> Aren't the people who survived Spanish colonization better off than they would have been?

"The ends justify the means" is certainly a valid metric by which to judge things, but an honest application of it leads one to conclusions such as "Mao Zedong was the greatest humanitarian to have ever lived" (as seen here: https://i.imgur.com/3QUXVi3.jpeg).

No, they are not better off.

I have provided as many facts for my argument as you have for yours.

Prove that without any colonization they would be worse off.

Latin America is a horrifically corrupt and inequal place, so, no, probably not!

Probably not, but this counterfactual depends on the circumstances, and depends on your values. For example: people might argue about the relative harms of various kinds of slavery vs. cultural genocide vs. land dispossession and forced displacement ....

After contact there were waves of mass die-off of people throughout the Americas due to disease brought from Eurasia: are we positing that those deaths still occurred? Because they were extraordinarily destabilizing. For example, if we hypothetically imagine that the balance of disease severity was the other way around and 90% of the population of Eurasia was wiped out over a century in several waves of horrific pandemics, then history would look quite different indeed, and it's all but impossible to predict precisely how.

European states other than Spain also did horrific atrocities in their conquests and colonial projects. Are we positing that we just replace Spanish kingdom(s) with some alternative European monarchies? Or are we imagining a situation in which peoples of the Americas retained some autonomy?

no, they're not, this whole line of thought is explicitly white supremacist. shame on you