Evo Morales Ayma: I, Too, Can Demand Repayment "The following is the statement of President Evo Morales Ayma of Boliva to the gathering of Heads of State of the European Community on June 30 of this year. With simple words, simultaneously translated, President Morales spoke to more than one hundred Heads of State and dignitaries of the European Community of what europe and the european world owes to Indo-America in terms of blood and resources. At a time when the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) is making moves to challenge three european powers (the u.k., france and the netherlands) for reparations for Afrikan slavery, this is a powerful statement. The genocide of the onkwehón:we, the theft of our lands and resources and the enslavement of Afrikan people and the conquest of Afrikan people were the primary motive forces in the development of capitalism in europe. It was what Marx famously described as the “primitive accumulation of capital”, that initial injection of capital needed to jumpstart the entire process. These brutal attacks in which europe powers stretched out across are the basis for the privileged position that europe and european people share around the world today. Well, here am I, Evo Morales. I have come to meet those who celebrate the encounter. Well, here am I, a descendant of those who populated America forty thousand years ago. I have come to meet with those who discovered her only 500 years ago. Well then, here are we all. We know who we are, and that is a lot. We will never have anything else. A European brother, a customs officer, asks me for a written paper with a visa to be able to discover those who discovered me. A European brother, a usurer, asks me for payment of a debt contracted by Judas, whom I never authorized to sell me. The European brother pettifogger explains to me that all debts are to be paid with interest, even when human beings and whole countries are sold without asking for their consent. I am discovering you now. I, too, can demand repayment, and can also demand interest. In the Archives of Indies, there is written, page after page, receipt after receipt, signature after signature, that between the years of 1503 and 1660 alone,185,000 kilograms of gold and 16 million kilograms of silver were brought from America to San Lucas de Barrameda. Plundering? I will not believe that! Because that would mean thinking that the Christian brothers betrayed their Seventh Commandment. Pillaging? Save me Tanatzin, from supposing that the Europeans, like Cain, would kill, and deny the blood of their brother! Genocide? That would mean to credit the slanderers, such as Bartolome de las Casas, who define the encounter as the destruction of the Indies, or to extremists such as Arturo Uslar Pietri, who affirms that capitalism and the present European civilization derive from the flood of precious metals! No! Those 185,000 kilograms of gold and 16 million kilograms of silver must be considered as the first of many friendly loans from America, destined for the development of Europe. To say otherwise would be to assume the existence of war crimes, which would give us the right not simply to demand their immediate return, but also indemnification for damages. I, Evo Morales, prefer to opt for the least offensive of these hypotheses. Such fabulous exportation of capital was nothing more than the beginning of a “MARSHALLTESUMA” plan to guarantee the reconstruction of barbarian Europe, ruined by her deplorable wars against the learned Moslems, who had created algebra, polygamy, daily baths, and other superior advances of civilization. This is why, celebrating the Fifth Centenary of the Loan, we can ask ourselves: Have our European brothers made a rational, responsible, or at least a productive use of the funds so generously advanced to them by the International Indo-American Fund? We hate saying no. On the strategic side, they wasted it in the battles of Lepanto, the Invincible Armies, in the Third Reichs and other forms of mutual extermination, with no destiny other than to end up occupied by the NATO gringo troops, as in Panama, but without the channel. On the financial side, they have been incapable, after a 500 year moratorium, of repaying the capital and its interest, and of becoming free from the liquidated rents, the raw materials and cheap energy that has come to them from all over the Third World.. This deplorable picture corroborates what Milton Friedman affirms, according to which a subsidiary economy can never function, and it forces us to reclaim, for their own benefit, the re-payment of the capital and interest that we have so generously delayed collecting for all these centuries. Saying this, we clarify that we will not lower ourselves to charge to our European brothers the vile and bloody rates of 20 and even 30 percent interest, that the European brothers charge the peoples of the Third World. We will limit ourselves to demanding the return of the advanced precious metals, plus the modest fixed interest of 10 %, accumulated only during the last 300 years, with a 200 year grace period. On this basis, and applying the European formula of compound interest, we inform the discoverers that they owe us, as first payment of their debt, a mass of 185,000 kilograms of gold and 16 million kilograms of silver, both amounts raised to the 300th power. This is to say, a number for whose total expression would require more than 300 digits, and one that easily surpasses the whole weight of planet Earth. Those masses of gold and silver are pretty heavy. How heavy would they be if they were calculated in blood? To suggest that Europe, in half of a millennium, has not been able to generate enough wealth to repay a modicum of interest, would be to admit her absolute financial failure and/or the demented irrationality of the capitalist presumptions. Such metaphysical questions, after all, do not matter to us Indo-Americans. But we do demand the signing of a Letter of Intent, that may discipline the debtor peoples of the Old Continent, and force them to fulfill their commitments through a rapid privatization or re-conversion of Europe, that allows them to completely turn her over to us, as a down payment of the historical debt. Evo Morales Ayma President of Bolivia"..."
Posted on: Tue, 27 Aug 2013 18:31:48 +0000
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