Alfredo Somoza
in Peuples/Popoli/Peoples/Pueblos n. 10 (June 1987)
At the recent meeting of the Executive of the International League for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples (Milan, May ’87) and of the International Lelio Basso Foundation for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples (Rome, March ’87) a research/intervention project was approved which, under the name of “1992: 500 years of the Conquest of America”, will be carried out jointly by these two organisations until 1992.
Conquest and not “Discovery” or “Encounter”, terms used by the apologists of this “enterprise”, because the word conquest is the one that best symbolises the history of the American continent in these 500 years: the organised or casual genocide, the birth of colonialism, which would later spread to Asia, Africa and Oceania, the destruction of hundreds of cultures, the imposition of a mode of production, a culture, religions that had nothing to do with the natural evolution of the peoples of the continent. Finally, the birth of structures that condition to this day the development and sovereignty of most of the countries of the Americas.
The real history of America prevents us from sharing the jubilee of the official organisers of the commemoration of this date, starting from the very choice of the term used as a symbol: “Discovery”. It is useless to polemicise about what was discovered, what seems incredible to us is that on the eve of the year 2000 they still try to deny the existence of a people (the Indian people) who have lived in America for 30,000 years and who paid the consequences of having been “discovered”, together with their lands, with the almost complete cultural and physical disappearance in a process of genocide that we can qualify as the most terrible in the history of humanity.
We also reject the term “Encounter” because an encounter is the mutual knowledge, between two or more realities, in which there is no relationship of domination, violence and expropriation as in the case of American history.
The project is divided into 5 sectors: history, religion, indigenous communities, culture, science and technology.
Through research work, men of culture, artists, we will try to find the “keys to change the present” and through the militant work of all the people sensitive to the theme of the rights of the peoples, we will try to “win the streets” to testify that in 1992 we should not happily celebrate the arrival of Columbus in America but reflect on the origins of the forms of oppression that have conditioned the “entry” of America into the “known” world and that have determined the current situation of generalised emergency in which millions of people live. Two of the main objectives of the project are to counterbalance the information produced by the Official Committees and to educate on the true history of America, which implies an effort to rewrite/re-interpret what has happened in this period so that this new vision (which already partially exists) becomes a weapon that can help in the search for common solutions.
The project will also involve the various peoples living in the Americas: the black communities of the various countries of the continent, victims of European expansion in the past and the sector hardest hit by poverty today; we also aim to bring together the experience of peoples fighting for their liberation as a living, mutating part of the history of America; nor can we forget the phenomenon of white immigration between the 19th and 20th centuries. These workers and peasants escaping exploitation or repression were often brought to America as slave-labourers, dividing, at first, the fortunes of Americans and blacks.
The white presence, a majority in some countries, cannot be underestimated, especially because today it is the class/race that monopolises political-economic power in almost all American countries, but at the same time there is a white proletariat that fights and works alongside the mestizo, mulatto, black and Indian proletariat.
Among the identified interlocutors, of vital importance for the achievement of the announced objectives are the Indigenous Peoples through their organisations in a coordinated and harmonious way.
Peoples who today, as always, are fighting for their rights to survival, to maintain their own culture, religion, economic organisation, to their own land. Rights that have been continuously and systematically violated by both the colonisers and by the independent states. These peoples, who in some countries still make up the majority of the population, were once again forgotten and marginalised by those who are preparing to “celebrate” in 1992 and have great difficulty in making their problems known in Europe. The third major objective of the project is to actively help them to be heard on this important occasion in the history of the continents, and also to incorporate their version of their own history, thus enriching the general reflection.
in: Peuples/Popoli/Peoples/Pueblos n. 10 (June 1987)