I know I’m treading on dangerous ground today, but nagging questions have been buzzing in my head and I need your help in answering them.
As I understand it, the Spanish stole Texas and California from the ancestors of the indigenous people who are now trying to swarm across America’s southern border. And America acquired Texas and California after those territories kicked out the Spanish.
If this is true, does America have a moral obligation to give special consideration to the indigenous people who occupied the seized territories?
Canada paid its indigenous people huge sums as reparation for taking their land. Does the US owe reparation to the original occupants of the territories forcefully acquired from Mexico?
And should that reparation include their right to return to the land stolen from them?
I know, I can hear you gasping from here. But that’s only fair, isn’t it?
Instead, we have criminalized and demonized these poor indigenous people, with their brown skin and “foreign” ways. We kidnap and imprison their children – even their babies – when they seek asylum in America.
All of that after illegally and immorally intervening in their sovereign states, helping to create the deadly narcoterrorism from which they are fleeing.
In a land that values “justice for all,” shouldn’t we reexamine our treatment of our Latin American neighbors?
Or am I missing something?
Some answers I found on the web
US interventions in Latin America
