The place of hunger
Desperate for gold and hungry, they arrived at these corners of the world.
They did not know where they were, but they knew their urgencies well.
They came from the other side of the Atlantic and in the beginning they were received as life gods. It was a mistake. They became the heralds of death.
They satisfied their needs. They killed to rob. They raped and corrupted to impose civilization and they justified atrocities in the name of the cross and manifested destinies.
They conquered and dominated, and their people ate and paid their own debts with American food and minerals.
They sacked the Potosi surroundings, what was later called Bolivia; they squashed the unrivalled Inca culture, what was later called Peru; they devastated the native flora and fauna of magnificent green hills and brown rivers like lions, what was later called Ecuador and Colombia.
More than five centuries have gone by since the starving European imposed the blood and money system on American soil.
And from then on, the trip never stopped.
Now, in the third millennium, one out of five girls and boys in Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia suffer from chronic malnourishment.
Since centuries ago, the imposed sacking inverted the bell of necessities.
The ones starving are no longer the invaders, but the invaded.
We have been so informed by the United Nations World Food Program and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean.
The figures say 52 million people suffer from hunger in these still beautiful and abundant lands.
“The human right to food not only implies having access to it, but also having access to productive resources, so that people can feed themselves and participate in the economic life of their countries.”
According to Jean Ziegler, UN Rapporteur on the Right to Food, “The fight over this right must take into account the problems of discrimination and marginalization, so that the poorest people can have access to productive resources.”
It is hard to believe these words might become magical keys to open doors to different realities.
It will be necessary to say other things. Like, for example, that the recently created international courts should ensure the so-called developed countries pay for their criminal responsibilities in the permanent plundering of natural and human resources perpetrated against the inhabitants of Latin America.
Only then, not only the right to food, but most of the human rights which so far have been suffering from deep invisibility in the eyes of the Earth’s children, expropriated for more than five centuries will be possible.
With each number synthesized by extermination, the system provides the words for the occasion which add hypocrisies and hide responsibilities.
It is time to pronounce other words, draw other figures, and demand something other than simple condolences.
