Social and political analysis of the colonising process in Latin America

Continuing inequality in Latin America: colonisation or negative political acculturation?

photo_camera Atalayar_América Latina

Latin America suffers from persistent inequality.

For decades, Latin American societies have been deflating the profound inequality that plagues the region. There is an undeniable effort by civil society, constitutional courts and institutions that have set in motion a formidable apparatus of emancipation and social change. However, inequality seems to be metamorphosing, recycling and enjoying good health. What is the reason for this phenomenon? 

The epistemology that excludes itself

Daryush Shayegan said: "The light comes from the West". I don't want to sound anthropocentric or westerncentric with this statement. But we have to know that we have some singularities that differentiate us from others. Think that, when Descartes starts his huge announcement about what exists, he does it epistemologically. He begins to ask: what do we have to understand, and he answers: "We have to understand our own understanding". That is to say, to create a self-reflection capable of unveiling what is there that is ignored. There is knowledge, that is true, but only our system of thought has been concerned with epistemology. Epistemological issues" are always issues for us. It is the way we have found to put space between us and the myths. To construct who we are. Because unlike many cultures, in the West we don't just live the world, we live and understand it. The latter is our great novelty: to be a created humanity. But created by itself through a process of three reflective and extremely violent centuries of action. Where moral, political and technical innovations are constant.

Atalayar_America Latina Colonización

Epistemology and its relation to political history are part of the novelty of ours. It is perhaps the most important feature we have constructed. Nietzsche, for example, was the first to introduce them. Historical-political consciousness", as Mary Beard calls political epistemology, is the articulation of ideas in order to attack with them the immemorial past that presents itself repackaged. Because political epistemology is a validator of democracy. It helps us to understand, from the Cartesian and sometimes Hegelian key, how justice and injustice; inequality, oppression and precariousness; and individualism or social forms have shaped a moment of humanity that we call history. Therefore, without embedding "colonisation" in the political perspective of epistemology, we will not understand the importance of having overcome this stage that was part of our civilising process.

Without political epistemology we will never be able to understand that, although we lost a great deal in the colonising phase, it was the condition of possibility that made a subsequent process of political rationalisation possible. Not to look at it in this perspective is to take a leap into regression that sometimes places us in an essentialist and cultural relativist discourse.This implies, from Wellmer's point of view, recalling the nature of a "free subject" who still believes himself to be a "slave". Hence, we still understand colonisation as a process of construction of a lost identity that must be completed by neo-narratives. In this way, the study of colonisation should not be limited to the description of a kind of injustice that only the sense of time made possible. But neither should it be ignored. Colonisation and its processes must be understood within the framework of political epistemology as a stage in the re-foundation of the concept of humanity. From the bottom up, as Marcela Lagarde states.  

Atalayar_América Latina Colonización
Colonisation" and the ancient world

Let us look, for example, at the cardinal questions of science: how is the order of ideas and things possible, how is it possible to know our possibilities in the order of nature? Descartes asked these questions. The intention was correct. For in every science there must be a well-spun discourse of what seem to be truths that have to be self-evident and therefore, in their order, demonstrated. This is how reason works, and this is how knowledge and science must work. Well, epistemic sense accompanied by great human action allowed Europe to renounce fundamentalism after the advent of the Peace of Westphalia (1648). And in some parts of the Americas it has succeeded in irrationalising social, political and economic inequality. Chile has been a product of this. However, another cardinal question must be asked: do we analyse the phenomenon of colonisation within the epistemic-political framework?

Current Latin American hermeneutics offers a different answer. It presents as an explanatory phenomenology a cultural relativism called "decolonial theory" whose epistemic centre is in authors such as Spivak, Sousa Santos and Grosfoguel (among others). For Grosfoguel, "decolonisation is the overcoming of all hierarchies of domination and the re-founding of a new, just and egalitarian original civilisation". It is a theoretical order that does not assume colonisation as a process of civilisational rupture for the emergence of a moral and political self-consciousness. But as a type of domination that must be constantly purged. It is a valid explanation, but one concerned with constructing a new era that focuses decoloniality on a cultural sifting (in relation to other cultures) that does not subject the natively inherited to the tribunal of purification. 

Atalayar_América Latina Colonización

It is not common to see in decolonial discourse questions of whether inequality within peoples and communities themselves is an inveterate misuse that they have simply inherited? It does not "discuss the rules of the tribe", in the words of Celia Amorós. At the same time it emphasises material aspects of power as if they were only inherent to the Western model. Decolonial discourse conveys, willingly or not, a romanticised version of pre-colonial societies. It ignores or minimises hierarchies and discriminations within. And it can mask, in the name of a "non-Western indigenous culture", features of inequality.  Native reason escapes any possibility of dialogue, to quote Habermas' "discursive ethics". And the only way to study it is to accept it without any kind of interpellation. It is claimed that it is the expression of "pure cultures" or superior forms of thought. It goes on to assert that there are "pre-colonised/post-colonised subjects" and that the interpellation between modern and native reason is improbable. It is as if native people (among others) are outside the democratic consensus because they are made of different stuff. What separates us from indigenous or native peoples? Rationally nothing. We are generically human. The only difference between us is a story of origin.

From my point of view I would like to point out the existence of a certain relativistic explanation that presents other human beings as the embodiment of sacred proverbial practices incapable of being challenged. Conduct that is not homologable by the universal democratic system. For whether one accepts democracy or not, it is a political rationalism. Thus from a total irenicism, decolonial theory accepts without question everything that comes in the name of "aboriginal identity". This is not wrong. There is nothing negative in "other realities". But the absence of the "questioning factor" is a gross error in the analysis of human differences. Because none of them has been born sufficiently deflated to present itself as a good product. There is no purity of origins. The purity of origins is a myth, said Nietzsche. What we will always find at the historical beginning of things is not the still preserved identity of their origin. But the discord of things, the nonsense. Aida Hurtado stated: "To pretend to discover truth and being at the root of what we know and what we are, converts knowledge into criticism and the myth of origin into a strategy of identity self-affirmation". Thus posed, it would seem that decolonial theory confuses "ethnic identity" with "ethnic identity as metaphysical fiction". Thus it is common to analyse in all decolonial discourses a fascination with a "metaphysical aesthetic" but any critique or interpellation of the "native ethic" is ignored.

Atalayar_America Latina Colonización

Decolonial theory cannot be reduced to a discourse of fascination that succumbs to the ecstatic. That romanticises everything for an origin. Because we do not inhabit an exclusively metaphysical world. We are institutions, behaviours, rules and customs. Everything must pass through the tribunal of reason. And we know what reason is because Modernity has made us aware of the enormous amount of reflection that we consist of. We know very well how to live according to legendary stories because they are our direct past. The rights we call "human" today, for example, had to break epistemically with their "divine" past. We are not subjects or worshippers. And even if we pray, we are people of ideas with cultures that can challenge and coexist. This is what the democratic habitat is all about.

The epistemic analysis of colonisation must therefore be an intellection of the past and, therefore, a capacity for critical comparison. It is to see how thought-action has taken place and how it has modulated the moral patterns of those who have lived at a specific moment in history. It is to admit that we are not so different that we do not have an extraordinary metaphysical dignity. But that we left in the past a process of oppression that allowed natives and "non-natives" to evolve into civilised ways of inhabiting the world. For no culture of the past, even our own, can be recognised as "open". That never existed. It is like Bachofen's myth of "matriarchy". In a place like Latin America, we have to get rid of the idea that "pure cultures" existed before. Although there is no lack of those who find them completely "inclusive". What is hidden in bad faith is that we have been purifying and deflating violence between human groups for centuries. For none of what we see is a consequence of "common sense". The modulation of our social types is a product of our rational ways of inhabiting the world. Hence we see in certain societies where irrationality is of such astonishing ferocity, the barbarism of the ancient world. Think of the immensity of violence in the Middle East, which is no joke. 

Atalayar_America Latina Colonización

Native is not synonymous with "advanced" and advanced is not "emancipatory". Human behaviour before rational thought appeared was mechanical. It is the excesses of the logic of identity that have conceptualised, even from decolonial approaches, that people are metaphysical entities and not relational processes. Identity formulated as cultural relativism will always oppose enlightened morality in order to argue that the former is an ideological universal. All in order to deny that it is not rationality that has achieved egalitarian advances. But identities and their relativisms. Think, for example, of Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, did he not vindicate indigenous equality, but what happened to his vindication? His advanced egalitarianism did not prosper because it did not find fertile soil, political rationality was not the discourse of unveiling. Rather, its seed fell on the hard bronze soil of a stereotyped society. It was the same for women before the Enlightenment. Christine de Pizan experienced it first hand. Until recently slavery was a right and homosexuals were stoned, well, still strangled in certain social classes. Before Modernity we find the rebellion of the oppressed and, in the case in point, technical or socio-political advances. But not a moral advance understood as an articulating discourse of change capable of deactivating the oppressive regime. It has not been the condensation of an abstract identity that has managed to break the chains of oppression. Rationality articulated as a discourse of change and emancipatory aims has brought us to our feet.

An identity advance does not always go hand in hand with moral innovation. For example, Western scientific innovations can be accepted almost everywhere in the world without problem. Muslim and Jewish identities can board a plane, use an iPhone or use a credit card issued by a Latin American bank. Just as some native peoples in Africa will inject themselves with the COVID-19 vaccine produced in Germany and the United States. But that does not mean that they accept the moral basis on which Western science has set out to present itself. The same thing happened in the ancient world. There were socio-cultural and identity advances, but not necessarily moral advances. No morally open society, to quote Popper, existed before. Hence they must always be purified. Even more so if they are made within the framework of a culture of recognition. Hierarchies and the ways in which we incorporate them into the construction of new identities need to be revised. All the inequality and misogyny that in some cases our contemporaneity can reveal, are the remnants of the past of which we will never have a complete memory. So to study colonisation is to dare to exercise, with sufficient methodology and caution, critical and epistemic comparison. 

Atalayar_América Latina Colonización
The epistemological meaning of colonisation

In the head of any culture (native or contemporary) thoughts bubble up that once added to a huge river of oppression and discrimination. And if they are taken as pure, avoiding the filter of reason, they will continue to provide us with the same inequality of those who preceded us, or how can we explain that those who defend "abya yala" are the same people who in a country like Ecuador subject 6 out of 10 indigenous women to violence? How can we explain that 88% of the women raped in Guatemala are all indigenous? Why is it that Bolivia, where 40% of the population is indigenous, is the country with the highest rates of violence against indigenous women (7 out of 10)? Is all this macho violence abducted by the United States or Europe? Or is it not the case that violence and misogyny are cross-border and cross-cultural and that, having modulating effects, they manifest themselves with the same indolence everywhere? This paper is not focused on feminism, but I cannot overlook the reality of indigenous Latin American women.

When the explanatory discourse of women is based on an identitarianism of "feminine difference" that only goes as far as revealing the cultural divide with white or non-indigenous women, and machista violence remains inert, it is a sign that the vindication is distracted or has been placed elsewhere. Talking about women and women's rights is not necessarily synonymous with feminism. There are cultural-women's relativisms that are confused with feminism. Feminism does not start from an "essential" diminishment of women. On the contrary. It opposes all essentialism. The only epistemological theory that feminism admits is the strictest nominalism. The nominalist idea states that there is no such thing as essence. That every "being" is itself someone, and therefore to posit an essentialist statement is imprecise for its definition. Feminism has been attacking women's "loaded universals" (essences) for 300 years because all essences have been used as a cultural construct to maintain their subordinate status. Because to subordinate someone real you must have a huge theoretical apparatus that justifies essence over existence. One only has to visit the feminist tradition of three centuries to see the alleged deactivation of "sex" and "womanly essences".

Atalayar_América Latina Colonización

Feminism is based on a vindictive political construction for the expression of a "free individual", not "the essence of women" as Amelia Valcárcel and Marcela Lagarde claim. It is not a theory that serves to bring more "womanised" women into the world. That will be done by womanism, if there is much of that left out there. Feminism is a political theory of equality. It understands women as "human individuals" without the mediation of any identity overload, as Celia Amorós affirmed. In certain sectors of Latin America there is an evident discourse of difference, sometimes essentialist, sometimes womanist. But concisely repeating, as happened in American feminism, the cultural vindication of the "essence of womanhood". A type of feminism which, because of its relativist heritage, strongly criticises enlightened reason and all its predecessors. But with little force it points out the patriarchy hidden in native or native practices. A feminism bent on justifying, for example, that Mary Wollstonecraft has nothing to do with Latin American women. Nor does it have any discursive continuity with Millán, Maffia, Segato, Lagarde, Femenías, etc. This is far from being true. And by focusing on proving the existence of a "white colonising feminism", she does not raise an invective against the oppression of thousands of indigenous women that Wollstonecraft would have liked to have vindicated in situ. There is a Latin American feminism of equality. However, it is being replaced by a discourse of essences. One that excludes many subjects from feminist militancy and assumes that Latin American women are monads in relation to other women. It is the new rhetoric that is rising to the top, but which does not deflate patriarchy, much less bring down macho violence. Paradoxically, the exaltation of cultural autochthony, even that which surrounds women, tends to make invisible the fact that the logic of domination also governs interethnic and religious relations within cultures. It is therefore only through careful examination that the intricate links between difference, hierarchy, one-other dialectics, norm, identity and exclusion can be disarticulated.

Well, we must never lose sight of the fact that the thoughts that are alive in our cultures maintain among themselves the loves and dislikes of their first factories. Hence, the explanatory framework that defines them is capable of analysing them without any kind of romanticism. Because criticism is not disrespect, interpellation is not supremacism and joint construction is not subordination. It is irrefutable that Latin America was subject to "imperial colonisations". But unlike the narratives that victimise Latin American society, I am inclined to think that it was the meeting of two pre-modern and pre-enlightened societies. I therefore discard any eschatological explanation that to date presents Latin America as the unfortunate society that was surprised by "the unexpected". The Latin America of those times was an organised society. It had thought forms pivoting on the mystical and a robust system of social distribution. Imperial Spain, to a large extent also mythical because it used the Judeo-Christian narrative to self-proclaim what by inheritance belonged to it, had the same conditions. However, the strengths of the two were different. But these societies had one thing in common: they believed themselves to be the only humanity. 

Atalayar_América Latina Colonización

Since Karl Jaspers we know that we have never believed ourselves to be "one and the same humanity". In fact, the concept of "humanity" is modern. It was inaugurated by a great ontologist of Modernity, Spinoza, and later by Linnaeus. Hence there are "original peoples" whose translated names mean "human/people" where we are the outsiders. The Jew, for example, comes from the Hebrew "yehúda", which means "legitimate son of Jacob" and defines that only these are the only chosen ones. In other words, another form of self-referencing as the only humanity. Likewise, the Arawak culture (Colombia) with its "kunsamü law" asserts that only they are the centre of the administration of the cosmos, of everything natural that exists, and the rest of us must follow this law. These differences have existed since the initial organisational systems established by the Sumerians and the Pythagoreans. There was Adam and Eve in the Sumerians and also in the religions of the Book.

Let us say that, in a way and by a certain rationalism, the different peoples started from their own birth taking for granted that they were the only thing that existed. "Pure Adamism". Hence we can understand by studying the processes of colonisation that the recognition of a "one humanity", although a modern construction, never existed. Because at no time have we ever believed ourselves to be "one". And so we have used different narratives to justify our pre-eminence over others, or do we not still appeal to exoticism to call ourselves strangers or foreigners? So what happened in the Americas in relation to Spain? Colonisation was a process of moral defeat of a reference culture that, believing itself unique, was swallowed up by another. But not in terms of victimisation. They were two cultures that met, both read each other as strangers, and one managed to defeat the other using an extraordinary advantage that the other did not have. Such was the ethos of the ancient world. For rapacity as opposed to rational horizontality was the basis underpinning the accumulation of wealth and power. Not that this has changed much either. But at least we now think more than once of declaring war on each other. 

Atalayar_América Latina Colonización

Before Modernity, however, rapacity was the only existing social category. "Take what you thought was yours' was the only truth and, contrary to popular belief, was the shared language of the peoples of the ancient world. It was this kind of thinking that inspired, for example, the papal bull that gave the world to Spain and Portugal. Hence the joke: "The King of France asked where is Adam's will that the world belongs to the Portuguese and Spanish alone?" In those times neither Kant's categorical imperative nor human rights as codes of justice, as defined by María José Fariñas, had appeared as limits.  All rapacity was permitted. Colonisation is not only the melancholic register of lost objects, nor an Aristotelian place of deserters. It was the hegemonic assumption of a culture that gained a position of power and managed to set its standards to impose itself as the best form of existence. But this could have been achieved by any of the opposing societies. Not to believe this is to assume that we were already inferior or underdeveloped from those times. This is far from being true. I say this because in our civilisational systems we have evidence that some indigenous peoples imposed themselves on others using the logic of domination that, with extraordinary ferocity, was later imposed by the Spanish Crown.

It must be understood that domination was neither born in Europe nor does it originate in the Americas. It is a socio-anthropological invariable present in all social systems and civilisational types on the planet. Margaret Mead explained this long ago. Nevertheless, colonisation as a historical process has come to an end. No one can justify today that Latin America is subjected to the "European yoke". Because, for example, of the first countries to obtain the vote for women (before Europe) were Latin American countries, were they abducted by Europe? Because not to take for granted that colonisation is a closed process is as much as to say that democracy did not arrive as a discourse of unveiling all that exists. After all, Latin America acquired its post-coloniality in the 19th century and, strictly speaking, has been independent for more than a century at least. It has constituted a syncretic culture, with its own differentiated features, where ethnic problems are more complex than the countries' relations with each other. All the inequality suffered by the region is not only due to an open "colonial process" that affects the engine rooms of Latin American thought, it is something else.

Atalayar_América Latina Colonización
The political-epistemological bias

Let's look at this example. Rousseau maintained that women could not be in the public sphere because they were driven by "emotions". He held that women citizens were "pure anomaly" and therefore should be outside the social contract. When Khomeini's Iranian revolution triumphed, the first thing he did was to remove women judges because, like Rousseau, he thought they were not objective and such a context was a danger to the administration of justice. Khomeini may have read Rousseau, though I doubt it, but whether Khomeini or Rousseau, misogyny behaved in the same way in France and Iran. It transcends and acquires modulations, but it is the same, so it is pronounced in the same way everywhere. Well, inequality, like misogyny, is just as accommodating.

The inequality that came to us in the Americas after colonisation was "another strain" that managed to accommodate. But it does not exclude the native. A point that nobody emphasises for fear of nonsense. Are we really going to believe this relativism that asserts things like: "blacks were black when whites came along", how do we explain that there was black segregation before the white race politicised the exclusion of these people in the United States? Didn't all black males vote before any black or white woman? Are we to forget the political favour white males did for black males to the detriment of white women's suffragism? Colonialism is not a system that is inspired by "race" even though it uses "race" as a mechanism of exclusion. It is a form of oppression that justifies multi-level subordination. As Harriet Tubman and Gloria Steinem once explained. Therefore, the structural inequality we suffer today has acquired Latin American modulations, it is inert and is not the classic colonising one. It is a turn of thought where the rule of hierarchy and subordination is its own. Rita Segato has been saying this for decades. 

Atalayar_América Latina Colonización

However, a similar type of explanation to that of Sophie Bessis coexists in the region, which denies the previous adaptive interpretation of inequality. From certain quarters, there is an impeccable critique of Western civilisation and how it cannot challenge the "native" civilisation, assuming that its own is adalid. It is a way of thinking that insists on the "incongruities" between universal values and the abstract principles proclaimed by the European Enlightenment of the 18th century. It points out that there are "colonialist practices" that continue to exert pressure on Latin American peoples. But what is interesting about this discourse, which identifies itself as "decolonial", is that it starts from a self-transcendence that is improper. Sousa Santos, Lugones, Spivack, "the subaltern studies", etc., who serve the colonising censorship in the region, are attached to critical theories of race by Kimberlé Crenshaw (UCLA); Alice Walker (Spelman College), etc. For example, the notion of "epistemic racism" or "epistemicide" are conceptual derivations of Foucault's "epistemic violence". Sousa Santos's "theory of the indignant" refers to the "dialectic of master and slave" of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and the critical studies of the Frankfurt School. Likewise, his "epistemology of the South" is a special accommodation of Marxist-Bourdieuian sociologism to Latin American reality. Decolonial discourses assume as their epistemic centre the critique of "instrumental reason" in the best Frankfurtian style. Hence, much of this discourse, on the one hand, vindicates the abolition of domination and, on the other, points to a subject damaged by instrumental peripeteia. In short, the conceptual and pulsional root of decolonial reason is the counter-hegemonic self-consciousness that emerged in Europe. They present a messianic light of emancipation, accompanied by theories produced in the continent they point to as the ultimate oppressor. They raise the diatribe from the same conceptual races that are the object of their criticisms. How curious.

How, then, does decolonial theory manage to repair the breakdown of the Latin American subject if it constitutes its identity from the concepts of the emancipated subject produced by the European enlightenment? The same people who do not ask themselves this contradiction are those who affirm things like: "(...) It is that such a context cannot be interpreted from Europe...", when the basic concept used to explain or defend the difference is European phenomenology. It may be that the person who says this is unaware of this fact, which demonstrates a colossal factual reductionism. However, even if it is unknown, the conceptual race is there. Because no matter how much or how little memory one has of great-grandparents, it is certain that we had them. We did not appear by spontaneous generation. And the latter is also an obsolete hypothesis. The same goes for explanatory theories, they have an epistemic genetics. In the same way, the pompous neo-historicist rhetoric of decoloniality ignores, among other things, that disquisitions such as multiculturalism, so fashionable in Latin America these days, emerged in Canada (first nations) and Europe (native realism). These societies were the first in the world to adopt multiculturalism as a state policy. For cultural relativisms are a planetary reality, not a monadology. 

Atalayar_América Latina Colonización

Decolonial studies manage to point out "the other" by inscribing themselves in the same theoretical lineages that they point to as "universals or negationists of difference". But at the same time, and in a sisyphean way, they present the worst face of Europe. Its first version: premodern and pre-Enlightenment. That is to say, the one that did not liberate the Latin American peoples from tyranny. But this is not a contradiction. It is a critique. Decolonial studies are the offspring of poestructuralism, and poestructuralism is a critique of the Enlightenment. Hence, decoloniality is evidence of a constant "attack" on the very foundations of reason, since it is the child of Enlightenment discourse. However, decolonial/peripheral or postcolonial discourse, unlike other post-structuralist critiques, does confirm what Wellmer said: "It discovers the other within enlightened reason". In other words, decolonial studies fails to construct outside the rationalist template of "subject" that the Enlightenment constructed, another explanatory concept because such a conceptual mediation does not exist and at the moment there is no other available. And what they end up doing is a special way of accommodating the emancipatory theory of the Enlightenment subject to the "invisible Latin American subject" in order to make it emerge as autonomous. That is to say, it uses an operating system built in Europe to programme a computer coupled to Latin America. Not a bad method. However, it is rather disjointed to raise a critique of the theoretical tools used to think of the "generalised other" that is ultimately an emancipated subject, isn't it?

Decoloniality is also "radical exteriority", says Alejandro Vallega. And this is nothing more than the "silenced subaltern" once presented by Edward Said. This demonstrates not only a fragile positive sense, but also reproduces the same incorrect register of the Kant-Hegel-Marx philosophy to explain the unjustifiable: to affirm that they did not think about the subalterns. This is far from the truth. One only needs to visit the founders of decoloniality to see from whom they have imbibed, whom they resemble and quote. Not to mention that this discourse is also rooted in Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari and Butler. Anglo-Saxon and European authors who are the background music for the whole template of Latin American decolonialism - what a decolonial conceptual race! Decoloniality has its relational link with the whole European sociological technique of the 1970s. Hence, the "epistemology of the South" as an empirical route is "relational", had you ever thought of that? Spivak, like other followers of decolonial tendencies, sometimes tell a story without intellection that is easy to buy: "bad conscience". For in these times nothing is easier than to convince the progressives of an open society that it owes part of its well-being to the wickedness or rapacity of its predecessors, especially if that rapacity has a "Eurocentric" surname. For some academics, Europe seems to pervert as a hermeneutic discourse. But not to be experienced or visited. Today it is easier to convince progressive societies that the problems they are experiencing go back to their pre-modern origins and not to the realities they experience on a daily basis.

Atalayar_América Latina Colonización

In this sense, does decolonial discourse not pose a critique of European thought that no longer exists? And if so, what is the point of criticising what has been deflated by Europe? There are enormous differences between the Spanish Empire and the European Union, between Bourbon despotism and Schuman's thought of unity. Hopefully they are not confusing "historical categories" with the modulation of the "political categories" of Modernity. It would not occur to anyone to claim that the first model of state/society imported by Simón Bolívar, a resolutely Rousseauist one, corresponded to the model of society that emerged in Europe after the Enlightenment polemics. The interpretation that the reflexive resource that brought colonisation to the Americas was the universalised and emancipatory European discourse achieved, for example, by the feminism of De la Barre, Wollstonecraft, Auclert, Stuart Mill or Tristan, is illegitimate. Europe, in order to declare the equality it is living, needed to radicalise socially, politically and philosophically. Feminism, for example, is a radicalisation of the Enlightenment. European society had to construct "citizenship without exclusions" using baroque political philosophy, preciosity and the great Madame de Staël (among others). Citizenship that Rousseau opposed and that Wollstonecraft, using the artillery of De la Barre, fought polemically.

Europe needed (among others) the anti-racist philosophies of De Gouges; the denunciation of gynophobia and misogyny by Condorcet, Montesquieu, Victor Hugo; the repudiation of Fourier's double standards; Hegel's "dialectic of master and slave" and a Fanny Raoul pointing out the economic injustice of women. All this and more was necessary to arrive at the great classics of egalitarian thought, such as Beauvoir and Sartre who, for example, denounced France's civilised crimes in the Algerian colony and repudiated French colonisation. The Enlightenment and with it all emancipatory concepts had to be refined in order for the civilisational type that reigns in Europe in this century to emerge. Only the death of this grid of thought allowed the emergence of the philosophies and political theories that today inspire the very same decolonial/peripheral studies to construct the identity subject. Such a perspective did not come to the Americas with Columbus or anyone else before him.

Atalayar_América Latina Colonización

The Enlightenment project, understood as the emancipation of the rational subject, was purified in Europe to include others, for example, "women", who, according to Hobbes, Locke, Pufendorf, Rousseau and Maréchal, had been left out of the social contract. To affirm that decoloniality has never existed in European thought is a revealing fact of profound ignorance of what in the old continent is called "the process of European construction", which is still open. The Enlightenment provided the condition of possibility for all the political theories and philosophies of modernity to present the "crisis of foundations" and, as Collin asserted, to bury modern inequality. Authors such as Spivack, among others, seem not to understand this self-consciousness and historical epistemology. To deny all this is to ignore the origin of the innovation that served as a springboard for emancipation. It is to confuse "origin of emancipatory innovation" with "adaptation or selective appropriation of emancipation" as explained by Elster and Nussbaum. What put them in the same context in 1776, the French Revolution in 1789, the independence movement in Spanish America in 1810, and the British-American War in 1812, and what condition of possibility enabled their emergence? The Enlightenment.

Was not the French Revolution the daughter of the American Revolution, was not the independence movement in Spanish America a special accommodation of the thinking of the French Revolution, and did not the British Enlightenment inspire the thinking of the great master Andrés Bello, given his closeness to Stuart Mill? To ignore all this is to ignore the history of political thought itself. It is one thing that we have begun the process of accommodating Enlightenment thought to our society and quite another that the decantation of that thought has not been completed because of what the Spanish crown did to our thinkers and because of what our leadership has subsequently done to our Gaitán, Garzón, among others. This being the case, what does Latin American decolonialism vindicate? What it presents is a re-edition of cultural relativism. A kind of self-determination that pretends to purify the past, which is impossible. And which from certain positions fails to understand that the "horrors of yesterday" were produced by pre-civilised societies that must be remembered only in the framework of a corrective historical memory. Because the civilisational present is ours, not Europe's or the United States'. It is an identitarian self-determination that seeks to find in the past the reasons that justify the inequality of the present, but the question of "today" is meagre. Decoloniality is a theoretical framework that pretends to purify the "Europeanised" and seeks to replace the "yesterday" that immediately preceded it with a new narrative that refers back to familiar essentialisms.

Atalayar_América Latina Colonización

What Kierkegaard said is often forgotten: "Every generation must learn to be human". That is, no matter how many old and evil things humanity has come to know how to do, that does not commit those of us who now exist to having to repeat or remember them as part of a vindictive discourse of social change. I have never seen Israel blame Germany for its current inaccuracies. Not to deny that the Nazi state generated a negative acculturation that "Hitlerised" (not to say colonised) very many Jewish consciousnesses. From the change of names and surnames to physical and cultural extermination. In Latin America we still live in the "trauma of colonisation". It is common, perhaps as a cliché, to remind Europe and other latitudes of a past that seems not to have been overcome, as if we were trapped in that course of history. We do not make historical memory of colonisation in order to critically revisit a period. Rather, we go there to open old veins that, as a result of historical change, must remain closed. It is a strange fetish that makes us commemorate and assume that everything that happens to us is due to past causes. As if the colonising ghost were that torment that ensures that we will never overcome inequality and poverty. As if we have forgotten that, although the past was dark, such humanity does not exist. And that the new humanities of the 21st century are the guarantors of "historical non-repetition".

The hidden paradigm

Colonial thought from the "subalternity studies and postcolonial studies" that took shape in England in the 1970s, thanks to the impulse of Indian scholars (Spivak, among others), tends to focus its analysis on the identification of an oppressive universality that installs a discursive and political phenomenon that usurps social, political and epistemic identities. Such a perspective focuses its vindication on the existence of the "logic of domination". From this logic, a system of expansionist thought is constructed that elaborates strategies around: power, emancipation, subaltern, hybrid or mestizo. All in order to resignify the identity of the "colonised". This, for example, was the same perspective that served the great emancipatory processes that took place in the early 1960s. The "logic of domination" was relevant. It allowed the subordination of the "silenced others" to be regularised in the same epochal explanation. By focusing the analysis on language, culture and identity, the socio-anthropological template from which decolonial studies came created concepts such as "community", "identity" or "decoloniality" that defined "other people" as actors in the social ecosystem. Although the "other/subaltern", as Seyla Benhabib put it at the time, is an older conception than the decolonial one. There are references in De la Barre (1673), Wollstonecraft (1792), Condorcet (1794), Hegel (1807), among others. Not to mention that the decolonial incardination responds to a "counter-hegemonic" discourse in Gramsci's terms, with strong Foucauldian and Bourdieusian overtones, as explained above. 

 Atalayar_América Latina Colonización

But, the logic of domination being a valid explanation presents an epistemic indeterminacy, how do we justify it today? If we live in Richard Haas' era of non-polarity, where does domination reside today, or what is the centre of domination in this century? This centre was clear in the imperial or colonial era. For there was the periphery and the centre of power. However, globalisation as a process of internationalisation has generated non-localised cultural and power redefinitions. There is concentration of capital in multinationals inside and outside the West, in the global North and South. There is also the emergence of cultures that are not tied to one soil. Indeed, indigenous people from the Amazon could live in Madrid and Spaniards share Bolivian culture, even if they do not live in the original territory. Moreover, as a result of identity amplifications, characterised by a strong post-structural incardination, today a conceptology is preached which affirms that one can belong to a culture only by expressing a "desire". This aspect is defended, for example, by queer studies, which affirm that neither biology nor identity origin are necessary to become a "woman/male" or to flow between genders. That everything can be susceptible to being assumed from a culture of performativity and desire.  Well, these "postmodern redefinitions" no longer reinforce identities based on the emancipatory struggle for a factual (localised) space of articulation. Without denying that native territories are legally or constitutionally protected. Today deconstructionism, in the words of Celia Amorós and Nancy Fraser, has generated the "substitution of the emancipation of space for the desired self (selves)". We are thus witnessing a "completely different politics", as Santiago Nino and Katte Millett would say, where domination is no longer over a physical identity but over thought.

The paradigm shift is that we have moved from colonisation to negative political acculturation. A type of acculturation that, although it does not generate the erasure of the condition of citizenship, it does impose a culture of thought that traps the emancipation that it should pursue. It manages to graft on a progressive hegemony which, although it does not reject differential identity, does not entail the abolition of the unjust order. And all of this is being gestated from centres of power located in different parts of the planet. The big difference with colonisation is that the former was hegemonic, central and universalising. But acculturation is diverse, apolar and delocalised. Colonisation used force to impose itself.  Acculturation is received consciously and unconsciously. Today, the logic of domination is not to be "imperially abducted" but to be accompanied by cultures whose alliances preach moral and political ruin. This may explain why Latin America, though formally free and equal, still does not enjoy a morally advanced liberation.

Atalayar_América Latina Colonización
Negative political acculturation

Acculturation is a process in which a human group receives a new culture. Individuals adapt to new canons by assuming understandings of a "new subject" that are traditionally inappropriate. It produces, for example, the juxtaposition that fosters the installation of a system that in some cases can come to coexist in a benevolent way. This was never the case in colonisation. Negative acculturation does not consist of marking a physical domination like classic colonisation. It will seek to replace the subject's egalitarian narrative without altering his or her social identity. In order for the subject to apprehend a discourse/thought that is alien to the social meaning of his emancipation. This would justify why we have communities and groups embracing a textuality that, although it does not deny the existence of their being (woman, indigenous, etc.), does change the version and mission of the liberation in process.

Negative acculturation, especially in Latin America, is constructing new subjects who, although native, blur the frontiers of emancipatory thought in order to assume a history which, believing itself to be specific, is neither egalitarian nor emancipatory. Thus, for example, we have communities and individuals embracing narratives that imply the extermination of their social and natural heritage. This was the case of "Bolivian post-neoliberalism". It aimed at a post-capitalist transition, but failed to differentiate itself from the previous model, nor was it able to lead Bolivia to a complete transformation. According to the UNDP, by 2019, 37.2% of the Bolivian population lived in poverty, i.e. less than four out of ten people had an income that did not necessarily cover other services such as clothing, utilities or transport. According to the UN, Bolivia is also the country where most women are murdered in Latin America. It is worth asking how the coexistence of a decolonial discourse with the possibility of an emerging neoliberalism can be justified. A first answer would be because much of decoloniality has focused on defending a cultural relativist discourse that ignores ruinous alliances. It barely looks at the acculturation transplanted by members of the same cultures that claim, for example, to embrace "neoliberalism" as akin to the desired liberation. This is what has just happened in Ecuador. The universals denounced by decoloniality no longer have the "magical powers" of subjugation as in historical times. Their feasibility depends on practices, uses, selective adaptations and resignifications, which are achieved thanks to the implementation of inequality through political acculturation. It may sound like an oxymoron, but acculturation driven by ultra-right, progressive neoliberals and speculation is being assumed as appropriation in the region. 

Atalayar_América Latina Colonización

In Latin America we have, on the one hand, the dominant liberal currents (classical liberalism, neoliberalism, etc.) capable of keeping pace with social movements and, on the other, dynamic sectors of the economy and industrial production that have apparently migrated to the discourse of distribution and recognition, almost on the same terms as distributive justice. There are environmentalist sectors in favour of economic autonomy based on extraction (exploitation); feminist sectors vindicating economic autonomy based on sexual slavery (neo-capitalist instrumentalisation) and indigenist groups aligned with neo-conservative movements (ultra-right-wing); etc. Is all of the above colonisation? It is for many reasons a decision to be there. This acculturation builds a social and political type of discourse that wins battles in the name of diversity, multiculturalism and women's rights. As did Bill Clinton and these days ex-banker Guillermo Lasso. It is a dangerous episteme that, using the key of Concordean progressivism, installs another "rhetoric of change" in the region. So we cannot speak exclusively of a logic of colonial domination. But of the reduction of equality to "fateful meritocracy" and "post-capitalist progressivism". It happened in Brazil with Bolsonaro, in Colombia with Duque and now in Ecuador with Lasso. Progressivism is not synonymous with "new deal", nor is it synonymous with an emancipatory spirit. A neoliberal programme, for example, does not seek to abolish hierarchies but to "diversify" them by falsely "empowering" social classes.

The differential variant in relation to colonisation is that in acculturation "empowerment" is the new domination. The "ethics of empowerment" is returned as a discourse to the social movements so that they accept a kind of thinking in which equality is not foreseen. Didn't Trump do it in the United States? Today we do not have the classic hegemony. It has been replaced by a trophy concept of "diversity". In Latin America diversity, thanks to acculturation, has come to be understood as "the capacity to mix everything for the sake of all", uniting chimerical realities under the same epistemic canopy. Diversity these days is the union of: extractivism with indigenism; prostitution with economic autonomy and feminism with essentialism. All these syncretisms are being made in the name of a false intersectionality that is nothing more than an "overton window" through which old forms of domination slip in. There is a "broken commodity" that is passing through the channel of diversity. And that commodity is the different forms of action and thought that by "diverse" are understood as the possibility of rationalising neo-capitalist production, the objectification of bodies and the instrumentalisation of nature. 

Atalayar_América Latina Colonización

A diversity adorned with the rhetoric of the future that makes the descendants of the new left believe that instrumentalisation (today repackaged as empowerment and autonomy) is emancipation. Presenting "avant-garde theories" that are nothing more than rhizomatic offshoots that destroy the possibility of social advancement from within. Much of the concept of diversity that is being presented in Latin America, far from vindicating equality, is a new parameter for creating the modern hegemonic bloc: the acculturated. The multiculturalist excesses from which the decolonial perspective is assumed in this attempt to construct a pure identitarianism, ignore the fact that inequality, while appearing to be white, heterosexual or foreign, is only a generic profile of a model that is no longer the only one. For decades, the decolonial perspective has focused on the subliminal "mere idioms" of majority cultures and not on the power of negative acculturation, which is no longer exercised on physical identities. But on the infrastructure of emancipatory thinking.

Decoloniality still privileges synchrony over diachrony. Physical space over the systemic of power. It prioritises coherence between symbolic elements rather than the analysis of how one way of thinking adapts over another. Colonisation and acculturation are distinct processes of appropriation. For these reasons, decoloniality should not only focus on "multiculturality", nor should it mean "multiculturalism". The logic of domination cannot only claim that we are captives. It cannot ignore that our cultures are dynamic and that hegemony has long been synonymous with acculturation. For more than 200 years we have ceased to be factional identities: indigenous, Afro, etc., none of these peoples are incapable of building a general will for change. No one can justify such an imposture. But even when emancipated, they are unequal and in some cases, following logics contrary to their own claims and demands. 

Atalayar_América Latina Colonización

The colonisation that had placed upon us a pre-civic status ceased to exist. However, the postcolonial overload with the figure of the "pure Latino", "unperforated pearl" and capable of protecting his identity as a "living fossil", ignores the fact that the inequality of this century is not interested in usurping socio-identity systems. Rather, with a morbid symptom, it pretends to go through thought with explanations that are producing "selective appropriations", which, although they do not deny citizenship, destroy the system of emancipatory thought. This is much worse. Decolonial epistemology remains myopic in relation to this perspective. It avoids the study and mention of negative acculturation and takes for granted that culturalist neolanguages are the only vindication. It pursues a centre of domination that for decades has not been located in European or Anglo-Saxon culture. Rather, it resides in large, delocalised political and economic powers, even among ourselves, but with the capacity to provoke dislocations, breaking points and dissent in order to do the same: to destroy emancipatory culture.

As Wellmer said, "no culture escapes acculturation processes". He was right. There are good processes of political acculturation. For example, in Colombia, the voluntary appropriation of Anglo-Saxon culture that we call "constitutionalist precedent" (Common Law) has been able to coexist with our legal system (Civil Law). And throughout Latin America, the selective appropriation of the Inter-American culture of rights protection as a complementary system to our constitutional traditions. However, the same does not happen with systems of political thought. These must be based on rational interpellation because they never start from common consensus. 

Atalayar_América Latina Colonización
By way of conclusion

In order to identify social marginalisation, we must break with the bad acculturation processes that are the mechanism of transplantation and continuation of inequality in this contemporary world. Likewise, it is necessary to renounce the obsession with colonisation. We have to put at the centre the historical epistemology, the genuine one, capable of showing us that, although two conceptual races go together, it does not mean that they have come from the same tree and that this is not progressive diversity either. We must understand that domination is no longer spatial but delocalised. Latin America must abandon the "ethnonationalism" that is the background music of the cultural relativism they call decoloniality. Because it only sharpens an epistemic myopia that prevents us from pointing out the Trojan horses that consume us from within. 

Atalayar_América Latina Colonización

Only from a robust egalitarian policy of distribution coupled with one of substantively inclusive recognition between cultures, can we build a true counter-hegemonic bloc that will take us beyond identitarianism. To a better world. Where the negative processes of acculturation are no longer the capture scheme of a society that, like ours, is trapped between progressivism, post-capitalism and identitarianism. We have apparently "decolonised ourselves from everything" except inequality. This is our peoples' irresolute cry for independence.

That is why, when it comes to selective appropriations to achieve change, we need to appeal to that Habermasian scale of interaction whose principles for achieving an "ideal speech situation" are: non-constraint, non-violence and seriousness. Where symmetry between participants in the dialogue must be the most relevant condition. Only through this good method, tested in societies with consolidated democracies, will we be able to make systems of thought coexist without the possibility of domination. Likewise, we must transcend the explanation and understand that everything that happens to us is of our own making. Because, although Europe and the United States continue to import acculturation processes, this is not colonisation. That one is over. It did leave wounds that need to be healed and overcome. However, today, we are living in a time of "selective appropriations", which, whether well or badly assumed, can move Latin America forward or backward. 

Luis Miguel Hoyos, Professor of Constitutional Law, Moral Philosophy and Politics.

Former National Deputy Director of the National Institute for the Deaf - INSOR (Colombia). Researcher in Economic Constitutional Law, Feminism and Constitutional Justice. Philosopher at Reina Valera College (USA). Lawyer from the Universidad del Norte (Colombia). Master (LL.M) in Law from Harvard University and Master in Constitutional Law from the Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales (Spain). Doctoral candidate (PhD) in Law at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Member of ATITLAN-CEPC (Madrid, Spain). In 2019, Visiting Research Professor at the Court of Justice of the European Union-TJUE (Luxembourg), the Instituto de Bienes y Políticas Públicas-IPP of the Government of Spain (Madrid) and the Instituto de Estudios de Género of the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Youth Leadership Award 2020 by the Washington Academy of Politics (USA).

*Part of the original research: "Critique of the Reason for Inequality in Latin America" (2021) by the same author.

More in Reports
PORTADA 

Una combinación de imágenes creadas el 9 de febrero de 2024 muestra a ucranianos fotografiados entre edificios y casas destruidos durante los dos años de la invasión rusa de Ucrania - PHOTO/AFP
In a post-pandemic scenario, Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a major offensive against Ukraine, bringing the first full-scale war since World War II to Europe

Mapping a failed invasion