Carballo offers input on Cholula, where Cortes conducted a notorious massacre. The moral controversy depends on the historical controversy: did Cortes actually do it, and if so why, and also how did he get away with it.
The confusion in the sources hints at confusion on the ground where it happened.
Elsewhere Carballo reiterates that Mesoamerican wars weren't total. Now: this needs to be nuanced. The Mesoamericans took to the "new rules" pretty darn fast later on, when the Spaniards presented that opportunity to them. Also, Carballo seems unaware that Xaltocan shifted from Otomí to Nahua ... at all, let alone how it was done. To be pointed out here: between Otomí and Nahua are real linguistic divisions with, at the time, ethnic prejudices.
When the battles were between one Nahua town and another, the two sides used war as Politics By Other Means. Just like Bismarck never intended to annex Denmark, Austria, or France. Cholula was a Nahua town disputed between two Nahua polities. So the nastiness there still requires explanation.
Carballo brings here that Cholula was, at the time, itself divided, into an old guard who supported the former Tlaxcala alliance; and the newer elite, subservient to Tenochtitlan. That, then, might explain it: the war on the outside covered up a lot of internal score-settling. Civil wars are, in their way, as brutal as tribal.
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