Balboa's dogs killing Native Americans because of their Homosexuality

The story of Captain Vasco Núñez de Balboa, the Spanish conquistador who in 1513, during the course of his journeys, discovered a group of indigenous men in Panama who had engaged in homosexual relations. Taking the men to a nearby mountain clearing, Balboa had the men stripped naked, then set his dogs on them, allowing the animals to tear the men to shreds. Various chronicles of the Spanish conquest of the Americas provide accounts of homosexuality among several of the indigenous peoples inhabiting the region -- an element which, together with others, served to provide "moral" justification for the genocide which marked the conquest...

It might also be germane to this specific discussion if we contextualized the various accounts on the “unnatural sin” written by early Spanish chroniclers in the Philippines within the Renaissance discourse of sodomy. This project should prove particularly insightful in relation to representations of the Indians of the “New World” (America) who, in the early colonial period, came to be known as being “all sodomites.”

Jonathan Goldberg, in his book Sodometries, discusses the unstoppable production of sodomitic Indians to be found in the early colonial Spanish texts coming from the New World after 1516, the year in which the earliest account of Vasco Nuñez de Balboa’s encounter with Panama’s Queraqua Indians first appeared in Europe in Pietro Martire d’Angheira’s De Orbo Novo.This story details the killing of 600 Indian warriors of the Queraqua tribe, after which Balboa fed to his dogs other Panamanians, whom he accused of being sodomites. This story of a sodomitic New World immediately became engraved in the European mind, as proven by subsequent sweeping pronouncements of sodomy-ridden nations and tribes populating the continent of America, from the relations of Hernan Cortes (1519), Tomas Ortiz (1525), Gonzalo de Oviedo (1526), Bernal Diaz (1526) and Cabeza de Vaca (1527), and as literalized by a dramatic engraving of the Balboa narrative in the 1594 edition of Thomas DeBry’s America. In fact, it was in the face of this hysterical condemnation of the entire continent—whose indigenous inhabitants had come to be perceived in Europe as being utterly and irredeemably sodomitic—that Bartolome de Las Casas came to the defense of the Indians by 1542. Las Casas, writing in his Brevisima Relacion, debunked the European myth that all Indians were cannibals and practiced “the nefarious sin.” (Despite such a brave defense, Goldberg reminds us that Las Casas still cannot be completely praised by students of colonialist history, inasmuch as he maintained that sodomy and “cannibalism,” just in case they were indeed a widespread practice among any Indian people, should be enough grounds to exterminate their race).