John Leguizamo claims Europe stole 500,000 tons of gold from Latin people

Actor John Leguizamo revived a long-standing claim that European colonizers stole 500,000 tons of gold from Latin America, a figure that exceeds the total amount of gold ever mined in human history by more than double.

Mr. Leguizamo, who is set to appear in Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film “The Odyssey,” made the remarks in a Tuesday episode of Bustle’s One Nightstand series, in which he discussed Eduardo Galeano’s 1971 book “Open Veins of Latin America” as one of the works that most shaped his outlook on colonialism. He credited the book with inspiring his Netflix special and one-man Broadway show, “Latin History for Morons.”

“He gives you a perspective of our empires before the conquest and then the ruination of Latin culture,” Mr. Leguizamo said of Galeano’s book, adding that reading it took him “through the five stages of grief.”

The 500,000-ton gold figure is one Mr. Leguizamo has cited repeatedly over the years, including in his Broadway show and in a 2024 interview with PBS’s “Amanpour & Company,” where he said Spain’s conquest of the Americas “took 500,000 tons of gold from us,” calling it “an Empire State building and a half worth of gold” that “fueled the enlightenment, the later Renaissance.”

That figure is vastly out of step with mainstream estimates of the world’s total gold supply. The World Gold Council estimates that roughly 219,890 metric tonnes of gold have been mined across all of human history, with roughly two-thirds of that extracted since 1950. Converted to U.S. short tons — the unit Mr. Leguizamo used — that figure comes to approximately 242,000 tons, still less than half of the 500,000 tons he claimed. By either measure, his claim would represent more than double the entire above-ground stock of gold that exists in the world today, including all jewelry, central bank reserves, and industrial holdings.

Mr. Leguizamo’s broader point — that Spanish colonizers extracted enormous quantities of gold and silver from the Americas, funding European economic development for centuries — is grounded in historical fact, even if the specific tonnage he cites is not. Historians generally agree that colonial-era extraction from the Americas was substantial and that Indigenous populations suffered catastrophic losses from disease, forced labor and violence following European contact.

The actor has faced criticism from conservative commentators over the figure in the past, with some noting that Spain’s total gold and silver haul from the colonial era, while historically significant, fell far short of his claim.