ABSTRACT
The creation of a parallel tribunal for the repression of native religion was an effective means of sidestepping both the controversy and the king's decrees on the Indians and the Inquisition. The Extirpation differed from the Inquisition in that it attempted to combine a repressive function with a didactic one. The comparatively light punishments imposed upon them demonstrate that the Inquisition implicitly denied the reality of many of the accusations against them. The Extirpation inherited from the Inquisition the tradition of incredulity and scepticism about the supposed powers of hechiceros, but applied it to a fundamentally different type of practitioner, the native Andean shaman. The most fundamental difference between the Inquisition and the Extirpation lay in the identity of their victims. Bartolome Bennassar has indicated that the power of the Inquisition lay less in the severity of its physical punishments than in the psychological weapons it could employ.
