Spanish Labor Systems
The colonial economies of the Spanish and the Portuguese have much changed throughout the colonial period in Middle America and South America. The economy all depended upon what product was influential during the times. For a good portion of the time it was gold and silver, than it made a slight switch to sugar in Brazil and other places. Depending upon the goods that were being mined or manufactured, there were different laws put into effect that controlled the workers. They even brought in slaves from Africa because the indigenous people were not fulfilling the needs of the Spanish and Portuguese. Silver was a highly sought after metal so after the Spanish conquered Mexico and began to head down south to take over more land they realized that silver was abundant in these areas and decided that they would mine the silver and trade it throughout the world. One of the major ways that the Spanish got the Indians to work for them was by enforcing the Mita. This meant that every seven years an indigenous male had to go work in the silver mine
They were too demanding and should not have thought that the natives were inferior to them and treated them equally. This started a whole new revolution in South America and it became heavily populated there. These workers did though in fact cause some resistance because it was not the right thing to do. Bolivar was known as the George Washington of South America. Many people were leaders of these revolts and takeovers of the land. If they want something the other country had they will do anything that needs to be done to secure them with money and goods. Sometimes they would run to a different city when the Spanish would come to collect the indigenous people to work in the mines, sometimes they stole silver or gold from the mines just to get by in life. If the Spanish would have been a little less of a dictatorship towards Latin America I believe that they still would have possession of most of the Americas. This was not the only way in which a product that was popular on the market shaped the economic system in Latin and South America. He had victories in Bolivia, Panama, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela. This was also a very dangerous job because to extract the silver from the rock and soil it would be mixed with mercury. That is what we built the United States on and it has worked for the past 225 years baring some points. Tupac Amaru II, Jose Maria Morelos, and Simon Bolivar were three prominent leaders of the revolts. This winds up hurting most countries in the end, but greed overtakes them while they are in power.
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