Within a generation of 1492 the indigenous societies of the Greater Antilles were destroyed. Settlers were granted encomiendas entitling them to the labour and tribute of named indigenous communities; villages were broken up and relocated to serve gold placers and estates, and when local labour ran short, raiding parties emptied the Bahamas and the coasts of Venezuela and Central America. Old World epidemics, above all the smallpox outbreak of 1518-19, arrived on top of forced labour, famine and the dislocation of subsistence agriculture, and the compounding of these causes is why the collapse was so fast. The scale of the loss is disputed by more than an order of magnitude, with high estimates from Las Casas and from Cook and Borah, minimal estimates from Rosenblat, and Livi Bacci arguing that even a few hundred thousand starting population implies near-total destruction. The Spanish crown's own investigations, the Laws of Burgos of 1512-13 and the New Laws of 1542 were responses to reports of the collapse, and failed to stop it.
Spanish settlers on Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Jamaica and Cuba seized land and distributed the indigenous population in encomiendas, raided neighbouring islands for slaves, and within two generations the Taíno had all but disappeared as a distinct population
No defensible single figure exists. Estimates for Hispaniola alone span more than two orders of magnitude — from a few tens of thousands implied by recent genetic work, through Karen Anderson Córdova's maximum of about 500,000, to Las Casas's claim of over three million; Jamaica and Puerto Rico together are put at a maximum of about 600,000. Because the plausible range is so wide, any percentage built on it would be an artefact of the estimate chosen rather than a finding.
No defensible total exists because the starting population is unknown to within an order of magnitude. Whatever the baseline, the surviving records show that the great majority of the Taíno died within about fifty years; scholars differ on the mix of epidemic disease, forced labour in the placers, famine caused by the disruption of cultivation, and outright killing, with Livi Bacci emphasising the labour and subsistence collapse and others emphasising imported pathogens.
Forced labour under the encomienda and in the gold placers, punitive campaigns against resisting caciques, and the destruction and forced relocation of villages are documented in the Spanish crown's own inquiries, the Jeronymite interrogatory of 1517 and the reports of Bartolomé de Las Casas, whose numbers but not whose account of the practices are disputed.
Dominican Rep., Bahamas, Venezuela