I think the key is encomienda. Not only is encomienda a kind of quasi-slavery that extracts labor from subject peoples without appropriate reward, the limited terms of the grants prevented the emergence of a long term and secure scheme of land ownership whereby property owners had the incentive to make improvements to estates that they could then sell or devise. It is both in one sense oo exploitive (with respect to people), and in another, not exploitive enough (with respect to land and physical resources).
Of course because it created an incentive for the encomenderos to Christianize the natives, (encomenderos get the natives' labor, but they must oversee the natives' religious observance in return) the encomienda system is one reason for the distinctive strength of Catholicism within Latin America. So quite likely if you get read of the encomienda you affect Latin American religious life. At the same time, because of the peculiar nature of the encomienda system, quite likely if you get rid of it, that would create an opportunity for system of starker inequality as other systems of labor "management" (like chattel slavery) take its place.