"The environment created by the fantastic stories about our homeland that have seen the light of publicity in all countries, the grotesque descriptions that have always been made of the character of Spaniards as individuals and collectively, the denial or at least the systematic ignorance of all that is favorable and beautiful in the various manifestations of culture and art, the accusations that in every era have been flung against Spain". Julián Juderías, La leyenda negra (1914).
In Venezuela, during the government of Juan Vicente Gómez, in 1921, the celebration of the day of the race was decreed to be in October 12, with the aim of commemorating the new identity that Latin America would build. This changed in 2002, three years after the election of the socialist Hugo Chávez. The name was changed to "day of indigenous resistance" and was justified by saying that the previous name was "discriminatory, racist and pejorative", because it is "the worst genocide that humanity has seen." Today I write to dispel tales of fallacies.
History Manipulation
In Wikipedia you can find an extensive article that cites several historians and statistics on censuses carried out at the time, and defended by Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Spanish encomendero and councilor. The problem with these censuses lies in their convenient interpretations - studied by Dr. Lynne Guitar- for Bartolomé himself and the parameters established by each one:
The chroniclers wrote that "all the natives of the island of Hispaniola had disappeared", obeying the wishes of Las Casas by exaggerating the numbers of the dead to try to obtain the approval of the crown in their project of missionary villages, which wanted to replace the encomiendas
The encomenderos inflated the deaths of the Indians to win the sympathy of the court so they send them African slaves, whom they considered stronger since they did not fall at the mercy of diseases, unlike the Indians.
We must also consider the flight of the indigenous to more remote regions.
The half-blooded were counted as spaniards when wearing clothes and practicing their customs, otherwise, they were counted as indigenous.
Note that in the second point, I brought up the diseases brought by the Europeans, which killed indigenous populations. This issue is treated as a systematic method of conquest, when the Spaniards did not know whether or not they brought germs to the new world, alongside with the fact that, due to their interest in the encomiendas, they would not want the unnecessary death of indigenous people.
Unjustified Hate From The Contemporary Spanish and Spanish-American
I do not know if in the rest of the continent the schools teach the conquest in the same way, but in my case, I remember well how they explained to us that the Spaniards have enslaved and murdered the Indians, and how they had lost because of their primitive weapons, without mentioning the internal wars that the Indians had on the continent and their alliances of these with the Spaniards, as are the cases of Hernán Cortéz conquering the Mexica empire and Francisco Pizarro in the conquest of Peru. Instead of talking about how the indigenous had primitive religions - who admitted the sacrifice - and the civilization that Spain brought, they told us about slavery in a very ambiguous way, never mentioning the existence of the laws of burgos.
The Laws of Burgos are very important, They endeavored to establish a thorough regulation of the work regime, wages, food, housing, hygiene and care of the Indians with a tuition, highly protective and humanitarian sense, in addition to prohibiting the application of any type of punishment to them, exempt of work to pregnant women after the fourth month, the married women and those under fourteen. The work assigned to the Indians would be remunerated with money or goods, so the definition of slavery does not fit when talking about the relationship between Spaniards and Indians. These laws are even considered precursors of Human Rights.
Conclusion and Civilization
Moving the myths aside, Spain brought one the most peaceful religions of the world: Christianity, the basis of Western values, and with it, the fashions of Spain, its architecture and artistic waves by the creation of universities, decree signed by Carlos V. Every place where there was a Cabildo had to have a university.
We can see that by far, the most humanist empire that could have been on Latin America was Spain, since Portugal never built universities and England devastated indigenous peoples and lands to the point of being almost nonexistent. Of course, the results of Spain are far from those of England, but that's another debate.