Portugal says no plans to pay colonial reparations – DW – 04/28/2024
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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.

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.

  • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    252·
    8 months ago

    That’s why wealth redistribution should be applied as indiscriminately as possible based on wealth, instead of discriminate cash payments based on cherry picked events that occurred more recently. Most people born into the rat race aren’t there because of their own failures, but because their lineage were historically screwed by the wealthy stretching back thousands of years, and everyones ancestors contributed to the current state of civilization, so rather than discriminate cash injections which create a new generation of people left behind and continue the imbalance, it should be focused on reducing the deviation from the mean and median both domestically, and internationally.

    Do you really believe that cash injections to developed economies will benefit the people instead of their domestic oligarchs?