Cortez had around 500 men. Even if you get rid of 99% of the local population, which they didn't, they'd have been outnumbered in to an absurd degree.
The peasants immediately broke and fled, which is where you get the crazy ratios from - fleeing armies are extremely vulnerable and near harmless. Had they fought, they likely would have inflicted far greater casualties on the military forces. However given there were roughly comparable peasant and military forces, the outcome was not in question, so it would have been suicide. Of course so was fleeing.
There's also plenty of accounts from the early days of Cortez' invasion where the Spaniards had a very hard time against the indigenous warriors even when the Spaniards were not largely outnumbered.