By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal
Does today’s settler colonialism construct, created by academics, have a religious predecessor? A number of scholars, including Donald Akenson (God’s Peoples: Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster) and Conor Cruise O’Brien (God Land: Reflections on Religion and Nationalism), have studied Dutch South Africa, Ulster, and Israel as covenantal states of “chosen people.” The same theology held true for the Puritans in New England, the Mormons in Utah, and others.
The current term settler colonialism, a non-religious label, is almost exclusively applied to anglophone countries such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, pre-1994 South Africa, and the United States, plus Israel – countries all politically descended from these covenantal peoples.
The theory neatly divides societies into white oppressors who displaced the indigenous population and now require a program of “decolonization.”
But if that’s the case, why aren’t the states of Latin America also settler colonial? After all, there too a white elite, originating from Portugal and Spain, governs Black and indigenous peoples.
Dispossession and elimination of native peoples, which are key tenets of a settler colonial model, were not isolated to British imperialism; they were also central to Spanish and Portuguese imperial projects. Indigenous peoples in the region have been subject to physical elimination efforts, including massacres and sterilisation campaigns.
All these countries, even left-wing states such as Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, have virtually all-white political rulers. With a few exceptions, such as Bolivia, their presidents have always been white. Even their radicals usually share that identity. In 1973 in Chile, General Augusto Pinochet mounted a vicious coup against President Salvador Allende, a Marxist, and instituted an authoritarian dictatorship. But both men were white.
Peru has a large indigenous population -- yet there, even a Japanese man was once president. Mexico pretends to be “mestizo,” but all their leaders are white -- including now a Jewish woman.
This situation also holds true for Brazil and Cuba, though they are overwhelmingly Black in demography, due to their origins as slave plantation economies.
Latin American nations have long proclaimed a multiracial ideal: countries like Brazil and Mexico have celebrated the mixing of races and claimed to extend equal rights and opportunities to all. It has long been assumed that their deep economic and social disparities have no racial or ethnic component.
Yet Latin America belongs to the history of the global expansion of white-settler populations from Europe. They too have a history of displacing and oppressing native peoples and favouring European immigrants. Their settlers expropriated the land and evicted or killed the existing population; they exploited the surviving indigenous labour force on the land; they secured for themselves a European standard of living; and they treated the surviving indigenous peoples terribly, drafting laws to ensure they remained largely without rights, as second -class citizens.
Today’s elites are largely the product of the immigrant European culture that has developed during the two centuries since independence. Latin America’s settler elites were obsessed with all things European. They travelled to Europe in search of political models, ignoring their own countries beyond the capital cities, and excluding the majority from their nation-building project.
Their imported ideologies included the racist and social Darwinist ideas common among settlers elsewhere in Europe’s colonial world. This outlook led to the downgrading of their Black populations, and, in many countries, to the physical extermination of indigenous peoples. In their place came millions of settlers from Europe. This was especially true for the virtually all-white states of Argentina, Uruguay, and, to a lesser extent, Chile.
In the 1870–1930 period, the region received far more immigrants or settlers than during 300 years of Spanish and Portuguese rule. Between 1870 and 1914 five million Europeans migrated to Brazil and Argentina alone. In many countries the immigration campaigns continued well into the 20th century, sustaining the hegemonic white-settler culture that has lasted to this day.
Brazil even had a so-called “whitening” law, which encouraged European settlement to diminish the percentage of African origin Brazilians. The country, declared the political class, had to embrace “branquitude” (whiteness).
Just as in North America, the concept of settler colonialism makes visible how the colonization of indigenous peoples evolved after colonialism, when today’s independent Latin American states were founded. Yet these Catholic states mostly escape the settler colonialist label. (As do the Muslim conquests across north Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, for that matter. Wasn’t the Mughal Empire in India a settler colonial state?)
Perhaps it’s because most Marxists and socialists in Latin America have focused on the economic problems of the continent. They have argued that prejudice was class-based rather than racial. That included everyone in the country as being victims, except for the economic elite.
So, is today’s settler colonialism construct only about those movements of conquest that were not interested in proselytism and conversion of “non-believers,” and therefore doesn’t apply to Latin America? Or is it because the left has romanticized the struggles of Latin America against “yanqui” American imperialism?
Either way, shouldn’t these countries also be “decolonized?” If we are to take this concept seriously, something that many consider problematic, then at the least, incorporating the experiences and conditions that shape settler society and indigenous struggle outside the anglophone world is important in enriching our understanding of settler colonial relationships.
