While Spain was preparing the celebration of the Fifth Centenary of the Discovery (1992), it deployed a huge amount of resources and money to support its proposal for reconquest, to recover a leading role on the continent. First, it undertook the task of exporting the ideology of political transition as a model to negotiate a way out of the dictatorships of the Southern Cone and, secondly, it sought to project and establish the landing of its multinationals Repsol, Iberdrola, Endesa, Banco Santander, BBVA, Telefónica and Iberia in Latin America. This time, it sought to make its European partners and those in the United States see that Spain was a good interlocutor to impose the Washington Consensus (1989). The PSOE, PP, Basque and Catalan nationalists were clear about their objective. There were no fissures. Spain had to recover its leading role. To do so, it had the complicity, except for Cuba, of all the governments in the region. The results have been meager, only the Ibero-American summits and the Ibero-American General Secretariat remain. An empty shell, fallen into disrepair.
Spanish companies, whether banks, technology companies, sponsors of green capitalism, tourism, hotel complexes or security, consider Latin America a natural space from which to extract profits and increase their investment portfolio. Exhibitions, forums and conferences showing the benefits of the Spanish presence for the development of the region, constitute the friendly face. Under the table, support for coups d’état, money laundering, destruction of the environment, arms sales, repatriation of profits and decapitalization. Ethnocide is not Spain’s past, it is present in its companies. It is enough to remember the United Nations reports written by Rodolfo Stavenhagen. Megaprojects such as hydroelectric dams, highways or the expansion of extractive mining are preceded by the expulsion of indigenous peoples from their territories. Spanish businessmen, supported by the crown, also have the backing of the cipaya bourgeoisies. Does it make sense to ask for forgiveness in this context?
Pink legend or black legend? Defenders and detractors maintain a polemic entrenched in justifying or condemning, to exonerate or blame those who carried out the crimes. The past is a continuous present. It is reinterpreted in the light of new data and perspectives. It is not a question of judging events from the 16th, 18th or 20th centuries with 21st century values, but rather understanding how colonial capitalism and industrial-financial dependence were articulated after political independence in Latin America. Let us not expect pears from an elm tree. The conquerors went to conquer and colonize. They were little or not at all interested in the existing populations, except as a workforce and to project their cultural dominance. We can sugarcoat the facts, but that does not change the meaning of the conquest. To maintain as an argument that there is no empire that has not committed genocide is vulgar. Consolation for many, the disease of fools. But let’s get to the bottom of it. In this debate, there is an unspeakable guest, an absent voice: the indigenous peoples. Their voice cannot be supplanted or ignored, and until now it has been. There are 500 years of struggle and resistance. Their vision is not in tune with the history constructed by the white-mestizo society, anchored in the idea of progress and the everlasting conception of an ethnic-racial superiority that enables invaders to commit genocide.
Forgiveness is an act of contrition, more religious than political. Without autonomy or recognition of their territories, of their customary laws, it is a wishful thinking. Today, nation-states follow the same path as the Spanish empire. The indigenous peoples are doubly exploited as peasants and Indians. Their lands are taken from them, their leaders are murdered, the army is sent to repress them, their ancestral rights are denied, their knowledge is stolen, their leaders are imprisoned, their women are raped until they are exterminated. Only that genocide and ethnocide take the form of internal colonialism. See Pablo González Casanova or Frantz Fanon.
For the Spanish Empire, there is much to celebrate, says its slogan on October 12th, and for the independent republics, continuity, refusing to stop the extermination. History is a field in dispute. Raw facts must undergo a process of construction, giving them meaning. Asking for forgiveness in the past and not seeing the present is legitimizing a form of domination, a political system. From Alaska to Patagonia, the same processes of plundering of resources, expropriation of lands from their legitimate owners, the native peoples, are taking place. That is the reality. Beyond the controversy between the governments of Spain and Mexico, what lies below is a paternalistic vision of history. As a fact, while participating in a debate on the 5th centenary, I heard Leopoldo Zea affirm that the Spanish colonization was legitimate, in form and content. His argument: the territories of Latin America had no owner. This is how imperial domination was justified. And I ask myself: if the territories had no owner, what were the native peoples? Let us not call forgiveness what continues to be genocide and internal colonialism.
Original article by Marcos Roitman Rosenmann, La Jornada, October 12, 2024.
Translated by Schools for Chiapas.