Columbus statue was doused with paint during last year's protests
The authorities in the capital of Mexico, the fifth most populous metropolis in the world, have unveiled a plan to move the Christopher Columbus monument, which previously stood on the central Reform Avenue, to a city park. His place will be taken by the figure of an unnamed woman from the native Olmec people.
The Genoese navigator, who discovered America for Europeans on October 12, 1492 and who until the end of his life mistakenly believed that he had visited East Asia, is considered by many public activists to be a symbol of colonialism today, since his expedition marked the beginning of the Spanish conquest of Latin America.
War on monuments
The pedestal has been empty since October 10, 2020. The authorities took it out, according to the official version, for restoration. In social networks, then calls were made to knock him down on the day of the next anniversary of the discovery of America.
Last year, demonstrators wrote “Down with Columbus!” on the fence protecting the monument
Desecrations of Columbus monuments have previously taken place in some Latin American states, as well as in Boston and the city of St. Paul, Minnesota, adjacent to Minneapolis, where an African American George Floyd died during police arrest.
During the campaign launched in 2020 under the slogan Black Lives Matter in the USA, Great Britain and other countries, the monuments of Winston Churchill and the Duke of Wellington were vandalized or dismantled, in addition to the victory over Napoleon, who suppressed the uprisings in India, the English King James II, an investor engaged in the slave trade The Guinean company, and the Belgian king Leopold II, who pursued a brutal colonial policy in the Congo.
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The demonstrators also targeted monuments to the entrepreneur and head of the British Cape Colony in South Africa Cecil Rhodes, the Bristol philanthropist Edward Colston, who received part of their income from the slave trade, the creator of the London West Indies docks, Robert Milligan, who owned a sugar plantation in Jamaica, and the commander-in-chief of the Civil Army. war in the United States to General Robert Lee.
Columbus discovered America in 1492, but until the end of his life he mistakenly believed that he had been to East Asia
Mexico City Mayor Claudia Scheinbaum said the Columbus monument will remain open to view and that moving it is not a rewriting of history, but an act of justice for the peoples who inhabited Mexico before the arrival of Europeans.
She announced the decision to replace the monument on September 5, the International Day of Aboriginal Women.
Sculptor Pedro Reyes is working on the statue of the Olmec woman.
The Olmec civilization in the territory of modern Mexico existed from about 1200 BC to 400 AD.
Little is known about this civilization. Subsequently, it was replaced by the Aztec Empire, which oppressed other nations so that they met Hernando Cortez and his people as liberators and helped them in every way.
But they were in for a cruel disappointment in the conquistadors.
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