The conquest of Latin America was a fairly rapid process in which the theme of hegemony was largely prominent. The cultures of colonialism and competitive nature to gain wealth through exploitation were the main driving force of hegemony. It's natural to exploit people of lower class or social status for your own benefit, and that's what happened. As the pressure of power and control on the people became unbearable, resistance would surely follow. Looking at today's society, there is a lot of exploitation and hegemony among some groups. Major global conglomerates exploit the populations of many poorer countries to obtain cheap labor. For people abroad, they receive quite high wages for their standards. As for companies, they are making a lot of money due to low labor costs. Similarly, we can consider the colonization of Latin America as a "business". Each country is like a global conglomerate, trying to make its “company” as rich as possible. This wealth and power was obtained through the exploitation of people. For example, if Spain decided to be legitimate towards the indigenous people, another country like Portugal would end up being more powerful in terms of power and control. Likewise, if a company decided to "play by the rules", they would know that another company would ultimately be more powerful and richer than them in the future due to exploitation. A sort of “If we don't do it, they will” mentality. In a certain sense, the desire for power over other countries leads in any case to the exploitation of indigenous populations. Stern explains that free labor was used to gain power and money. "Free labor, excluded from access to the means of production, has no...... half of the paper......r, instructed an apoderado, legal representative in Spain, to keep him informed of developments and facilitate moving your case through bureaucratic channels." (Avarza 197) Many used the legal system to their advantage. This was the civilized way of dealing with hegemony between different social classes. Hegemony was an important theme in the conquest of Latin America, which then led to the independence of the oppressed citizens. Although conquest was a fairly rapid process, independence was not. It took many riots and acts of rebellion to get their points across. Hegemony will always exist wherever there are two or more groups with a large class difference. In the case of Latin America, the entire hegemonic process was characterized by different classes and races, which ultimately led to racial tensions and conflicts between social groups..