In the latter half of the 16th century, a famed friar and chronicler set out to write his “Treatise about the just causes for a war against the Indians.” The manuscript seeks to justify the enslavement of the natives and oppose a humane approach to the conquest. "The Spaniards are perfectly entitled to exert their dominance over these barbarians of the New World [...]” wrote Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, “whose wisdom, wit and any sort of human virtue or sentiment is so inferior to the Spanish man, as the child is to an adult, a female is to a male, the cruel and inhuman is to the meek-spirited one and, I shall say, the monkey is to man".
The world of which the Treatise spoke is long gone. It’s been over 500 years since the conquest of the Americas. However, the words of Friar Ginés stuck. And perhaps nowhere as much as in my home country, Guatemala. For the following centuries, the upper classes promoted the idea of a superior race. By the 19th century, a phrase (which is still common to date) had been coined: Mejorar la raza (Improve our race). It serves a double purpose: to celebrate European lineage and to suggest that the farther a Guatemalan is from his or her non-white roots, the better.
The State certainly took that phrase to heart. For the rest of the century and the first half of the 1900s, grossly unequal distribution of wealth, forced labour and State-sponsored violence were part of everyday life for indigenous peoples. It culminated in the Guatemalan Civil War, one of the longest armed conflicts in Latin American history, which resulted in the genocide of nearly 200,000 Mayans and the displacement of 1.5 million others.
