Eduardo Galeano and October 12

Yesterday, on the day of our national holiday, we celebrated the arrival of Christopher Columbus in America, an oceanic feat that marked the beginning of a period of splendor and external projection for Spain. Our ancestors brought to Europe unknown plants, new foods, the promise of silver and gold, and a vast uncharted territory to explore, colonize and dream about.

One wonders if the discovery of America was so positive for those on the other shore, those defeated by steel, fire and the ambition of the conquerors. And when speaking of the losers, we must not think of the current American nations, founded by crillos and mestizos. They are not the victims of Pizarro and Cortés, but their emancipated daughters. That is why they also celebrate October 12. We must look for the authentic defeats of the conquest today in the indigenous communities and cultures that poorly survive.

Time has passed, but the persecution of the indigenous continues. In an old article recovered yesterday by www.ecoportal.net, the author of Memory of fire, the Uruguayan Edward Galeano, He writes: «After five centuries of business throughout Christendom, a third of the American jungles have been annihilated, much land is barren that was fertile and more than half the population eats sauté. The Indians, victims of the most gigantic dispossession in universal history, continue to suffer the usurpation of the last remains of their lands, and continue to be condemned to the denial of their different identity. They are still forbidden to live in their own way and way, they are still denied the right to be. At first, the looting and the othercide were carried out in the name of the God of heaven. Now they are fulfilled in the name of the god of Progress. "

The article is titled "October 12: Nothing to celebrate" and it is a hard and lucid denunciation of the iniquities that capitalism, disguised as civilization, still inflicts on the children of the earth. Its reading seems to me indispensable. 

-More information about Eduardo Galeano: 1, 2, 3.