The suffix cidio refers to the action of exterminating or killing. In this way, words such as suicide, assassination or homicide, among others, are formed. It refers to the extermination of a racial or ethnic group.
This term is normally used in relation to the original peoples of a territory who have been eliminated, subdued or displaced by a dominating people.
Ethnocide in Latin America
Before the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese to the American continent, there were thousands of peoples with their own language and culture. Colonization meant the imposition of a dominant culture and, therefore, the direct or indirect elimination of all those genuinely American communities.
This phenomenon has occurred over the centuries and with various strategies:
1) the physical annihilation of the population,
2) the prohibition of the language and culture of indigenous peoples,
3) occupation of the territory,
4) the imposition of a slave system on the indigenous population and
5) the implementation of a globalized socio-economic model.
The denunciation of ethnocide in America is as old a fact as ethnocide itself. In this sense, already in the seventeenth century the Spanish Dominican Fray Bartolomé de las Casas harshly censured the slavery situation of the natives.
In its different versions, ethnocide has been based on a general idea: there is a cultural model considered superior that legitimizes the domination or devastation of those supposedly inferior or savage populations. This view of reality is called ethnocentrism. Faced with the ethnocentrism that defends the supremacy of one cultural identity over the others, there is an opposite vision, cultural relativism.
Latin America is not the only territory in which this phenomenon has taken place, as it has also occurred in the different colonial empires.
The crime of ethnocide is intended to protect communities that are in danger of extinction
In recent decades, countries such as Ecuador, Argentina or Colombia have typified the crime of ethnocide. This legal tool aims to prevent native peoples from losing their cultural identity.
The criminal offense of ethnocide emphasizes the need to respect those peoples who voluntarily decide to isolate themselves from the globalized world. In this way, if a state or a multinational were to adopt a measure contrary to an isolated community, it would be committing a crime of ethnocide.
Photo: Fotolia - Makbart
