Born in 1485, Guzmán served as King Charles I’s bodyguard. Apparently impressed by the howling vacuum where Guzman’s soul should reside, the king yeeted him across the Atlantic to Mexico in 1527.
Guzmán took to sadism like a fish to water. As governor of Pánuco, he enslaved thousands of Indigenous individuals, making sure to brand their faces before shipping them to be worked to death on Caribbean encomiendas.
In 1529, after he was removed as President of the Audiencia, Guzmán decided to take a trip up Mexico’s west coast. Unfortunately for everyone in his path, his idea of a jaunt included a torture and killing spree across four states that modern historians call a “genocidal enterprise.” Guzmán kicked off the raid by burning an allied Native chief alive before completely eradicating several tribes and committing innumerable other atrocities.
Nine years after he first arrived in Mexico, the Spaniards finally decided that Guzmán made even them look bad. So, they arrested him in 1536 and carted him back to Spain, where he spent one whole year in prison—apparently the 16th century Spanish mandatory minimum for crimes against humanity—before he was reinstated as the king’s bodyguard until his death in 1561.
