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September 30, 2017 - May 5, 2021
The more freedom is extended to business, the more prisons have to be built for those who suffer from that business.
For the world today, America is just the United States; the region we inhabit is a sub-America, a second-class America of nebulous identity.
the mortality of wealth which nature bestows and imperialism appropriates.
The strength of the imperialist system as a whole rests on the necessary inequality of its parts, and this inequality assumes ever more dramatic dimensions.
North American missionaries sow pills, diaphragms, intrauterine devices, condoms, and marked calendars, but reap children. Latin American children obstinately continue getting born, claiming their natural right to a place in the sun in these magnificent lands which could give to all what is now denied to almost all.
The human murder by poverty in Latin America is secret; every year, without making a sound, three Hiroshima bombs explode over communities that have become accustomed to suffering with clenched teeth.
The United States is more concerned than any other country with spreading and imposing family planning in the farthest outposts. Not only the government, but the Rockefeller and the Ford foundations as well, have nightmares about millions of children advancing like locusts over the horizon from the third world.
While intrauterine devices compete with bombs and machine-gun salvos to arrest the growth of the Vietnamese population, in Latin America it is more hygienic and effective to kill guerrilleros in the womb than in the mountains or the streets.
Three years after the discovery Columbus personally directed the military campaign against the natives of Haiti, which he called Espanola. A handful of cavalry, 200 foot soldiers, and a few specially trained dogs decimated the Indians. More than 500, shipped to Spain, were sold as slaves in Seville and died miserably. Some theologians protested and the enslavement of Indians was formally banned at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Actually it was not banned but blessed: before each military action the captains of the conquest were required to read to the Indians, without an interpreter
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If you do not, or if you maliciously delay in so doing, I certify that with God’s help I will advance powerfully against you and make war on you wherever and however I am able, and will subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and of their majesties and take your women and children to be slaves, and as such I will sell and dispose of them as their majesties may order, and I will take your possessions and do you all the harm and damage that I can.
in 1523 Pedro de Alvarado launched the conquest of Central America.
Ancestral research
In 1540 Pedro de Valdivia crossed the Atacama desert and founded Santiago de Chile.
Quetzalcoatl had come from the east and gone to the east: he was white and bearded. Also white and bearded was Viracocha, the bisexual god of the Incas. And the east was the cradle of the Mayas’ hero-ancestors.
These remarkable coincidences have given rise to the hypothesis that the gods of the native religions were really Europeans who reached our shores long before Columbus.
The Europeans brought with them, like biblical plagues, smallpox and tetanus, various lung, intestinal, and venereal diseases, trachoma, typhus, leprosy, yellow fever, and teeth-rotting caries. Smallpox was the first to appear.
The Brazilian anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro estimates that more than half the aboriginal population of America, Australia, and Oceania died from the contamination of first contact with white men.
They crave gold like hungry swine.”
Today in the enormous bare plaza at the center of Mexico City the Catholic cathedral rises on the ruins of Tenochtitlán’s greatest temple and the government palace occupies the site where Cuauhtémoc, the Aztec chief martyred by Cortés, had his residence.
The metals taken from the new colonial dominions not only stimulated Europe’s economic development; one may say that they made it possible.
Latin America was a European business.
Defense of the Catholic faith turned out to be a mask for the struggle against history.
The Latin American colonies were discovered, conquered, and colonized within the process of the expansion of commercial capital.
although it showed some feudal characteristics, it functioned at the service of capitalism developing elsewhere. Nor, indeed, can the existence of wealthy capitalist centers in our own time be explained without the existence of poor and subjected outskirts: the one and the other make up the same system.
One French economist argues that Latin America’s worst colonial legacy, which explains its backwardness today, is lack of capital.17 But all the historical evidence shows that the colonial economy produced bountiful wealth for the classes connected internally with the colonial system of domination.
those who survived were compelled to pay the tributes for the dead. The monarch added that Indians were bought and sold; that they slept in the open air; and that mothers killed their children to save them from the torture of the mines.
to the plight of the Indians of the
exterminated Latin American civilizations was added the ghastly fate of the blacks seized from African villages to toil in Brazil and the Antilles. The colonial Latin American economy enjoyed the most highly concentrated labor force known until that time, making possible the greatest concentration of wealth ever enjoyed by any civilization in world history.
The price of the tide of avarice, terror, and ferocity bearing down on these regions was Indian genocide:
The Indians of the Americas totaled no less than 70 million when the foreign conquerors appeared on the horizon; a century and a half later they had been reduced to 3.5 million.
The fiction of legality protected the Indian; the reality of exploitation drained the blood from his body.
The Crown regarded the inhuman exploitation of Indian labor as so necessary that in 1601 Philip III, banning forced labor in the mines by decree, at the same time sent secret instructions ordering its continuation “in case that measure should reduce production.”
In three centuries Potosí’s Cerro Rico consumed 8 million lives. The Indians, including women and children, were torn from their agricultural communities and driven to the Cerro. Of every ten who went up into the freezing wilderness, seven never returned.
“These poor Indians are like sardines in the sea. Just as other fish pursue the sardines to seize and devour them, so everyone in these lands pursues the wretched Indians.”
Many people claimed mestizo status before the courts to avoid being sent to the mines and sold and resold in the market.
The mita labor system was a machine for crushing Indians. The process of using mercury to extract silver poisoned as many or more than did the toxic gases in the bowels of the earth. It made hair and teeth fall out and brought on uncontrollable trembling. The victims ended up dragging themselves through the streets pleading for alms.
The Indians were used as beasts of burden because they could carry a greater weight than the delicate llama, and this proved that they were in fact beasts of burden.
Center for Anthropological Studies of the Catholic University of Asunción later carried out a revealing survey, both in the capital and in the countryside: eight out of ten Paraguayans think that “Indians are animals.” In Caaguazú, Alta Paraná, and the Chaco, Indians are hunted down like wild beasts, sold at bargain prices, and exploited by a system of virtual slavery—yet almost all Paraguayans have Indian blood, and Paraguayans tirelessly compose poems, songs, and speeches in homage to the “Guaraní soul.”
As Darcy Ribeiro puts it, the Indians were the fuel of the colonial productive system. “It is almost certain,” writes Sergio Bagú, “that hundreds of Indian sculptors, architects, engineers, and astronomers were sent into the mines along with the mass of slaves for the killing task of getting out the ore. The technical ability of these people was of no interest to the colonial economy. They were treated as so many skilled workers.”
“There are no accomplices here other than you and I. You as oppressor, I as liberator, deserve to die.”
“Campesino! Your poverty shall no longer feed the master!”
Tourists love to photograph altiplano natives in their native costumes, unaware that these were imposed by Charles III at the end of the eighteenth century. The dresses that the Spaniards made Indian females wear were copied from the regional costumes of Estremaduran, Andalusian, and Basque peasant women, and the center-part hair style was imposed by Viceroy Toledo.
The Indians have suffered, and continue to suffer, the curse of their own wealth; that is the drama of all Latin America.
As René Dumont says, “This Indian’s ancestors, answering to no man, used once to cultivate the rich soil of the ownerless plain. Now he works for nothing to gain the right to cultivate the poor slopes of the mountain.”
In Argentine Patagonia soldiers drew pay for each pair of testicles they brought in. David Viñas’s novel Los dueños de la tierra (1959) opens with an Indian hunt: “For killing was like raping someone. Something good. And it gave a man pleasure: you had to move fast, you could yell, you sweated and afterward you felt hungry.… The intervals got longer between shots. Undoubtedly some straddled body remained in one of these coverts—an Indian body on its back with a blackish stain between its thighs.…”
Violence and disease, the advance guard of civilization: for the Indian, contact with the white man continues to be contact with death.
Under every Brazilian constitution they are “the original and natural masters” of the land they occupy, but the richer that virgin land proves to be, the greater the threat hanging over their lives. Nature’s very generosity makes them targets of plunder and crime.
It is known that the Indians have been machine-gunned from helicopters and light airplanes and inoculated with smallpox virus, that dynamite has been tossed into their villages, and that they have been given gifts of sugar mixed with strychnine and salt mixed with arsenic.
They participate in an economic and social order which assigns them the role of victim—the most exploited of the exploited.
in a continuous annual cycle they leave their “sacred lands”—high lands where each small farm is the size of a corpse—to contribute 200,000 pairs of hands to the harvesting of coffee, cotton, and sugar in the lowlands. They are transported in trucks like cattle, and it is not always need, but sometimes liquor, that makes them decide to go. The contractors provide a marimba band and plenty of aguardiente and when the Indian sobers up he is already in debt.
The Maya-Quichés believed in a single god; practiced fasting, penitence, abstinence, and confession; and believed in the flood at the end of the world. Christianity thus brought them few novelties. Religious disintegration began with colonization. The Catholic religion assimilated a few magical and totemic aspects of the Maya religion in a vain attempt to submit to the Indian faith to the conquistadors’ ideology. The crushing of the original culture opened the way for syncretism.
