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The real decimation of the native peoples of South, Central and North America can not be directly attributed to the willful action of any European Nation. The killer was European (Old world) diseases, particularly smallpox. At the time people did not understand about diseases and unfortunately the isolation of the native American peoples meant they had no resistance to the endemic diseases from Europe. (About the only disease that is thought to have come the other way of any significance is Syphilis).

Certainly the first recorded description of a European ship entering the Amazon describes the river as being populated (with cities along its banks). With the next visitation, a hundred years later the descriptions are of jungle to the river banks and no people. The intervening depopulation is likely to have been caused by diseases brought during that first contact.

Apart from the rather brutal Spanish Incursions into central and south America, the rest of European nations had an objective of trade rather than slaughter. Sadly after the formation of the United States there was another period of brutalization and slaughter but this time not by a European nation.

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