[rockyleal]

Me too. It would be cleaner, unpolluted, less bloody, and the native cultures would probably be blossoming and making interesting stuff by combining their knowledge with outside influences. Too bad most of them were exterminated and dispossessed (the galleon being just one instance of that dispossession), and too bad they continue to be institutionally and structurally marginalised, decimated, and dispossessed.

[golergka]

Why?

The spaniards have been better prepared for war and overcame the local population in bloody conquest — this is a historical fact that no one will argue with.

How, from this fact, do people come to an assumption that local population had higher moral values than invading spaniards?

Have you completely no idea what pre-columbian era indian cultures were like? I mean, not today's "New Age" versions that have been adopted for Californian yappies, but actual kingdoms, chiefdoms and empires that resided there several hundred years ago.

[karmapolice]

In fact, most of the army Hernán Cortés used to overcome the Aztec empire were natives that hated the oppressive power of the aztecs. He managed to exploit these regional feuds, and also internal problems of the Aztec government.

The spaniards alone were a skeleton crew, not enough to conquest anything that big, despite having better technology.