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    Re: Oscar Guardiola-Rivera - The Fire This Time in the Americas Archived Message

    Posted by Thomas Newfield on February 24, 2019, 9:12 am, in reply to "Oscar Guardiola-Rivera - The Fire This Time in the Americas "

    The general outline, the place of this attack on Venezuela historically and in the present, of resource theft, justified in the present implicitly, at least partly, by a racist narrative - is good.

    I don't think the racial angle holds in the old sense though. It's not black vs. white in fact. Guido was chosen probably precisely because he's mestizo. The millions who voted Bolsonaro in Brazil, and those pressed into voting for crypto-fascists in Colombia for a long time however are not white - most are black and mestizo.

    I've lived in central America and Mexico, in the 90s, and known many Latin Americans here in the UK and I find something odd about this narrative. Even for Eduardo Galeano, a white Uruguayan, there is just no possibility that the Nortenos (the Yanquis, and before them the English), could be anything other than untrustworthy, deceitful, greedy arseholes, perhaps ever. In itself this is a racist narrative, and I suspect it is disempowering. The Bolivarians; Mexico, Nicaragua and elsewhere also attest to the breakdown of this old, racist structure of domination. I think there are too many educated people now, too many confident, erudite Mestizos and blacks - and certainly not only in the "progressive" wing. People and groups are themselves gradually changing - and it was always ridiculous anyway. Even in the early days by no means all of the (white) Spanish ascendency where unmitigated arseholes - - e.g : Fray Barolome de las Casas.

    The evangelists in Brazil are trying another angle now, less racist: back to the old ways: if you accept the True Cross and Path you may live! otherwise...

    The weird thing with the black-white narrative in Latin America is that most of the liberators who remember the conquest and indigenous genocides in purely racial terms, are themselves mestizo, that is mixed, usually part indigenous ("Indian") and part European and white. (In some areas there's more black African ancestry too.)

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