Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa had called for Lisbon to find ways to compensate its former colonies, including canceling debt. The government says it has not initiated any process to that effect.
Lisbon is not planning to pay reparations for trans-Atlantic slavery and colonialism, Portugal’s government said on Saturday.
The statement comes in response to remarks by President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, who said Portugal could find ways to compensate its former colonies.
Portugal said in a statement that it seeks to “deepen mutual relations, respect for historical truth and increasingly intense and close cooperation, based on reconciliation of brotherly peoples.”
It stressed that it had not launched any “process or program of specific actions” for paying reparations.
The Fascists were the ones who loved and spread all over all that iconography celebrating The Discoveries, to make up for a country which was incredibly poor except for a handful of selected Families. It was pretty standard Fascist ultra-nationalism in the same style as Moussulini’s Italy.
A lot of those ill-gotten gains were blown up centuries ago, and whatever was left never actually made its way down from the Old Wealth to most people.
Real compensation should go to the ones that were being exploited much more recent in the “colonies” before the Revolution that brought Democracy to Portugal and should be coming from the ones doing the exploitation, many of whom are still alive, got given a whole lot of benefits as “Returnees” following the Revolution and many who whom are still today in the top political parties.
It should also be done in a way that it ends up with the most in need, not in the hands of the rich and crooked of places like Angola.
As I said elsewhere, group blame is how the wealthy who benefited from such abuses get to diffuse the blame through entire etnicities/nationalities so that they don’t have to loose a significant chunk of their wealth for compensation. Curiously, the President Of Portugal who started with all this talk is the son of a Minister of the old Fascist Dictator - Salazar - and got to go study in France at a time were most of the country was way too poor to even dream of going for a week all expenses paid to Lisbon, much less a couple of years to Paris.