Mexican Inquisition (Wikipedia)

A reference encyclopedia article on the Mexican Inquisition, tracing the early episcopal inquisition Bishop Juan de Zumarraga exercised in New Spain from 1535, including the 1539 prosecution and burning of the Nahua lord Carlos Ometochtzin of Texcoco, through the formal establishment of the Holy Office tribunal in 1571 under first inquisitor Pedro Moya de Contreras. Records that the formal tribunal, unlike Zumarraga's earlier episcopal proceedings, exercised no jurisdiction over Indians except for printed material in indigenous languages, an exemption explained by the impracticality of enforcement where native peoples vastly outnumbered European colonists, by native religious practice often being read as running parallel to Christian forms rather than opposed to them, and by mendicant friars frequently shielding indigenous communities from secular prosecution. Cites one scholarly estimate of around fifty persons executed by the formal tribunal across its 1571 to 1820 operation, noting the surviving record is incomplete.