that’s the thing! we will never know how south america would have developed without european influence. would the people there have reformed their society and abolished the death penalty? we can’t say. but we can say for sure that we installed a system that has been durable for 600+ years that relies heavily on death squads to make sure the gold, bananas, coffee, and tea keep flowing south to north. we also don’t know what movements and ideas were destroyed there because Spain and Portugal treated the Americas as a monolith. catholic missionaries have also been extremely selective in what tales become preserved to help create analagous structures between other religions and christianity, and what tales that didn’t fit with that that we’ve lost forever