Europe's Debt to The Americas

EUROPE’S DEBT TO THE AMERICAS

Speech by an indigenous chief directed to the 150 chiefs of state at the European Union/Latin American Summit, May 2002

So here we all meet. We know what we are, and that’s a lot.

The brother in European customs asks me for a paper stamped with a visa to be able to discover those who discovered me. The European moneylender brother asks me to pay a debt contracted by Judas, that I never authorized him to sell me.

The legalizing European brother explains to me that all debts are paid with interest even if it means selling human beings and entire countries without asking their consent.

I go discovering. I too can demand payments and I too can demand interest.

It is stated in the Indian Archives, paper after paper, receipt after receipt, and signature after signature, that merely between the years 1503 and 1660, 185,000 kilos of gold and 16 million kilos of silver from America arrived at Sanlucar de Barrameda.

• 1. Robbery? I don’t believe it! Because that would be to think that the Christian brothers lacked the Seventh Commandment.
• 2. Exploitation? Tanatzin protect me from thinking that the Europeans, like Cain, kill and deny the blood of their brother!
• 3. Genocide? That would be giving credit to the slanderers, like Bartolome de las Casas, who described the meeting as the destruction of the Indians, or extremists like Arturo Uslar Pietri, who confirms that the starting engine for capitalism and the present European civilization was the flood ofprecious metals!
• 4. No! Those 185,000 kilos of gold and 16 million kilos of silver should be considered as the first of many other friendly loans from America, destined for the development of Europe. The contrary would be to presume the existence of war crimes, which would give the right not just to require its immediate return, but also the payment of damages and losses.

I, Guaiacaiputo Cuatemoc, prefer to think of the
least offensive of these hypotheses.

Such fabulous capital exportation was no more than the beginning of a MARSHALLTESUMA Plan, to guarantee the reconstruction of savage Europe, ruined by its deplorable wars against the Muslim cult, creators of algebra, polygamy, the daily bath and other superior achievements of civilization.

Therefore, to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the
Little Loan, we may ask ourselves:

Have the European brothers made rational, responsible, or at least productive use of the funds so generously advanced by the International Indoamerican Fund? We regret to say no.

Strategically, they wasted it on battles, invincible armadas, on Third Reichs and other forms of mutual extermination, with no other outcome than to end up occupied by gringo troops from NATO – like in Panama, but without the canal.

Financially, they have been incapable, after a moratorium of 500 years, either to pay off the principal and its interest, or to become independent of the liquid profits, raw materials, and cheap energy that the entire Third World exports and provides.

This deplorable picture corroborates the statement by Milton Friedman, according to whom subsidized economies can never work, and obliges us to require, for your own good, the payment of the principal and interests that we have so generously delayed all these centuries to charge.

Saying this, we clarify that we will not stoop to charging our European brothers the vile and bloodsucking rates of 20 and even 30% interest that the European brothers charge the peoples of the Third World.

We will limit ourselves to requiring the return of the precious metals we advanced to you, plus a modest fixed interest rate of 10%, accumulated only during the last 300 years, with 200 years’ grace period. Using this base, and applying the European formula of compound interest, we inform the discoverers that they owe us, as the first payment on the debt, a mass of 185,000 kilos of gold and 16 million kilos of silver, with both figures raised to the power of 300. That is to say, an amount whose complete expression would need more than 300 digits, and which vastly exceeds the total weight of planet Earth.

These dishes of gold and silver are very heavy. How much would they weigh calculated in blood?
Deducing that Europe, in half a millennium, has not been able to generate sufficient riches to pay off these modest interest rates, would be as much as admitting its absolute financial failure and/or the irrational insanity of the assumptions of capitalism. Such metaphysical questions, of course, don’t trouble the American Indians. But we do require the signing of a letter of intent that disciplines the debtor peoples of the Old Continent and that obligates them to fulfill their promise by means of a prompt privatization or repossession of Europe, which will permit them to deliver it to us whole, as the first payment of the historical debt….