The government of Nicolás Maduro denounced this Sunday that the United States wants to “repeat the same history” of October 12, 1492, when Christopher Columbus landed on the island of Guanahaní, which he called San Salvador, and began the so-called discovery of America, a fact that he calls an “invasion” and the beginning of a “genocide.”
At an event in Caracas, the Minister of Indigenous Peoples, Clara Vidal, warned that today, 533 years after the arrival of “la Pinta, la Niña and la Santa María”, There are “other ships in the Caribbean Sea, but with missiles”in reference to the military deployment that the United States maintains in waters near Venezuela, under the argument of combating alleged drug trafficking from the South American nation, while the Venezuelan government denounces that it is a “threat” to promote a “regime change.”
However, the official asserted that, although Venezuela “continues to be besieged by the North American empire and its allies,” “the same history will not be repeated.”
“Here we are ready on permanent offensive. Our indigenous people will always continue to be at the forefront of every battle,” he expressed.
Vidal led an event for the Day of Indigenous Resistance at the National Pantheon, where the remains of the Liberator Simón Bolívar and other heroes of independence rest, as well as the symbolic remains of the Cacique Guaicaipuro and the Cacica Apacuana.
The “persistence of an ancestral memory”
The minister, whose statements were broadcast on the state channel Venezuelan Television (VTV), said that it does not commemorate “the beginning of a colonial era, but rather the persistence of an ancestral memory that refuses to be erased.”
“From Venezuela, land of Guaicaipuro, of Apacuana, we reaffirm history, that history (…) that does not begin with the invasion, but with the millennia-long resistance of its native peoples,” he added.
The Minister of Defense, Vladimir Padrino Lópezassured in a statement that “the battle that Venezuela is waging at this moment is the same as 500 years ago: the defense of the right to self-determinationthe certain possibility of defining one’s own destiny, peace, equality, social justice and respect for ethnic and cultural diversity.
“In the 21st century, governments like the North American one, practicing the same logic of domination, plunder and death, seek to subjugate sovereign nations with a modern arsenal: suffocating economic blockades, unilateral coercive sanctions, diffuse war and the permanent threat of military incursion. The current deployment of American warships in the Caribbean Sea is nothing more than a crude example of the repetition of the colonizing method: intimidation by force,” he said.
However, he assured that the Venezuelan people have “organized themselves in a perfect popular-military-police fusion to not allow this noble land to be sullied and the primitive dispossession of the invader to be repeated, as before.”
For this Sunday, Nicolás Maduro called for a mobilization in order to “remember the strength and wisdom” of the native peoples, and announced that a monument will be inaugurated in honor of “Guaicaipuro and Urquia.”
