Glad you asked. Check out the Nobel Prize winning work by Acemoglu in his book Why Nations Fail. He makes a compelling case that the encomienda system put in place by the conquistadors impoverished South America at the time and continued to impoverish its victims in the future as well.

So yes, extremely evil even by the standards of settler colonialism.

> Was Spanish colonization “evil?”

It's hard to look at the on-the-ground details and come to any other conclusion.

Nobody can know, but it is hard to believe it could be any worse than it already is, and so most scenarios they would probably be better off.

I suppose it depends on whether or not you view genocide and forced religious conversion as evil.

We truly have no clue, nor could we pretend to infer an answer to this. Anyone who pretends otherwise needs to get off their high horse.