During one of his expeditions through the Isthmus of Panama, and several weeks after becoming the first European to sight the boundless Pacific ocean, Balboa and his soldiers came across the village of Quarequa in Eastern Panama and ordered the killing of 40 berdache and two-spririt members of Cueva Indians, including their brother Quarequa who practiced "sodomy"(it is likely that labels like "sodomy" reflected the contemporaneous European moral frameworks, not actual indigenous cultural understandings, and many historians like Jonathan Goldberg assert these were used to justify violence) and same-sex marriage by employing war dogs("perros de guerra"). The employment of dog breeds specialized to be used in the context of battles was prevalent in 16th century Spain, particularly common during the colonization of the Americas wherein large, bulky and fierce Spanish mastiffs were used as weapons of psychological and physical warfare against the indigenous population who had never seen them before, making them very effective. Balboa's massacres was praised by later commentators, including Antonio de la Calancha, who unabashedly described it as “a fine action of an honorable and Catholic Spaniard.”

In the works of Peter Martyr d'Anghiera, particularly page 285 of his work De Orbe novo, he articulates the event in detail:

"Vasco discovered that the village of Quarequa was stained by the foulest vice. The king’s brother and a number of other courtiers were dressed as women, and according to the accounts of the neighbours shared the same passion. Vasco ordered forty of them to be torn to pieces by dogs. The Spaniards commonly used their dogs in fighting against these naked people, and the dogs threw themselves upon them as though they were wild boars or timid deer. The Spaniards found these animals as ready to share their dangers as did the people of Colophon or Castabara, who trained cohorts of dogs for war; for the dogs were always in the lead and never shirked a fight. When the natives learned how severely Vasco had treated those shameless men, they pressed about him as though he were Hercules, and spitting upon those whom they suspected to be guilty of this vice, they begged him to exterminate them, for the contagion was confined to the courtiers and had not yet spread to the people. Raising their eyes and their hands to heaven, they gave it to be understood that God held this sin in horror, punishing it by sending lightning and thunder, and frequent inundations which destroyed the crops. It was like wise the cause of famine and sickness."

^* It is likely that the notion wherein the Indians "begged him to exterminate them" was either fabricated or entirely exaggerated by d'Anghiera.

In the words of Jonathan Goldberg, he asserts that European values were projected onto indigenous societies. Balboa's claim that native informants denounced the accused as "pestilence" served to position himself as a moral arbiter. He further makes the assertion that this "quasi-democratic" ruse masked colonial domination by depicting indigenous compliance as direct endorsement of European sexual ethics. However, he questions whether these accusations reflected genuine indigenous beliefs or strategic survival tactics under conquest. Elaborating on this, he says that the cross-dressed of indigenous men became a site of colonial anxiety. Their bodies symbolized disorder (gender inversion, class trangression) and justified Spanish hegemony. The term "presposterous venus" (which he quotes verbatim from the 1555 English translation of the work by Richard Eden) underscores the racialized and gendered logic of colonial violence, linking non-normative sexuality to political and cultural "infection".

Directly quoting from his essay:

"[Balboa] founde the house of this kynge infected with most abhominable and unnatural lechery. For he founde the kynges brother and many other younge men in womens apparell, smoth & effeminately decked, which by the report of such as dwelte above hym, he abused with preposterous venus. Of these above the number of fortic, he commanded to bee given for a pray to his dogges. (89v)

A number of elements in this description make it clear that sodomy is its subject even though the term is never used. The crime of “preposterous venus” says this in a highly condensed way. Preposterous means a confusion of before and behind; here the cross-dressed Indians have confused gender and the supposed “natural” procreative sexuality that follows from it. What they do is thus termed unnatural and abominable, an infection in danger of spreading. All this is familiar enough in the discourse of sodomy, but simply to identify that as its topic fails to take stock of the excessiveness of this representation of sodomy.5 In simple narrative terms, Balboa has already established his power by the act of carnage that precedes this one. If he seeks to remove the king’s brother in order to make his position absolutely secure, it’s more than a bit odd that the king’s brother is depicted as a cross-dresser. But what this does — it is not something that can be found in the description of the battle scene — is to infuse Balboa’s acts with moral purpose. It’s as if he’s righting a wrong against the prerogatives of gender. (In this context, it’s worth noting that many sixteenth-century narratives describe native women as offended by the sodomites in their midst.6) But if the elimination of the king’s brother and his minions is done for the sake of women, and for the sake of the proprieties and prerogatives of gender, it is also obviously fuelled with misogyny, as the disgust at effeminacy implies. Yet that disgust is displaced upon the cross-dressed/ sodomitical body and its making preposterous of the act of Venus.

Moreover, one must notice that what Balboa knows about the king’s brother he does thanks to native informants. If the king’s brother’s manliness is discredited — no warrior, he stays at home with his cross-dressed minions — his political abilities also are impugned. And this seems to be an opinion about him shared by the native informants. Balboa is thus represented as serving the interests of those he has conquered. This is, in fact, registered in the aftermath of the slaughter of the forty Panamanians, as the Indians accommodate Balboa by handing over more sexual offenders, delivering up “al such as they knewe to bee infected with that "stinkynge abhomination," Peter Martyr explains, "hadde not yet entered among the people, but was exercised onely by the noble men and gentelmen. But the people lytlinge up theyr handse and eyes toward heaven, gave tokens that god was grevously offended with such vyle deedes" (90v). It is at this point that Richard Eden cannot resist his comment; in the margin of the text beside these lines, he writes: "I wolde all men were of this opinion."

The slaughter of sodomites is thus mobilized as a kind of quasi-democratic device; this is, of course, a ruse of power: Balboa eliminates and supplants the Indian rulers but appears to be acting as the liberator of the oppressed. Political oppression has been translated into sexual oppression, the abuse of preposterous Venus. The Indians who decry sodomy are "good" Indians, not merely in their accommodating behavior, but also in providing a belief that Eden eidorses. They have been made the site upon which European values can/be foisted, but also an exemplary mirror in which Europeans might find themselves.

In the battle that precedes the slaughter of the forty Panamanian sodomites, all Indians are described as animals, and their slaughter is expliclty an act of butchery; they were, Martyr writes, with perfect equanimity, "hewed...in pieces as the butchers doo fleshe...from one an arme, from an other a legge, from hym a buttocke, from an other a shulder, and from some the necke from the bodye at one stroke" (89v). After the forty sodomites are fed to the dogs, two kinds of Indians appear in the text, sodomitical ones, and noble savages. As the latter lift their hands to heaven, it's as if they're proto-Christians, at the very least testifying to the universality of the Judeo-Christian condemnation of "unnatural" sexuality.

Serving as a mirror of European belief, this split representation of Indians permits the covering over of divisions within the invading troops. For Balboa himself is no noble or gentleman, although that is the position he strives to achieve in his conquests. The representation of the Indians (which, of course, starts with believing that they are ruled by a king, and that their society is divided along European class lines) serves to dissimulate Balboa's power grab within Spanish society. In this post facto rewriting, Balboa is not only the righter of sexual wrongs, he's also the universal liberator of the under classes.

The slaughter of sodomites, from such a vantage point, serves only as a spectacle for Europe and its ruses of power. Such mirror effects are quite complicated, however. Balboa's elevation is predicated on his re-placing the native powers: yet when natives are made to voice European beliefs about corrupt sexuality, the truth they utter is one about the corruptions of those in power—about nobles and gentlemen—about the very courtier Balboa seeks to become. The mirror that the natives hold up suggests, in the doubleness of native construction, divisions within the Europeans."

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