Venezuela’s Maduro: Spain must ask “forgiveness” from Latin America for colonial period “crimes”

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, has pointed out that Spain has to ask “forgiveness” to the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean for the “crimes” of the conquest of America, after Pope Francis and the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, have expressed themselves along the same lines in recent days.

“Spain must ask forgiveness from the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean, all of the Americas, for the terrible crime committed against our grandfathers and grandmothers,” he said during his speech Sunday to take stock of the covid pandemic in Venezuela.

He accused “European colonialism” of “massacring, looting, plundering, robbing, enslaving all America” and stressed the “millions” of slaves who died in these circumstances, as reported by VTV Television. This is not the first time that Maduro has asked Spain to apologize for the conquest of America.

“That is what (former president) José María Aznar does not want to see in his stubbornly colonialist, racist (…) vision,” he added, stressing that “he does not want to see how Spanish colonialism, which he defends, massacred, murdered, banished, enslaved millions of original inhabitants of the indigenous peoples and then enslaved, massacred and disappeared more than 50 million grandfathers and grandmothers of Africa, who were brought from Africa as slaves, to these lands.”

Cuba’s Foreign Minister, Bruno Rodriguez, also alluded to Aznar’s defense of the conquest of America and considered his “racist mockery” “deplorable”.

“Evidence of the apology of the crimes of conquest, slavery, extermination, and his supremacist thinking,” Rodriguez said on his Twitter social network account before describing Aznar’s words as “intolerable offense” towards America. The former Spanish leader has already stated that he will not apologize for the conquest of America.