Hugo Chavez has been standing up for the indigenous peoples of the Americas and denouncing ‘Columbus Day’. Aside from the political issues, I found there were some ironies in this. According to the State Department the racial breakdown of Venezuelans is as follows: 68 percent mestizo, 21 percent unmixed Caucasian, 10 percent black, and 1 percent Indian. Chavez himself looks to be a mestizo with a great deal of indigenous ancestry[1]. But I suspect that he delievered his speech in the official language of Venezuela, Spanish, in a nation that is over 95% Christian, mostly Roman Catholic[2].
A few points of history. Disease killed many of the native peoples-there simply weren’t enough Spaniards to do all the killing before the invention of machine guns. Also, population replacement and displacement are historical realities and applying 21st century morality to events of past centuries gets dicey, after all, all peoples are guilty of genocide in its most broad definition. Reflecting on these points, the importance of the displacement of the native peoples of the New World was not that they were displaced, but that white people did the displacing. And that is the greatest sin of all….
fn1. With 400 years of admixture the relationship between proportion of ancestry and phenotype can be muddled.
fn2. Venezuela is a Latin American country where Protestantism has made few inroads. The Catholic Monarchs would have been proud!
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