Letter from an Indian chief to the governments of Europe

here's an old article that sheds a different kind of light on the ETI case against Bolivia...


THE REAL EXTERNAL DEBT

I, Guaicaipuro Cuautemoc, have come to meet with those who celebrate the anniversary of the Encounter. I, a descendant of those who have populated America for 40 000 years, have come to meet those who encountered it 500 years ago.

And so we all find ourselves here: we know what we are, and that is enough. We will never have anything else.

My brother, the European customs officer, asks me for a piece of paper with a visa so that I may discover those who discovered me. My brother the European lender asks me to pay a debt accumulated by Judas, who I never authorized to make such a deal. My brother the European petty lawyer explains to me that all debts are paid with interest, even though entire peoples and countries have been sold without their consent. And I go on discovering them.

I can also demand my payment. I can also demand interest. Recorded in the Indian Archive: paper after paper, receipt after receipt, signature after signature, that between only 1503 and 1660, 185,000 kilos of gold and 16 million kilos of silver from America arrived in San Lucar de Barrameda. Pillage? I don’t think so. Because that would be to think that our Christian brothers had ignored their seventh commandment. Plunder? That would be to assume that Europeans, like Cain, kill and then deny the blood of their brothers! Genocide? That would be giving credit to slanderers like Bartolome de las Casas who qualify the Encounter as the destruction of the Indies, or Arturo de Pietri, who states that the start of capitalism and of present-day Europe was due to the flood of precious metals!

No! Those 185,000 kilos of gold and 16 million kilos of silver should be considered the first of many friendly loans from America for the development of Europe. The alternative would be to consider them war crimes, which would give us the right to not only the immediate return of those goods, but to indemnization for damages as well. I, Guaicaipuro Cuautemoc, prefer to think of the least offensive hypothesis. Such incredible exports of capital were nothing but the start of a Marshalltezuma Plan to guarantee the reconstruction of a barbaric Europe, ruined by its terrible wars against the Muslims, the defenders of algebra, daily baths and other superior achievements of civilization.

That is why, as we approach the 500th Anniversary of the Government Loan, we can ask ourselves:

Have our European brothers made a responsible and rational, or at least a productive use, of the resources generously given them by the International Indoamerican Fund?

We deplore it but we have to say no. Strategically, they wasted it on the battle of Lepanto, on invincible armadas, Third Reichs and other forms of mutual extermination, and ended up occupied by foreign troops of NATO, just like Panama (but without the canal).

Financially, they have been unable -- after a 500 year moratorium -- to neither pay back the capital with interest nor to become independent of the liquid assets, the raw material and the cheap energy which the Third World exports to them. This deplorable situation corroborates what Milton Friedman said about how a subsidized economy could never work. And so we are obliged to ask you -- for your own good -- that you pay back the capital and interests that we have generously deferred for all these years.

In saying this, we would like to make clear the fact that we will not lower ourselves to charging our European brothers the vile and bloody floating interest rates of 20 to 30% which our European brothers have charged the people of the Third World. We will limit ourselves to demanding the return of the precious metals lent to you, plus the low fixed rate of 10% interest/year, accumulated during these last 500 years. On this basis, applying the European formula of compound interest, we would like to inform the Discoverers that they only owe us, as a first payment of their debt, a total of 185,000 kilos of gold and 16 million kilos of silver, both of these raised to the 300th power. That is to say, a number whose total expression would require more than 300 digits, and which would easily surpass the weight of the earth.

These gold and silver pieces are very heavy! How much would they weigh in blood? To deduce that Europe in half a millennium has not been able to generate sufficient riches to cancel out this small interest is basically admitting its absolute financial failure and/or the demented irrationality of the assumptions of capitalism.

Such metaphysical questions do not trouble us indoamericans. But we do demand the immediate signing of a letter of intention that will discipline the debtor-people of the old continent and that will make them fulfill their duty through a rapid privatization or reconversion of Europe which will allow it to be handed over to us as the first payment of a historical debt.

The pessimists of the Old World say that their civilization is bankrupt and that this stops them from carrying out their moral and financial duties. If this is the case, then we would be happy if they would pay us by giving us the bullet with which they killed the poet.

But they cannot. Because that bullet is the heart of Europe.



Guauicaipuro Cuautemoc.
Source: Indian Renaissance magazine, #7 (1991)