“In 1517 Father Bartolomé de las Casas had great pity on the Indians who were exhausting themselves in the hells of the Antillean gold mines, and recommended to Emperor Charles V the importation of blacks who would exhaust themselves in the hells of the Antillean gold mines. ”.
Jorge Luis Borges, Universal History of Infamy (1935).
Andrés Manuel López Obrador, in one of his recent “mornings” accused the Peruvian elites of “harassment and discrimination” that would have forced Pedro Castillo to make decisions that led to his dismissal by Congress. He also revealed some of the conversations he had with him in the 16 months he ruled in the House of Pizarro. In one of them, the former rural teacher told him that the ladies of the pituquería in Lima covered their noses when he passed by.
López Obrador –born and raised in Tabasco, for which many Mexicans treat him as naco, a derogatory Mexicanism for people of indigenous origin–, replied that, in his time, Benito Juárez, a Oaxacan of Zapotec descent, the lords of the Creole oligarchy used to say that they were “going to Juárez”, to say the bathroom.
cholos and pitucos
Since Castillo launched his campaign, which surprisingly led him to the second round and which he won in June 2021 with a 0.4% difference in votes, he took advantage of the image of a cholo peasant, provincial and unionist. He did it in opposition to the racist Lima pituquería that prevented him from governing.
The correspondents in Lima immediately perceive that the ethnic demand that Castillo agitates is not free in a country built on a great fracture: the one that separates the Andean mountain range, with a Quechua and Aymara majority, from the Creole coast that faces the Pacific.
Mexico has the largest indigenous population in the region, and, although it only represents 12%-15% of the total, its gravitation in the imaginary of Mexican nationalism is much greater. Congratulating him on the New Year, in a tweet with a photo of him in front of a Mayan pyramid in Palenque, López Obrador pointed out that it was built 1,000 years before “the Europeans came to invade us.” Like the nineteenth-century Juarista liberals, he came to say that the Mexican nation fell fighting against Cortés and it took three centuries to heal its wounds.
internal fractures
In Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, the indigenous population is the majority, especially in rural areas, where fissures –geographical, racial, cultural– often generate violent friction. In the current Peruvian protests, in which police repression has claimed 30 lives, the big Lima media only see vandals, terrorists and drug traffickers.
«The ethnic demand that Castillo agitates is not free in a country built on a great fracture: the one that separates the Andean mountain range, with a Quechua and Aymara majority, from the Creole coast that faces the Pacific»
Pedro Angulo, the fleeting prime minister of President Dina Boluarte, denounced that the protests manipulated “people from the heights who speak Quechua or Aymara.”
As Cecilia Méndez writes in The Republicthe apartheid de facto it is so ingrained in mental habits that it does not need laws to exist: “The country cannot continue on this infamous trajectory without dehumanizing us all.”
In TradeGonzalo Banda points out that the establishment Peruvian seems to live in a country that only exists in Netflix documentaries, in which Peruvians in ponchos and typical costumes are only good “if they are part of the landscape, but don’t even think about protesting.”
relics of the past
As Enrique Moradiellos writes in The Holocaust and Franco’s Spain (2022), the truth in history does not refer so much to the past itself, essentially unknowable, as to “the relics” of it that are preserved in the present: the most credible historical accounts are those with the most verifiable evidence.
From his first trip to Peru in 1979, the Mexican historian Enrique Krauze recalls that he perceived that the “open wound of the conquest” was more tangible than in Mexico, which explained the “torn and fertile” nature of its indigenism. In the works of José María Arguedas and Ciro Alegría, virtuous peasants heroically resist gamonales who have reigned since time immemorial in impregnable haciendas supported by soldiers, judges and venal priests.
To put an end to the forms of feudal servitude on the mountain haciendas, the agrarian reform of General Velasco Alvarado (1968-75) expropriated them and distributed their lands, a change in Andean history that some sociologists equate to the abolition of slavery on the Americas between 1810 and 1888. Until then, in the Peruvian Sierra, haciendas were not worth their value for their size but for the number of pongos (indigenous servants, a word of Quechua origin) that lived on them. In The faces of the mob (1984) Alberto Flores Galindo described that archaic order as one of “men on foot and men on horseback; some barefoot and others with high boots.
walls and stigmata
The Peruvian case is not unique. In Rio de Janeiro, Caracas or Guayaquil it is also easy to distinguish by the predominant skin color in the streets when crossing from a high neighborhood to a favela. In Lima, the Constitutional Court recently ordered the demolition of the so-called 10-kilometre “wall of shame” that has separated the mansions-filled district of La Molina from the adobe shacks of Villa María del Triunfo since the 1980s, where the streets are dirt and there is no running water or sewers.
According to the sentence, the wall, crowned with barbed wire, was discriminatory and inadmissible in a democracy. La Molina does not rule out taking the matter to international courts.
Although no one admits to being racist, the bias comes to light in closed groups, in the space of confidences and jokes. Declaring oneself mixed-race often means assuming a circumstantial and convenient mask in countries where racial codes are ubiquitous, even if they are not written down.
«In Rio de Janeiro, Caracas or Guayaquil it is easy to distinguish by the predominant skin color in the streets when crossing from a high neighborhood to a favela»
In Brazil, which received 45% of the slaves taken to the New World, some 4.8 million, and the Caribbean, where another 2.7 million ended up, prejudices against blackness predominate. In Guatemala, the Commission for Historical Clarification attributed “to racism” the cruelty of military operations against indigenous communities during the war that the Central American country suffered for 36 years and which claimed the lives of more than 200,000 people, 83% of them Maya-Quiché.
Blood cleansing
If there is a sure way to repeat the old cycles of violence, it is to continue preventing uncomfortable truths from coming out. Identity, after all, is not an ethnic, historical or linguistic imperative. The problem is doing it in societies that find it very traumatic to admit their racism. In Castro, blacks and Africa (1988), Carlos Moore, an Afro-Cuban writer, denounced the difficulty of combating discrimination in a country that denies its existence. In 2000 the army had four black generals out of a total of 95.
In Cuba, blood cleansing records were not suppressed until 1870. Although by then they had lost legal utility, they revealed that colonial society accepted racial inequalities as natural. In 1841, blacks and free slaves –mandingas, lucumís, carabalís…– were the majority: 58.5%.
During the viceroyalties, white society was obsessed with noble titles, scrolls and coats of arms on which fortunes were spent because nobility and political power went hand in hand. In the 19th century, Creole elites enthusiastically embraced the so-called fashionable scientific racism that held that ethnic “shoddiness” stood in the way of progress. When Arthur de Gobineau, author of Essay on the inequality of human races (1855), was a member of the French diplomatic delegation in Rio de Janeiro, wrote that all Brazilians except his friend, Emperor Pedro II and his court, had black blood, “the depraved breed of the human race.”
populate to civilize
In Argentina and Chile, the republican motto was “to populate to civilize.” But only up to a certain point. To populate is to “dumb down” when you populate with Chinese, Indians, or blacks, wrote Juan Bautista Aberdi, who inspired the Argentine constitution of 1853. Until today, the surnames of landowners are recognized by judges, congressmen, soldiers, and bankers in the Southern Cone.
Between 1979 and 1983, the recognized Chilean Mapuche communities decreased from 3,000 to 300 due to the parcelization policies of the military regime. According to Elisa Loncón, former Mapuche president of the Constitutional Convention, the new drafting process for a constitutional proposal represents a political throwback to the 19th century: “They have already resolved without us that Chile is a unique nation.”
end of taboos
The appointment of Afro-Colombian Vice President Francia Márquez as Minister of Equality and Equity and of Afro-Brazilian Anielle Franco as Minister of Racial Equality show that the silence is coming to an end. In her recent inauguration speech, Lula said that burying “the tragic legacy of our slave-owning past” would be one of her priorities. In Brazil, 75% of the poor and 76% of those who die violently are black (blacks). After winning the 2022 World Cup with the canarinha, Ronaldo Nazario said “I used to be black, but not anymore”.
A nation is, in a way, a genealogical saga: a story about who its ancestors are. Before the UN Permanent Forum on People of African Descent in Geneva, Márquez, elected by the Financial Times As one of the 25 Women of the Year, she asked the UN to establish mechanisms for “historic reparation” for victims of slavery.
«After winning the 2022 World Cup with ‘la canarinha’, Ronaldo Nazario said ‘I was black before, but not anymore'”
Barbados, which declared itself an independent republic in November 2021, plans to sue the British descendants of cotton and sugar plantation owners, including actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who played the owner of one of them in New Orleans in 12 years a slave (2013). He accepted the role, he said, to try to repay the damage done by an ancestor who bought a plantation in Barbados in 1728 that came to own 250 slaves and was in his family’s hands for nearly a century.
‘Coffee with milk’
The problem is that qualifying racially implies going against the value of equality. According to that discourse, racism would only be an illusion or a mirage: the desire to see racial discrimination where there is only economic inequality.
As in other fields, Brazil is taking the initiative through positive discrimination measures, following the model of the affirmative action from USA. Between 2003 and 2010, the Lula governments passed laws so that black Y brown they had fixed quotas of access to the administration and public universities. The State University of Rio de Janeiro assigned 40% of its vacancies to them, thereby tripling their number in the faculties of medicine and law, but also the legal demands of those who felt harmed.
It was inevitable in a country of 210 million inhabitants in which almost everyone admits having ancestors of different races and in which the census includes dozens of classifications determined by skin color, including coffee with milk. Latin America is now aware of these problems, but is still far from knowing how to solve them.
The entry Racism: a Latin American pathology? It was first published in Foreign Policy.
