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.
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2021/3/10/how-portugal-silenced-centuries-of-violence-and-trauma
It was also the first country in the entire world to abolish slavery (European Portugal, that is)
If you’re going to separate out mainland Portugal and its overseas territories like that, then technically slavery was never legal in England.
Unlike England, Portugal did not keep any overseas territory.
Gibraltar anyone?
I didn’t mean to claim that the British Empire were the good guys. I was just pointing out the silliness of only looking at one very narrow fact to make a country look good, while ignoring the wider context.
As the article says, they were benefiting from slave labor in their colonies until the second half of the 20th century.
Benefitting how? They were a drain on the Portuguese economy.
Portugal invested more in the colonies infrastructures than in the country itself. The carnation revolution had a few reasons and one of them being that despite the government stubborness, the Portuguese people did not want to keep the colonies.
Sorry… you don’t understand how economies benefit from unpaid labor?
But sure, you’re right. They weren’t getting a benefit from having de facto slavery in their colonies until 1961. So I guess they were just doing it to be cruel.
Only well connected members of the Fascist Regime were benefitting from that (for example, the guy who founded a Coffee Company who got cheap raw materials from the “colonies”, something that at the time was only possible with the authorization of the Fascist Dictator himself).
Most of the rest of the country was incredibly poor and I suspect that the exploitation of the natives in the “colonies” allowed Fascism to keep going a lot longer than otherwise, since Portugal itself (were most people were illiterate subsistence farmers) did not generate much wealth.
It was a Resource Curse kind of situation, with the extra Evil element that the “resource” being exploited to keep the members of the Fascist power circles fat and happy without caring in the least for the welfare of their countrymen, were people in far away lands.
“Only some people benefited” is a terrible excuse to not pay anything back to previously enslaved people who are alive right now.
That’s a hyper-simplified False Choice Falacy, not a rational argument.
If your process for righting old injustices requires committing even more widespread newer ones, it’s not Just and it needs rethinking.
I think that if you can have some standard of proof for the crimes and can trace both the victims and the proceeds of the crime to the present day it’s just to compensate the descendants of said victims by confiscating the proceedings of the crime (for example, what’s being done with paintings stollen by the Nazis).
However being born within the present day geographical borders of a nation whose elites were (or even are) criminals is not itself a crime nor does it make one a benificiary of the proceeding of the crime (possibly the reverse, as criminal elites are way more prone to also pillage their own country than they are to share with their countrymen the proceedings of their pillaging abroad) and being born within the present day geographical borders of a nation containing an area where in the past those crimes were committed does not make one a victim of those crimes.
(To cast blame or claims of victimhood on people merelly based on the place they were born in is pretty straighforward Descrimination)
The situation with the paintings is extremelly easy to solve in a fair way because the paintings themselves are proof plus it’s mostly (sadly, not always) reasonably easy to now, 2 generations later, find the handful of descendants of the victims, but it’s way harder to trace long ago human exploitation (including the evils of slavery) to present day benificiaries of said crimes because it long ago became money and money is fungible and got spread out, dilluted by money from legal sources or even totally spent by an earlier generation.
I’m not saying an effort shouldn’t be made, I’m saying that it should be made with the proper effort, not some bullshit group blame and group compensation that leaves the ill gotten gains of the Portuguese Old Money untouched (by taking it mostly from everybody else) and further enriches well connected elites in some other nations rather than the people there who need that money the most and are much more likely to be descendents of the victims (since poverty has a tendency to stick).
What is the “widespread newer” injustices that come from paying restitution to living people who were slaves under Portuguese rule?
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.