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- THE WEEK, Page 23WORLDTake That, Cristoforo!
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- Columbus' quincentennial provokes protests throughout Latin
- America
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- In the U.S., the controversy had raged so long and so
- intensely before the 500th anniversary of Columbus' discov . . .
- err, voyage to the New World that the actual day passed almost
- unnoticed last week. Not so in Latin America, where Native
- Americans constitute a majority of the population in a few
- countries and a large minority in others, and where cultural
- tensions between Indians, mixed-bloods and descendants of the
- conquista dores have long been severe. Two groups of native
- peoples from nearly opposite ends of the hemisphere -- Alaska
- and Peru -- met at the Teotihuacan pyramids outside Mexico City
- at the end of a month-long march to celebrate "500 years of
- survival." In the city, thousands of additional demonstrators
- danced and prayed on the Zocalo, the central square; still
- others hung a sign reading FIVE CENTURIES OF MASSACRE around the
- neck of a statue of Columbus on the elegant main avenue, Paseo
- de la Reforma. Mass demonstrations also occurred in Bolivia and
- Chile. In Buenos Aires some native people staged a three-day
- hunger strike that ended on Columbus Day in front of the Casa
- Rosada, the Argentine presidential palace. And in Managua,
- Nicaragua, a poster branded Columbus A BIG THIEF, MURDERER,
- RACIST, TORTURER, OPPRESSOR OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLE AND INSTIGATOR
- OF THE BIG LIE.
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