Chavez Supporters Pull Down Statue of Columbus
CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) – Supporters of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez celebrated Columbus Day on Tuesday by toppling a statue in Caracas of the explorer whom Chavez blames for ushering in a “genocide” of native Indians.
Police firing tear gas later recovered parts of the broken bronze image, which was dragged by the protesters to a theater where the Venezuelan leader was due to speak.
Two years ago, Chavez rechristened the Oct. 12 holiday — commemorated widely in the Americas to mark Christopher Columbus’ 1492 landing in the New World — “Indian Resistance Day.”
The new name honored Indians killed by Spanish and other foreign conquerors following in the wake of the Italian-born Columbus who sailed in the service of the Spanish crown.
As the left-wing nationalist president led celebrations on Tuesday to honor Indian chiefs who resisted the Spanish conquest, a group of his supporters conducted a mock trial of a statue of Columbus in central Caracas.
They declared the image guilty of “imperialist genocide,” looped ropes around its outstretched arm and neck and heaved it down from its marble base. No police or other authorities intervened as the protesters drove off in a truck yelling, “We’ve killed Columbus!”
“This isn’t a historical heritage. … Columbus is the symbol of a conquest that was a globalization by blood and fire, a cultural massacre,” said Vitelio Herrera, a philosophy student at Venezuela’s Central University.
Outside the Teresa Carreno theater, the protesters hung the statue from a tree and then let it fall to the ground. Police arrested several of them.
Chavez has called Latin America’s Spanish and Portuguese conquerors “worse than Hitler” and the precursors of modern-day “imperialism” he says is now embodied by the United States, the biggest buyer of his country’s oil.
The base of the toppled statue was daubed with slogans such as “Columbus – Bush. Out!”