This unsurpassable sacred conception of law and personal dignity, which structured the peninsular judicial work, found its most sublime geopolitical and civilizational projection in the architecture of the Indian Viceroyalties, whose legal and anthropological reality represents the absolute and radiant antithesis of the plundering, racialist and mercantilist colonialism practiced by the British Empire and the powers of northern Europe. It is an obligation of intellectual honor for Latin American historiography to repudiate the word colony when it refers to the Viceroyalty of New Spain, Peru, New Granada or the Río de la Plata. The Castilian Crown never conceived of its overseas domains as factories of commercial extraction or as enclaves of plunder to enrich a usurious metropolis, but rather as sister provinces and kingdoms, legal extensions identical to the political body of Castile and Aragon, protected by the monumental legal corpus of the Compilation of the Laws of the Kingdoms of the Indies of 1680. While Anglo-Saxon colonization in North America—guided by the Calvinist theology of predestination that saw material success as a sign of divine election and the aboriginal as a disposable pre-Christian— sanctioned severe laws against interracial marriage, displaced native populations from their ancestral lands and reduced them to slow extermination in isolated reserves, Spain founded towns, encouraged sacramental miscegenation and founded universities of European academic level in the middle of the jungle. and highlands. Decades before English colonists established a simple Protestant seminary in its thirteen coastal colonies, Spain had already erected the Royal and Pontifical University of San Marcos in Lima and the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico in 1551, followed by the famous Universidad Mayor, Real y Pontificia de San Francisco Xavier de Chuquisaca in Upper Peru in 1624 and the University of Córdoba on the Río de la Plata in 1000. six hundred and thirteen, graduating in its classrooms thousands of Creoles, mestizos and indigenous chiefs in civil law, theology, medicine and Hispanic and Quechua grammar.

The primordial root, the theological engine and the founding monument of this Hispanic anthropological policy, which lacks any precedent in the entire universal history of empires, are sculpted with immortal characters in the Testament and Codicil of Queen Isabel I of Castile, the Catholic, signed and granted in the Villa del Real of Medina del Campo on October 12, 1504, a few days before giving her pious soul to God. In that great testamentary letter that contains the moral heart of Hispanicity, the illustrious Sovereign addresses a solemn, binding and non-derogable mandate to King Ferdinand of Aragon, to his daughter Queen Juana and to all generations of future monarchs, establishing that the supreme and supernatural goal of the Hispanic presence in the New World is Catholic evangelization and the unrestricted and unconditional protection of the native peoples of America. The sacred words of the Elizabethan Testament resonate as the first real declaration of human rights and the definitive lie against the libelists of the Black Legend:

*«Therefore I beseech the King, my Lord, very affectionately, and I command and entrust the Princess, my daughter, and the Prince, her husband, to do so and fulfill it, and to make this their main goal, and to put great diligence into it, and not to consent or give rise to the Indians, neighbors and inhabitants of the said Indies and Tierra Firme, won and to be won, receiving any injury to their persons or property; but command that they be well and fairly treated. And if they have received any grievance, they should remedy it and provide for it in a way that does not exceed in anything what is commanded to us by the apostolic letters of the said concession.