

Empire did not rely on steel alone. It required documents, decrees, sermons, and legal fictions capable of presenting seizure as order and subjugation as civilization. The ideological language surrounding conquest did not merely justify violence after the fact. It accompanied it, organized it, and made it intelligible within the frameworks of authority that governed the time. In this sense, the narrative forms we encounter in the present—careful acknowledgments, calls for contextual understanding, appeals to moderation—are not new. They are the latest expressions of a long tradition of explaining domination in terms that render it acceptable.

This broader perspective clarifies the stakes of the contemporary dispute described in the article. The question is not simply whether a monarch should apologize for past actions. It is whether the system created through those actions is recognized as such. For colonized societies, the conquest represented the destruction of existing orders and the imposition of new ones structured around extraction and external control. For imperial centers, it marked the beginning of a long period of expansion and accumulation. These different historical positions did not dissolve with the formal end of colonial rule. They were carried forward into the structures of the modern world.

The global economy that exists today still bears the imprint of that transformation. Regions that once served as sources of labor and raw materials continue to occupy positions shaped by those roles, while the centers that accumulated wealth during the colonial period retain disproportionate influence over finance, trade, and political institutions. The language of reconciliation, when detached from this material history, narrows the field of vision. It shifts attention from structures to sentiments, from systems to statements.

This is where the narrative of “much abuse” reveals its function most clearly. It does not deny that harm occurred. It limits the scale on which that harm can be understood. It translates a process that reorganized the world into a moral episode that can be acknowledged and set aside. What disappears in that translation is the system itself—the network of extraction, labor control, and wealth transfer that linked conquest to the formation of the modern world economy.

To restore that system to view is to change the terms of the discussion entirely. The issue is no longer whether the past should be judged more or less harshly. It is whether the structures that emerged from that past continue to shape the present. Once that question is asked directly, the language of diplomatic regret begins to sound less like resolution and more like containment.

From Managed Memory to Material Struggle

If the previous sections have done their work, then the question raised by the king’s remarks can no longer be understood as a matter of tone, apology, or diplomatic sensitivity. It is a question about the world that conquest produced and the structures that continue to govern it. When colonial violence is reduced to “abuse,” the past is not clarified—it is neutralized. It is rendered safe for the present. The destruction of societies becomes a regrettable episode rather than the foundation of a global system that still organizes land, labor, and wealth.

Across Latin America, that history is not being remembered quietly. It is being fought over. Indigenous movements are not treating conquest as a closed chapter but as an ongoing condition. In practice, this struggle appears in concrete forms: resistance to lithium extraction in the Andean region, opposition to open-pit mining projects that poison water sources, battles against agribusiness expansion that displaces rural communities, conflicts over pipeline corridors and infrastructure projects imposed without consent, and the criminalization of those who defend communal land. These are not symbolic disputes. They are struggles over the same fundamental questions that defined the colonial order: who controls land, who controls labor, and who benefits from the wealth extracted from both.

At the level of states, efforts toward regional coordination have reflected a similar recognition. Forums such as the 0 have attempted to create spaces where the political and economic future of the region can be discussed outside the direct authority of former imperial centers. These initiatives are uneven, contested, and limited, but they indicate a persistent tension within the global order: the desire of formerly colonized societies to assert greater control over their resources and development.

Within Europe itself, the legacy of empire has become increasingly difficult to contain. Campaigns demanding the return of looted artifacts, the removal of colonial monuments, and the opening of imperial archives have forced questions of historical responsibility into public life. These struggles are often led not by states but by migrants, students, and workers whose lives are shaped by the afterlives of empire. What appears in official discourse as a matter of historical reflection emerges in these movements as a demand for material reckoning.

For workers in the imperial centers, the issue cannot be approached as an abstract moral concern. The wealth, institutions, and global position of these societies were not produced in isolation. They were built through centuries of extraction that reorganized entire regions of the world. Today that extraction continues in altered form. Minerals, agricultural commodities, and industrial inputs flow outward from the Global South through supply chains that concentrate value elsewhere. The geography of exploitation has changed its appearance, but not its logic.

This is where the language of reconciliation reaches its limit. So long as the structures created through conquest remain intact, apology functions as management rather than transformation. It offers recognition without redistribution, acknowledgment without structural change. The result is a form of historical memory that soothes without altering the conditions that made the history possible.

The colonial order did not vanish when the old empires lowered their flags. It reorganized itself. The tribute systems of conquest became the global supply chains of capital, and the flows of silver that once crossed the Atlantic now move through financial networks that continue to concentrate power in the same centers of the world economy. For the global working class and the peoples who endured colonization, the struggle is therefore not simply over how the past is remembered. It is over whether the system built through that past will continue to govern the present.

That is the real issue beneath the king’s measured regret. Not whether empire can speak more politely of its crimes, but whether the world built by those crimes will continue to rule the living.