Word: conquistadors
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Swashbuckling into Guatemala more than 400 years ago with soldiers, priests and instructions to Christianize the heathen, Conquistador Pedro de Alvarado took thoughtful note of the fact that much of the rites of the Mayas' animistic religion resembled Roman Catholicism. The Mayas burned candles and incense, venerated relics, held processions. Alvarado's priests seized on the common ground; they gave the local gods the names of saints, the Virgin and Christ, and pushed on to convert other pagans...
...cultivated land is largely tied up in latifundios, the big farms that have dominated Latin American agriculture ever since the time of Conquistador Hernan Cortes, who got a royal grant of 100,000 Indians and 25,000 square miles of farmland in 1529. In Venezuela, 3% of the land holders own 90% of the land; in Chile, 2% own 52%; just 2% of the people own half of Brazil...
...citizens with a firm grip on French and British history may remember, when it comes to Mexico, little more than the cinema-celebrated names of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, and the conquistador Hernán Cortés. Few are aware that in the past three decades Mexico, historically unstable (see box), has stirred itself, put away its pistols and begun an explosion of industrialization that has pulled one-third of the once-somnolent population into a new middle class...
...first, Conquistador Hernán Cortés, landed near Veracruz A.D. 1519 with horses and 600 men, defeated the Aztecs under Montezuma because the Indians believed the Spaniards to be brothers of a neglected god. Spain ruled for nearly 300 years before Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, a parish priest in the village of Dolores, led forth a ragged army of Indians under the banner of Mexico's own Virgin of Guadalupe, sparked an uprising that ended Spanish rule...
Among the early Marquises de Portago, one helped to drive the Moors from Spain, another conquered the Canary Islands, a third sailed with Conquistador Pánfilo de Narváez unsuccessful expedition to Florida. The current and 17th Marquis de Portago does his dangerous living in the world of sports. At 28. lean and swarthy Alfonso de Portago has been a champion jai-alai player, a fine swimmer, a superb polo player, a leading gentleman jockey, an Olympic bobsled star, and is one of the best sports-car racers in the world. When he rolls his sleek, shovel-nosed...