In the image, it describes:
“A native American wearing a feathered headdress is tied to a tree and strangled or garroted by two others. Spanish soldiers and a Catholic priest observe. Built environment includes dwellings and palisade.”
The image is titled “Atabaliba Strangled,” with the source date from the year 1760. Atabaliba was another name for the last famous Incan emperor, Atahualpa. The image depicts what life was after Spanish colonialism took over the Americas. Cuzco, Peru, was the center of life for the Incas. When the Spanish colonialists arrived, the Incas were oppressed by the conquistadors and the legacy that the Catholic Church left behind. The image of Atahualpa being strangled, not only shows the disregard that the Spanish had for the Incas, but as well as the hierarchy that existed after the conquest of the Incas.
The Catholic Church was a major force that shaped Latin America throughout history. “The Roman Catholic Church in colonial Latin America was a conglomeration of institutions, including ecclesiastical offices, the parish clergy, and various orders of nuns, monks, and friars that ran hospitals, schools, orphanages, missions, and even slave plantations.” Both The Catholic Church and the Spanish empire ruled together, in the picture, one can see that this is true by the way in which the priests and soldiers are both spectators of Atahualpa’s death. Kris Lane describes the view of the Spanish as
“With few exceptions the colonizer’s baser impulses and reflexive self-deception predominated, coarse veils of greed and pity alike obscuring the chaotic splendor of multiple Andean chiefdoms and lowland tropical cultures of astonishing physical, linguistic, political, and artistic range. The new administrative order, Spain’s typically tone-deaf late Renaissance bureaucracy, demanded this kaleidoscope be shattered, its varicolored sand grains separated and sorted, individuals and whole communities alike reduced to quanta called “Indians.”
So low was the hierarchy of the “Indians,” that the Spanish had no fear in ending the highest member of the Incan hierarchy. Although the Spanish viewed the Incas as savages, one can argue that the priests were present for the execution of Atahualpa, for religious reasons of “resolving one’s sins before death.” The Catholic Church had missionaries arrive in the Incan empire to not kill, but to spread the faith and to “guide, the subjects of God and king.” The Catholic Church continued to regulate the Incas throughout history because they believed it was God’s w.ish. “Furthermore, the pope had declared Amerindian souls equivalent (perhaps even superior) to those of Europeans in the eyes of God. The message to all colonists? Mistreat His innocent “children” and risk damnation.” It was due to religious reasons, that the Incas were converted to catholic religion and treated by the conquistadors as subjects of the king with limited rights. In the image “Atabaliba Strangled,” it can be concluded that the Incas demise started with their crowned ruler being killed. The Spanish soldiers and priests were the highest members of the colonial hierarchy, while the rest of society was oppressed
Citations
Problems in Modern Latin American History : Sources and Interpretations, edited by James A. Wood, and Anna Rose Alexander, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central,https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/baruch/detail.action?docID=5743856.
“Atabaliba Strangled.” Atabaliba Strangled. – JCB Archive of Early American Images, jcb.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet/detail/JCB~1~1~6835~115902696:Atabaliba-Strangled-?sort=image_date%2Csubject_groups.