It is not only in our continent, that the people have never been more ignored.
The constant abuses of the great corporate powers, with the open complicity of a neoliberal system disguised as development, have transformed international politics into a sinister power game in which human life has ceased to exist as a factor in decision-making. This framework, whose limits are reduced to the relentless pursuit of wealth concentration, has turned the planet into a battlefield on which a strategy of extermination is imposed. The phenomenon of migration, in this context, is not reduced to fleeing violence or the search for better opportunities – as some would have us believe – but to the urgent need to preserve life.
Governments, especially in the more developed countries, seek to criminalize the huge caravans of human beings displaced from their territories. They blame them for fleeing wars that those same countries have provoked, with no other excuse than the plundering of their wealth. They demonize them for having the audacity to protect their families against the perverse invasion of their territories and the destruction of their habitat. Those developed countries that accumulate privileges with their right hand while devastating entire continents with their left have rendered the people invisible and robbed them of their dignity.
Human rights, despite all the conventions, treaties and speeches that claim to protect an abstract and outdated idea of their unrestricted respect, are being violated on a massive scale under an apparently legal system whose aim is to turn the world into a territory open to plunder and exclusion of the great majorities. On this planet, life and survival hang by a thin thread; the unstoppable greed of power groups – such as the pharmaceutical industry, the mining and oil industries, the companies that have taken over water and the oceans – have transformed Humanity into a resource or an obstacle, depending on their petty interests, and have denied it the protagonism that its nature grants it.
With the greatest cynicism, they try to make us believe in the legitimacy of their supposed rights and that ours – as the people that we are – no longer exist. They inoculate us with viruses to develop vaccines that will swell their already bulging coffers, they convince us that migration is illegal, they want us subdued and silenced by the force of repression and, thanks to all this, they are defining a world at their convenience. The most developed countries thanks to our heritage – Africa and America – despise our culture, our color, and our right to live free of their invasions and far from their war industry.
They condemn us as a hindrance to their plans for exploitation and plant in our governments corrupt and criminal beings, docile individuals capable of surrendering their nations in exchange for bribes. To do so, they assassinate leaders whose consciousness opposes their intentions. In this way, we have traveled through a history charged with loss; a timeline that has left us with deep scars and fears so deep-seated that they paralyze and condition the spirit. These peoples, invisible to the great economic and political powers, are the indispensable force that is living to right the course.
We have been through a history charged with loss, a painful timeline.