La controversia de Valladolid

Valladolid, 1550. In the Monastery of San Gregorio, a Dominican college, two men are locked in an intense argument. One, Ginés Sepúlveda, maintains that the Indians of the New World have no souls, meaning that they were born to be slaves. The other, Bartolomé de las Casas, an ardent defender of Native Americans, believes that they are in no way any different from anybody else. Those Indians from five hundred years ago today form the bitter face of Guatemala, Chiapas, Peru… condemned to struggle for their very lives, to emigrate, the final victims of migratory tensions, of nationalist conflicts, of the
exploitation of one country by another.