Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro takes aim at the former colonialist powers who have yet to so much as even attempt to compensate for the centuries of ravaging they’ve done to the Black and Brown world.
Maduro paid homage to independence fighter Pedro Camejo, the only black military officer who fought against the Spanish in the independence army of Simon Bolivar. | Photo: Presidential Press
Maduro expressed his support for the Caribbean nations seeking reparations from former colonial power.
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro expressed support for the Caribbean call for reparations from their former colonial powers, in an address to the country on Wednesday.
Maduro expressed his support for those 15 Caribbean nations seeking reparations from former slave-trading nations, including the U.K., France, Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal, Norway, Sweden and Denmark.
“Our brothers from the Caribbean Community and Petrocaribe have raised their voice to demand Europe for one of the greatest holocausts in history–the African–during which 50 million women and men of our African grandparents were kidnapped from their land, from their roots, to be brought to America as slaves,” Maduro said.
“Europe must indemnify the…
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United States Hypocrisy 
Ironically, Maduro is himself a descendant of those same Portuguese colonials. This is always a one sided story, no one talks about Africans taking European slaves for centuries before 1592. Maybe I should sue the Vatican for burning my Nordic ancestors, or the Germans for attempting to starve my Mother; and how about the Jews that ratted out my relatives to the Germans for guess what, hiding Jews! Let’s not forget that most African slaves were purchased from Africans, who saw this as an opportunity to get rid of their enemies and get paid at the same time.
We need to move forward, we can’t fix the past. This constant dredging up of wrongs committed by people that are long gone is only used to serve one purpose: Divide and Conquer. We’re far easier to fool and control when we’re fighting each other, when we should be questioning the crimes committed against us right now!
Greetings!
The African continent has been ravaged for centuries by the kidnapping of tens of millions of its population to build overseas empires. Regardless of who originally captured them, generations and generations of unpaid labor have left the descendants of the enslaved at near the bottom of the economic totem pole. Not to mention the discrimination and economic segregation continued long after slavery. Meanwhile there are giant corporations that have continued to profit from the exploited labor of the past.
And when it comes to colonialism, reparations are in order for more than just past hard feelings. The countries of the West literally looted African nations of their wealth, resources and people in order to build their own houses of comfort, leaving those they looted from in poverty. How can it be too much to ask them to pay back some of what they’ve taken?
Because those paying the bill won’t be the ones that benefited, and that would include descendants from the very people that were enslaved. Not all wrongs can be righted. I don’t see Maduro standing in line to pay for oil and other natural resources stolen from native land either.
I don’t necessarily disagree with your point of view, I only think it can’t be fixed without another miscarriage of justice; should people of African, Arab, Chinese and Indian descent in Europe also pay? Because that’s where the money will come from, the tax payer!
The Danes are a minority in their own Country, so how are you going to sell this to the foreign born Muslim majority? Maduro is just using this to divide people while his warships threaten smaller neighbors, like he did to Aruba a year ago.
Greetings.
Perhaps Maduro isn’t the perfect spokesperson, but I imagine he might be saying some of this to hit back at the US propaganda that is vilifying him and his country at the moment, and President Obama’s declaration that Venezuela is somehow a “threat to US national security.”
You are right that there is some hypocrisy on his part, but the fact is that that money didn’t just disappear. This is especially important to rectify considering the ungodly gap in income we are seeing in the US and the rest of the world today. Those on the top didn’t get ahold of all that wealth by playing fair and working harder than everyone else.