bboc/24_The_Indian_genocide.tex

\chapter{The Indian Genocide}

\chapterauthor{Robert PAC}

The Indians of the Americas were the victims of the greatest genocide in human history.
To satisfy the appetites for wealth of Europeans, the indigenous peoples of the Americas were exterminated, in the West Indies, Mexico, South America, Brazil and North America by the Spanish, Portuguese and Anglo-Saxons.
This genocide continues to this day in often very different forms.

The Greater Antilles (Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica) had some 1.5 million natives in 1492, when Christopher Columbus arrived.
In 1550, there was no Indian left in these islands. The accounts of Bartholomew de Las Casas are proof of this:
\enquote{While the Indians were so well disposed towards them, the Christians invaded these countries like rabid wolves who throw themselves on sweet and peaceful lambs.
And, as all these men who came from Castile had no concern of their souls, thirsty for riches and possessed of the vilest passions, they put so much diligence into destroying these countries that no feather, not even any language, would suffice to recount.
So much so that the population, initially estimated at eleven hundred thousand souls, is completely dissipated and destroyed.}\footnote{\enquote{Report of the Dominicans of the Spanish Isle to M. de Chievres} (1519) in \emph{Las Casas et la défense des Indiens}(Las Casas and the defense of the Indians), Julliard, Éd., Paris, 1971.}


\enquote{Other, more aggressive indigenous populations are organized for combat, but they were going to suffer the same fate:
such as the Caniba (Martinique, Guadeloupe), the Puelches, Picunches, Tehuelches de la Pampa and Patagonia;
such as the Araucans (Chile) whose resistance and courage stunned the conquerors commanded by Valdivia who paid with his life for his obstinacy;
such as the Chibchas (Colombia) who intervened in the penetration of the military columns of Jimenez de Quesada in search of the \enquote{Eldorado}}\footnote{Félix Reichlen, in \emph{Les Amérindiens et leur extermination délibérée}(Thez Indians and their deliberate extermination), Éd. Pierre-Marcel Fabre, Lausanne, 1987.}.


\section{Brazil}

When the Portuguese \enquote{discovered} Brazil in 1500, it was populated by about 3 million Indians. In 1940, they were estimated at 500,000.
By 1950, there were only 150,000. Today, there may be only 100,000 of them. The magnitude of the genocide can be measured.
We can also see that this genocide continues today, since 800,000 Indians have been \enquote{physically liquidated} since 1900.
Since then, 90 tribes have completely disappeared.

Each advance of \enquote{industrial civilization} drove the Indians back to increasingly inhospitable areas.
This has been the case since the second half of the 19th century, when the industrial rubber \enquote{boom} broke out.
In 1910, the \enquote{Indian Protection Service} (IPS) was established, whose function was, in principle, to assist Indians in the exercise of their \enquote{rights} and to promote better living conditions for them.
In 1968, it is the shattering scandal.
The authorities acknowledge that SPI officials were easily bribed by corrupt \enquote{settlers}, adventurers and government officials and carried out themselves the sale of the natives they mistreated to the point of torture, as well as the sale of Indian lands, and that they turned a blind eye to the most atrocious methods used by the buyers,  when they weren't helping:
machine gun massacres, destruction of villages and their inhabitants with dynamite, poisoning with arsenic and pesticides.
Thus disappeared entire tribes such as the \enquote{Cintas Largas} or the \enquote{Tapalunas} on which the army experimented with new methods of strafing and perished many \enquote{Parintintins} accused of having killed a soldier, the \enquote{Bocas Negras} declared rebels, the \enquote{Pacas Novos} who were pacified with poisoned sweets.

The FUNAI (National Indian Foundation) succeeded the SPI. But it soon proved powerless to fulfill its mission.
Moreover, it is accused of subordinating the needs of the Indian people to the goals of national expansion and \enquote{capitalist development}.
FUNAI's collusion with private companies has very often been denounced by credible voices. In addition, FUNAI's budget is insufficient.

FUNAI and The Indian jurisprudence of Brazil aim above all to promote \enquote{the integration of Indians into the national community}.
This is the purpose of the \enquote{Indian Status} which brings together the legal measures concerning them.
Chapter II of the Statute states that, as long as an Indian is not assimilated, he is under the guardianship of the State and cannot be protected by the Brazilian Constitution.
But an assimilated Indian is no longer an Indian, since he has renounced his culture.
For the Indian, this \enquote{assimilation} means being at the lowest level of the social ladder. It's misery, begging, alcohol, prostitution for women... 
The Indian therefore has no legal existence in his otherness and specificity and he cannot perform valid legal acts without the assistance of the competent guardianship agency.
Some experts believe that the guardianship system deprives Indians of basic human rights and places them in a situation similar to legalized slavery.

The Indian Statute denies the natives the possibility of a choice of their own concerning their future.
Article 60 of the Statute speaks of \enquote{psychic development} rather than cultural development and considers the Indian as a man who is not yet developed, that is, as a child!
In fact, does he consider him a man?

The Indian Statute does not recognize his ownership of the land (which remains a property of the federal state).
Articles 34, 35 and 36 of Title 3 allow the deportation of entire indigenous populations by simple decree of the President of the Republic for various reasons including \enquote{national security} and the \enquote{development of the region in the highest national interest}.

\section{Mexico and Guatemala}

According to the work of the Berkeley School, there were twelve million Indians in Mexico when Cortes arrived in 1519.
120 years later, in the middle of the seventeenth century, there were only 1,270,000, according to Eric Wolf.

As in all of so-called \enquote{Latin} America, the contact between the two peoples, Spanish and Indian, resulted in a dizzying fall of the indigenous population.
Famine, repression, massacres, forced labor and diseases brought by Europeans (especially smallpox), against which the inhabitants of the \enquote{new world} had no biological immunity, having lived in a closed circuit since the Paleolithic, caused 90\% of the indigenous population of Mexico to perish during the 16th century.

Then, it is the conquest of the Mayan Empire by Alvarado in 1523 and the Inca Empire by the bloodthirsty Francisco Pizarre from 1532 to 1537.
\enquote{Thus, in the space of some twenty years, empires built in several centuries are annihilated, indigenous communities dismantled and enslaved, the foundations of astonishing civilizations undermined.}\footnote{Félix Reichlen in \emph{op. cit.}}.

The population of Central and South America, estimated at 70 million before the arrival of the Spaniards by Dr. Rivet and the Berkeley School, drops to some 20 million.
The Aztec Empire alone, with a population of 25 million Indians in 1519, had only 6 million thirty years later, barely reaching one million at the end of the 16th century.
At that time, in Central and South America, the Indian population is only 7 million people, ten times less than 80 years ago!

The massacres of Indians continue today in these regions, as the recent events in Chiapas have recalled.
Amnesty International, in a 1985 report, reported massacres in chiapas, Tzacacum on 24 March 1983 and the Comitan region in 1985.
In Guatemala, it was the massacre of 108 Indian peasants in Panzos in May 1978. On 31 January 1980, 21 Quiche Indians were burned alive with flamethrowers in the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala City by elements of the Guatemalan army.
Massacres of Indians by the Guatemalan army and \enquote{anti-riot} militias have increased in recent years, as they are systematically suspected of being complicit with guerrilla groups.

Everywhere in South America, massacres of Indians are reported. In Colombia, Peru, Chile...
Indians are victims of multinational corporations and the \enquote{big stick} policy whereby the United States has a de facto right to scrutinize and intervene in the political development of these countries.


\section{United States}

In the current territory of the United States, estimates of the population at the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in the early 17th century have long been imprecise.
But we now agree on the figure of 10 to 12 million individuals.
Officially, the Americans have long put forward the figure of one million, which was a way
to reduce the importance of the Indians and to minimize the extent of the genocide that reduced the number of Indians to only 250,000 in 1900.

The genocide was a long tragic and bloody series of massacres, treaties violated by Europeans, epidemics of imported diseases against which the Indians had no immunity.
All accompanied by theft of territories and an enterprise to destroy the ancestral cultures of the Amerindians.

The \enquote{reservations}, which were real concentration camps when they were created in 1851, and in which the Indians are still confined, 
constitute serious violations of Articles II B and II C of the United Nations International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,
 which condemn the \enquote{serious injury to the physical or mental integrity of the members of the group and the intentional subjection of the group to conditions of existence before cause its total or partial physical destruction}.

For example, poor living conditions on reserves mean that one in three children dies within six months of birth.
On some reserves, there are 100 deaths per 1,000 births, compared to 8.1 for whites.
The average life expectancy for an Indian is 63 years compared to 76 years for whites, but there are reserves where it falls to 46 years.

Suicides among Indians are double those of whites: 21.8 versus 11.3 per 100,000 people.
They particularly affect young people. An Indian between the ages of 14 and 24 is four times more likely to kill himself than a white person. 75\% of Indians are malnourished.

Alcoholism affects one in four men and one in eight women.
Urban Indians suffer more from this scourge than those on reserves, but 80\% of the Indian population is victimized in various ways by this form of alienation caused by idleness and awareness of its loss of identity.
Drugs, the \enquote{crack} are now wreaking significant havoc among the Indians.

\rauthor{Robert Pac}