I'm counting three attempts to set up model settlements. The problem with these types of endeavors is that they usually aren't organic to the main flow of life and hardly ever live up to expectations.The Discoverers, Daniel J. Boorstin, New York: Random House, 1983, pages 631-32:
https://books.google.com/books?id=aEr07wJ21NYC&pg=PA632&lpg=PA632&dq=%22he+defended+the+Indians+in+the+Barcelona+Parliament%22&source=bl&ots=hZvT4kSEZj&sig=yg8DO7qe__ihFt8mQoAk9ieGeUY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiu79qLoILLAhVJ6mMKHTMSAowQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&q=%22he%20defended%20the%20Indians%20in%20the%20Barcelona%20Parliament%22&f=false
In his sermon on August 15, 1514, he publicly returned to the Governor all his Indian serfs. For the next fifty years he remained the Indians' most effective champion. Returning to Spain, he defended the Indians in the Barcelona Parliament. Then he persuaded Charles V to sponsor his utopian scheme to build towns where "free Indians" would collaborate with carefully selected Spanish farmers. [1] They would be settled on the Gulf of Paria, between present Trinidad and Venezuela, to provide the model for a new civilization combining the human resources of the Old World and the New. When this scheme failed, he retreated into a Dominican convent in Santo Domingo where he began to write his account of the Spanish in the Indies . . .
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In 1537, when Pope Paul's Sublimis Deus proclaimed the grand principle, . . .
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Again he tried to demonstrate his unorthodox approach, [2] this time by a new settlement in Guatemala, now part of Costa Rica. When Las Casas returned to Spain, he persuaded Charles V to sign the New Laws declaring that the grants of Indian serfs were not hereditary and requiring Spanish encomenderos to liberate their serfs after one generation [emphasis added]. As part of a papal plan that Las Casas himself wrote, [3] he was created bishop of Chiapa expressly to protect the Indians and promote model settlements of Spanish farmers and free Indians. But within two years Spanish settlers sabotaged the scheme and forced Las Casas to return to Spain.
The public climax of Las Casas' struggle provided a spectacle unique in the history of colonization. On April 16, 1550, Charles V, impelled by Las Casas' doubts and accusations, ordered that conquests in the New World be suspended and not be resumed until his theologians had agreed on a just way of proceeding.
On the other hand, the part I put in bold is potentially the real thing. If Bartolomé de las Casas had been successful at getting in the right kind of administrators and/or had been an administrator himself, this might have changed everything.
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