Maduro condemns Spain's celebration of 'the indigenous holocaust' of the Americas
Tuesday, October 15, 2013 @ 12:07 PM
VENEZUELAN president Nicolás Maduro has hit out at Spain's celebrating October 12 as a bank holiday with military processions – because it marks what he calls 'the greatest massacre in history'.
Likening it to the holocaust of World War II, the leader of the South American country says Spain's Día de la Hispanidad, which commemorates Christopher Colombus' finding of the New World and the subsequent colonisation of at least 19 countries by Spain, is a source of 'indignation and offence' to the people of Venezuela and neighbouring nations.
The 'indigenous holocaust' wiped out over 90 per cent of the native Latin American Indians – Mayans, Aztecs, Incas, mapuches, ilotas and many other tribes in the Caribbean, Central and South America, who 'previously lived in harmony and peace, untouched by war', Maduro recalls.
Within 50 years of Colombus' arrival, only three million of the 70 to 90 million indigenous inhabitants of the Americas remained.
Catholic priests were taught native languages such as quechua, aymara and guaraní in order to convert those remaining, and catholicism is now the predominant religion in Latin America with Spanish being the first official language in all of Spain's former colonies.
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