THE Uruguayan writer and historian Eduardo Galeano has devoted much of his work to the history of Latin America, attempting to express the point of view of the victims of the Conquest of the Americas after the European invasion of 500 years ago, currently being celebrated as the "Discovery". EDUARDO GALEANO judges, police and officials; it is true that Spanish is not the only language heard on television — which also speaks English.
Five years ago, city registrars in the Argentine capital Buenos Aires refused to record the birth of a child. The parents, indigenous people from Jujuy wanted to give their child a first name from their language - Qori Wamancha. The Argentine registrars could not accept this "foreign
The Indians of America live in exile in their own land. Their language is not a sign of identity but a a mark of a curse. It does not say who a person is, it brands them. When Indians give up their language, they
When I was a child I was taught in the Uruguayan schools that our country had been saved from the "native problem" thanks to the generals of the last century who wiped out the last Charruas [a people from the Rio de la Plata region].
The native problem. The first Americans, the continent's real discoverers are a problem. To get rid of the problem the Indians must stop being Indians. They must either be wiped off the map or their spirit must be wiped out; the alternatives are annihilation or assimilation, genocide or "othercide".
In December 1976, Brazil's interior minister announced triumphantly that "the native problem will be totally solved" by the end of the 20th century. By then all Indians would be properly absorbed into Brazilian society and would no longer be Indians. The minister explained that the task of the organization officially entrusted with their protection (the National Indian Foundation) is to make them disappear.
The invasion of Amazonia by enterprises greedy for minerals and wood was accompanied by shots, dynamite, presents of poisoned food, the contamination of rivers, the destruction of forests and the spread of diseases unknown to the Indians. However this long and ferocious attack has not been * This article first appeared in the Uruguayan journal Brecha of April 10, 1992.
enough. The domestication of the surviving Indians to save them from barbarism is also an indispensable weapon if all the remaining obstacles on the road of the Conquest
"Kill the Indian and save the man" advised the pious American adviser Henry Pratt. Years later the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa has explained that the only solution is to modernize the Indians even if this means that their culture has to be sacrificed to save them from hunger and
The maelstrom of salvation
Salvation has condemned Indians to working from dawn to dusk in mines and on plantations for wages which are not even enough for a can of dogfood. Saving the Indians also involves breaking up their communities and throwing them into the maelstrom of the cities as cheap labour, where they change their language, their name and their bearing and where they become beggars, drunks and prostitutes.
Then again, saving the Indians can mean putting them in uniform and sending them, rifle on their shoulder, to kill other Indians or die defending the very system that has repudiated them. Indians make good cannon fodder; of 25,000 mobilize during the Second World War, 10,000 died.
On December 16, 1492, Columbus explained in his journal that the Indians are there "to receive orders and to work, to sow and to do all that is necessary and to make DR s/he disappears. Emptied of themselves, they are non-Indians, nobody.
The shaman of the Chamacocos Indians of Paraguay sings of the stars, the spiders and the mad Totila who wanders in the forests crying. He explains what the kingfisher says: "Do not suffer from hunger, do not suffer from thirst. Mount on my wings and we will eat the river fish and drink the wind". He sings about what the mist says: "I am coming to cut down the frost so that your people will not suffer from cold"
He sings about what the horses of the sky say: "We will saddle up and go to look for
However the missionaries of an evangelical sect forced the shaman to abandon his feathers, tambourines and chants because "these things are from the devil"; he can no longer attempt to cure vipers' bites, bring rain in times of drought, nor fly over the land to sing about what he sees. In a conversation with Ticio Escobar the shaman said: "I stopped singing and I fell ill. My dreams don't know where to go and they torment me. I am old and wounded. In the end what good has it done me to give up what belonged to me?"
That was in 1986. In 1614, the Archbishop of Lima had all the quenas [Indian flutes] and other Indian musical instruments burnt and prohibited all their dances, songs and ceremonies threatening with a hundred lashes for those who refused for "they are in league with demons".
To dispossess the Indians of their freedom and belongings they were deprived of their symbols of identity. They were forbidden to sing, dance and dream of their gods even if they themselves [the Spaniards] had been danced and sung about in the distant days of the creation. Indians have been and are crucified in the name of Christ: to save them from hell the idolatrous pagans must receive the word.
Of course, the God of the Christians is an alibi for robbery. As South Africa's Arch5 # 237 International Viewpoint
International Viewpoint # 237 • October 26, 1992
500 YEARS bishop Desmond Tutu put it: "They came; they had the bible and we had the land. They said to us: 'close your eyes and pray.' And when we opened our eyes, they had the land and we had the bible"
The modern state prefers the alibi of education. To save them from the darkness, the ignorant barbarians must be civilized. Today, as yesterday, racism transforms colonial robbery into a act of justice. The colonized is a subhuman, capable of superstition but not of religion, capable of folklore but not of culture; the subhuman gets the treatment s/he deserves and the small value of their labour is appropriately rewarded. Colonial and neo-colonial pillage is justified by racism. Latin America treats the Indians in the same way as the great powers treat Latin America.
A prestigious Bolivian historian
Gabriel Rene Moreno was one of Bolivia's most prestigious historians of the last century. To this day one of the country's universities bears his name. This illustrious representative of a nation's culture believed that "the Indians are donkeys who produce mules when they intermingle with the white race". He weighed native and mixed-race brains; these, his scales told him, weighed five, six or seven ounces less that those of a white. He concluded that they were "cellularly incapable of grasping
Rene Moreno's Peruvian contemporary and colleague provided the excuse for the robbery of lands and labour.
The market demanded, for example, coffee and coffee demanded more land and labour. It was then, for example, that Guatemala's liberal president, Justo Rufino Barrios, a progressive man, reintroduced colonial-style forced labour and offered his friends Indian land and abundant Indian
The racism reached its paroxysm in countries such as Guatemala where the Indians remained in the majority despite the repeated waves of extermination.
To this day there is no worse paid workforce: Maya Indians get $0.65 for cutting a quintal of coffee or cotton or a tonne of sugarcane. The Indians cannot sow maize without military permission nor move elsewhere without a work permit. The army organizes massive labour recruitment for the sowing and harvesting of products destined for export. In the plantations pesticides fifty times more toxic than the tolerable limits are used; the mothers' milk is the most contaminated in the Western
In complete impunity, it is officially recognized in Guatemala that 440 native settlements disappeared from the map betwar uniforms. They no longer have a white skin; they are mixed-race, brutally trained and obliged to carry out crimes that lead to their own death.
Some 1,200 years before European mathematicians, this inferior race discovered the number zero. They knew the age of the universe with astonishing precision, a thousand years before the astronomers of our epoch.
The Mayas were always time-travellers: "what is a man on the road? Time?"
### Henry Ford's revelation
However they did not know that time is money, as Henry Ford revealed. Time, the foundation of space, seemed sacred to them like a daughter, the land, a son or a human being: like the land and like people time cannot be bought and sold. Civilization has been doing its best to teach them otherwise.
History changes depending on who is telling the story. What for the Romans were "barbarian invasions" were for the Germans "southward emigration"
Until now the history of the Americas has not been told by the Indians. On the eve of the Spanish conquest a Maya prophet, speaking in the name of the gods announced: "when greed comes to an end.
the face, the hands and the feet of the world will be released". And when the been heard say? Form the point of view of the conquerors — until now
VVi
Ricardo Palma wrote that "the
Indians are an abject and degenerate race". And the Argentine, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento used the following terms to describe the long struggle of the Araucanos
Indians for their freedom:
"They are more indomitable, that is to say more recalcitrant, and less apt for European civilization and assimilation".
The most violent racism in the history of Latin America is found in the words of the most famous intellectuals of the end of the 19th century and in the deeds of the liberal politicians who founded the modern states. Sometimes they are of
Indian origin, like Porfirio Diaz, the author of capitalist modernization in Mexico who forbade Indians to walk in the main streets or sit in public parks unless they changed their cotton trousers for European style trousers and their sandals for shoes.
This was the period when Latin America became tied into the world market ruled over by the British Empire, an epoch of
5 "scientific" contempt for the Indians which ween 1981 and 1983 in the course of a campaign of annihilation in which thousands of men and women were murdered or "disappeared". The cleanup in the mountains (operation "shaved earth") also led to the death of an incalculable number of children. The Guatemalan military are sure that the vice of rebellion is genetically transmit-
But does this supposedly inferior race, condemned to vice and idleness, incapable of order and progress, deserve a better fate? Institutional violence is there to drive away any hesitation. Today's conquistadores no longer wear suits of armour but Vietnam
Indians have always been taken as proof of their possession by demons or of their biological inferiority.
The Indians of the Caribbean killed themselves rather than do slave labour
This proved that they were lazy.
They went naked as if their body was their face. This showed that they were without shame.
They did not know about property rights, they shared everything and lacked the lust for wealth. This was because they were more like monkeys than humans.
They washed too often. This suggested a resemblance to the infidel Muslims, burned by the fires of the Inquisition.
They never hit their children and left them in freedom. They did not know how to administer punishment and lacked any doctrine.
Protests mark 500th anniversary
IN the Dominican Republic, a visiting Pope John Paul I used October
12 as an occasion to call on his followers to undertake a renewed evangelical mission in Latin America and the Caribbean
October 26, 1992
They believed in dreams and obey voices. This is the influence of Satan or
500 YEARS perhaps pure stupidity.
They ate when they were hungry and not at the proper mealtimes. Clearly, they have no control over their instincts.
theologians and the growing number of Protestant sects. At the same
They make love when they feel desire.
time, there were demonstrations across the country, with transport ser-
Here it is the Devil impelling them to vices and shops being shut down in the capital, Santo Domingo repeat the original sin.
In Ecuador, several thousand Quechua Indians marched behind a
There is no stigma on homosexuality or banner symbolizing "500 years of indigenous and popular resistance"
special value put on virginity. This is
In Mexico, rituals dating from the pre-Hispanic era were carried out because they line the antechamber to hell.
at various historic sites, such as the cathedral in Teotihuacan.
In 1523, the Indian chief Nicaragua
In Santiago, Chile protests met with government repression. One asked the conquistadores, "and who elecprotestor was killed and two others were injured ted your king?" He had been elected by the
(Taken from reports in Le Monde and El Pais, October 13 and 14.)* community elders.
Pre-Colombian democracy
Pre-Colombian America was vast and diverse with forms of democracy that Europe has never seen and that the world does not know even today. To reduce the reality of native America to the despotism of the
Inca emperors or the bloody practices of the Aztec dynasty would be like seeing in the European Renaissance only the tyranny of its monarchs or the sinister ceremonies of the Inquisition.
In Guarani tradition, for example, the chiefs are elected by assemblies of women and men - and they are chucked out if they do not respect their mandate. Among the Iroquois, men and women govern on an equal footing. Chiefs are men, but they are elected and deposed by women. Via the
Council of Matrons they have decision- making power over the essential aspects of the life of the confederation. Around 1600 when the Iroquois men launched a war on their own initiative, the women staged a love strike. Shortly afterwards, the men, obliged to sleep alone, submitted to joint government.
In 1919, the Indian chief on the island of
San Blas [near Panama] announced his triumph: "The Indian women no longer wear their [traditional] molas but civilized dresses".
He also announced that the women no
There's not very longer painted their noses but their cheeks, as they should and that they no longer wore gold rings in their noses but in their ears, as
70 years after this the Kuna Indian women of our day still wear nose rings and wear their molas made of multi-colored cloth blended with extraordinary imagination and beauty and are buried in them
In 1989, on the eve of the US invasion, General Manuel Noriega assured the world that Panama was a country that respected human rights. "We are a tribe", he explai-
The primitive tools of the Indian communities rendered fertile the deserts of the Andes chain. The modern technologies of the big private export-oriented estates have made deserts out of fertile lands, in the
It would be absurd to retreat five centuries in terms of productive techniques, but it is equally absurd to overlook the catastrophes produced by a system which forces human beings, razes the forests, violates the land and poisons the rivers to obtain the maximum wealth in the minimum of time. Is it not absurd to sacrifice nature and people on the altar of the international market? This is our absurdity - and we accept
A sense of community So-called primitive cultures are always dangerous because they retain their • common sense. Common sense, by a natural extension, gives us a sense of community. If the air belongs to all, how can the land be private property? If we come from the earth and return to it, is not a crime against the earth a crime against us? The land is birthplace and tomb, mother and companion. It receives the first mouthful and we give it rest and protect it from erosion.
The system despises what it doesn't understand because it refuses to recognize what it fears to know. Racism is thus also a
What do we know about the native cultures? What we see in Wild West films. And what do we know of the African cultures? What we have been told by Profes-
At the end of the last century an English doctor John Down identified the syndrome that bears his name. He believed that the alteration of the chromosomes implied "a return to inferior races" producing mongolian idiots, negroid idiots and aztec idiots.
At the same time an Italian doctor, Cesare Lombroso gave the "born criminal" the features of Blacks and Indians.
Thus the prejudice that Indians and Blacks were naturally inclined to crime and mental deficiency was fitted out with a scientific basis. Indians and Blacks, traditionally instruments of labour became
In the epoch of Lombroso and Down a Brazilian doctor Raimundo Nina Rodrigues (who was a mulatto) came to the conclusion that "the mixing of blood perpetuates the character of the inferior races" so that "the Black race will always be a factor in our inferiority as a people". This psychiatrist was the first researcher of African origin into the Brazilian culture. He studied the latter as if it were a clinical case — with the Black religions as a pathology, its trances a sign of hysteria.
Shortly after, an Argentine doctor, the Socialist Jose Ingenerios wrote that "the Blacks, the ignominious slag of the human race are closer to apes than to civilized whites". To demonstrate their irremediable inferiority Ingenerios stated that "the Blacks have no religious ideas".
In fact, religious ideas crossed the sea with the Black slaves. They had to take refuge under the guise of white saints where they survived to help millions of people violently torn from Africa and sold as things. Ogum, the god of fire, reappea-