Quote:
Yet the people of the New World had no history of prior exposure to these germs. They farmed only one large mammal – the llama – and even this was geographically isolated. The llama was never kept indoors, it wasn't milked and only occasionally eaten – so the people of the New World were not troubled by cross-species viral infection.
When the Europeans arrived, carrying germs which thrived in dense, semi-urban populations, the indigenous people of the Americas were effectively doomed. They had never experienced smallpox, measles or flu before, and the viruses tore through the continent, killing an estimated 90% of Native Americans.
Smallpox is believed to have arrived in the Americas in 1520 on a Spanish ship sailing from Cuba, carried by an infected African slave. As soon as the party landed in Mexico, the infection began its deadly voyage through the continent. Even before the arrival of Pizarro, smallpox had already devastated the Inca Empire, killing the Emperor Huayna Capac and unleashing a bitter civil war that distracted and weakened his successor, Atahuallpa.
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Guns Germs & Steel: Variables. Smallpox | PBS
Anyway, most Native Americans live in Latin America today and even the average person is the product of racial mixture between the Spanish and Native American blood. The irony is that North America (Canada + USA) is the region where Native American blood and culture has been destroyed to the greatest degree.
Heck, even in the Caribbean, most of the Native American blood (mostly Arawakan or Taino and Carib) is found in the three Spanish-isles (Cuba, Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico) to a much greater extent than in the English, French or other type of Caribbean islands. In Puerto Rico most of the population actually has Native American maternal lineages (based on studies focused on mitochondrial DNA), the average Dominican has 5-12% Native American DNA, and in Cuba, especially in eastern Cuba, Native American features are quite common in many people. That's not quite the case in much of the other islands, with the exception of perhaps English-speaking Dominica (in the Lesser Antilles and not to be confused with Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic) is an exception because they do have a sizeable number of people that descend in part from Carib Native Americans with a Native American reserve and everything.
The first Spanish Constitution of 1812 even recognized the Native Americans and anyone with Native American blood as Spaniards. Heck, even the mulattoes and the free blacks were considered Spaniards and this was in colonial times. That's not quite what was done in the English parts of America, especially in the United States where Native Americans were forced into reserves that functioned as countries within a country and well into the 20th Century blacks were not even considered full citizens (the vote of a black person was worth less than that of a white person, with something like 4 black votes equaled 1 white vote or something like that).
Lets not even get into the racial segregation that was imposed in the USA or even the laws prohibiting racial mixture or any of the other nonsense that was simply never applied in much of Latin America.
In most Latin American countries they have had non-white presidents in many cases since more than a century ago, while in the USA we are still under the rule of the very first non-white president. Its quite shameful that in a country as the USA that has been around for centuries, its just now that is seeing its first non-white president. That should had happened a long time ago!
Several countries in Latin America have even female presidents and in some cases multiple female presidents. Has the USA been there yet? Nope! What about female vice presidents? Several in Latin America have had them and quite a few have them right now, but the USA can't really be said to be part of that club yet.
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