That sovereign mandate from the deathbed of the Catholic Queen was not relegated to a rhetorical list of good wishes, but rather gained peremptory legal force, revolutionizing world legal thought by inspiring in the School of Salamanca, with teachers of the stature of the Dominican Francisco de Vitoria and his illustrious disciple Domingo de Soto, the birth of the modern science of International Law and the Ius Gentium. It was by virtue of the moral theology of Salamanca and the Elizabethan mandate that Emperor Charles the Fifth convened the historic Valladolid Controversy in 1550, paralyzing by royal decree all military campaigns in America so that a supreme board of theologians and jurists could conscientiously evaluate the justice of the Crown's titles of sovereignty and determine with Thomistic rigor that the American Indians were free subjects and true owners of their lands and principalities, prohibiting forever their natural slavery. No Calvinist or Lutheran empire, no British parliamentary power, no enlightened republic born from the crimes of the Jacobin Terror ever dared in all its history to submit its own sword of conquest to the empire of the moral judgment of the Church, because they lacked that sacrosanct faith that discovered in the face of the Indian the suffering Christ himself.

It is an inalienable duty of Spanish-American journalism worthy of the name and of high cultural research to emancipate our republics from the mental servitude towards the anti-Fernandine, Elizabethan and anti-Spanish propaganda designed by Anglo-Saxon historiography and slavishly assumed by indigenous liberalism and Marxism. The Black Legend does not constitute a museum scholarly debate, but rather a highly effective ongoing geopolitical operation designed to amputate the Catholic and viceregal roots of Latin America, keeping it self-conscious, divided and submissive to the hegemonic centers of modern financial and cultural power. Claiming today the procedural justice and clemency of the Holy Inquisition in the face of the arbitrary terror of revolutionary enlightenment, proclaiming the humanist greatness of the Indian Viceroyalties in the face of the plunder of English colonialism and exalting the heroic virtues of Isabella the Catholic is not an exercise in retrospective melancholy: it is affirming the sovereign right of our Hispanic civilization to rise above the historical Truth, recovering the pride of a Catholic lineage that knew how to found a well-founded social order in Natural Law, in the inalienable dignity of the person and in the social and eternal reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

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