Apocalypto More Factual than Native-Americans Like

Dennis Mangan has an interesting caption to this article that Pizarro and Cortez were liberators, and theNew York Times link is very thought-provoking.
The Jesuit Relations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries detail innumerable instances of elaborate torture-to-death rituals among Northeast Indian tribes and confederations among themselves, and of course, the hapless French or English colonist who might fall into their hands. These Mohawk, Huron, and Iroquois butchers didn't have power drills or chainsaws, but could match any Iraqi sectarian extremist in grisly torture resulting in prolonged painful death. The movie "Blackrobe" had the slightest hint of what the Jesuits spelled out in detail.

The same bettering of conditions which abolished human sacrifice, albeit replacing it with forced-labor slavery in some cases, might also have occurred in the black slaves imported from Africa, whose descendants live in relative freedom and prosperity compared to their distant kin in Old World Africa today.