Cristián Rodrigo Iturralde is a historian, writer, and lecturer. He specialises in history, philosophy of history, and Western politics, and his main areas of interest include the history of Spain and the Catholic Church, the New Right and cultural Marxism. He is the author of nine books, including 1492. The End of Barbarism. The Beginning of Civilisation in America and The Inquisition: Myth or Reality? which have been translated and published in different parts of the world. He has received several awards in Argentina and Mexico, and in 2016 the Library of Congress of the United States acquired his works and added them to its catalogue. We spoke about his latest book Pueblos imaginarios. El libro negro del indigenismo (Imaginary Peoples. The black book of indigenism), published in September 2024.
A few weeks ago, the Día de la Hispanidad (Columbus Day) was celebrated on 12 October and, as usual, there was talk of “celebrating genocide” or that “Spain must ask for forgiveness,” as the president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, has done. Does it seem that many people still believe in this narrative?
There is a lot of opportunism, but this narrative is still going strong and many people believe in indigenism. What is this narrative? Basically, good Indians and bad Spaniards: the Spanish occupied land that did not belong to them and did all sorts of wrong things. This narrative is believed by many people and has political implications, because all the demands of indigenism, which is totally monopolised by the Left, are accepted in order to compensate for this historical mistreatment. And then there is the rise of radical indigenism, especially in Argentina and Chile, in the region of Patagonia, where there are armed movements that carry out acts that we can describe as terrorist. This radical indigenism was born in the 1970s by Fausto Reinaga, a Bolivian intellectual who reversed the original indigenism of the early 20th century, which defended indigenous culture but sought assimilation. From the 1970s onwards, indigenism moved towards a more radical discourse that opposed assimilation and spoke of exterminating the white man.
In the 1930s, there was already a Marxist current that took up the indigenist discourse in the sense of ‘oppressor and oppressed,’ so this discourse was almost a century old.
Yes, with José Carlos Mariátegui, founder of the Peruvian Communist Party, who was the first to see the continent’s indigenous people as a revolutionary subject, replacing the class struggle with the struggle of the races. This caused unease in Soviet communism, which demanded extreme obedience from the other communist parties, and was the beginning of what we could call à la carte socialism. Mariátegui and others I quote in the book criticise the Hispanic period, but there is no radicalism of the kind seen from the 1970s onwards. There is even a certain recognition of the Hispanic period as opposed to the independence period, and they recognise that the indigenous people lived better with Spain than after the arrival of the ‘liberators.’
Indigenism in the 1970s was strengthened by its links with various terrorist groups. With the defeat or disappearance of these groups, is it Chavismo that is taking up that banner?
There is a quote from Hugo Chávez in the mid-1990s, in which he says that the indigenous will be the vehicle for the construction of socialism on the continent. But before Chávez, indigenism was already being promoted by the Sao Paulo Forum in 1992. The Left, forced to rethink itself after the fall of the Berlin Wall, is looking for new revolutionary subjects: feminism, LGBT, gender ideology, etc. The indigenous is the revolutionary subject par excellence chosen for the American continent, an artificial conflict created by a completely false narrative with the aim of undermining the foundations of the culture it wants to destroy, that is, Western Christian culture. By idealising the indigenous and criminalising the European, the identity of the Americans is attacked.
This false narrative is built around myths. Could you name some of the most common ones?
I quote ten in the book, but I would like to highlight the following three. The first is the myth of the ‘original Indian,’ which would give him the power to decide everything that happens on the continent. But it has been scientifically proven that there is no original Indian on the continent; the Indians arrived before the Europeans. The Indians did not even occupy the entire territory, and when the Spanish arrived, they knew only a tiny part of the continent; it was the Spanish who travelled through and discovered the territory, populated it, and built its infrastructure.
The second great myth is that it was a conquest, whereas for the indigenous peoples, as many of them claim in their historical accounts, it was a liberation. There were five million people in Mesoamerica, so how could a few hundred Spaniards take over this territory? Because many indigenous people were fed up with Aztec oppression and made common cause with the Spaniards. In contrast to what had happened before, Spain incorporated the Indians into its empire, and in two generations you had Indians studying in the metropolis: they were teachers, priests, intendants, governors, and so on. Faced with this fact, people try to explain the victory by the technological superiority of their weapons, but we know that this is absurd and the truth is that 98% of the Spanish armies were made up of Indians.
Finally, there is the myth of genocide. This too has been disproved many times, as 99% of deaths from contact with the Spanish were due to smallpox and other diseases against which the Indians had no defence. However, this was not new in Mesoamerica, and there were demographic hecatombs before the Spanish arrived, as shown by the indigenous codices themselves and by anthropological research; this is even confirmed by Marxist anthropologists, whom I quote because I prefer to use sources that are not favourable to the Spanish. Many Europeans also died of indigenous diseases.
The government of Javier Milei has released a video celebrating Columbus Day. Something seems to be changing.
Yes, this is the first time in the last eighty years that an Argentine government has recognised Columbus Day. This is a question of identity, and what we have before us is a big lie. For example, the name that has been used in Argentina to replace Columbus Day is the ‘Day of Cultural Diversity,’ although there has been no greater enemy of cultural diversity and tolerance than the indigenous people themselves, who have waged constant wars for racial and religious reasons. There is no greater incoherence than to see LGBT and feminist banners defending ancestral cultures. In the book, I quote feminist and Marxist authors who claim that women have never been more trampled and mistreated than in these cultures. Obviously what unites all these banners is the common enemy, but it is necessary to point out all these inconsistencies to the unwary who are deceived by these ideas.
It is also important to dismantle the narrative of indigenous victimhood. At the moment, the only privileged group are the indigenous because, just by being indigenous, they have the right to own the best land, to rent it, and even to sell it; and they have tax exemptions and receive structural subsidies. The real losers are the whites and the mestizos, not the indigenous.
In your book you talk about ‘plurinationalism,’ a term that recalls the plurinational Spain that the Left and separatism want. What does this term mean in Hispanic America, and how far has it spread?
I think one of the most accurate descriptions is that indigenism, as a product of 21st century socialism, has managed to introduce the question of separatism in an open way. There is a Bolivian intellectual, Alvaro García Linera, the vice president under Evo Morales, who says that indigenism has two strategic ways of taking power: violent and constitutional. In the latter, the figure of plurinationalism appears, as it does in the Bolivian and Ecuadorian constitutions. What does plurinationalism mean? Previously there was the idea of interculturalism, which recognised the existence of different ethnic groups and the equality of all of them before the law; but plurinationalism gives all the indigenous cultures recognised in each country the same powers as the national state. For example, there are twenty in Argentina, ten in Chile, and more than forty in Bolivia. Basically, it is separatism in fact and in law, and a plurinational nation is an absurdity, an oxymoron, because it means splitting the state into ten, twenty, or forty parts.
The current aim of indigenism is to introduce plurinationalism into national constitutions with the support of the UN, which seeks recognition of indigenous peoples as states within nation-states. In short, plurinationalism is a prelude to separatism and the fracturing of the continent’s nations.
To what end?
To ensure that the Left, the socialism of the 21st century, has a force with which to overthrow any conservative or right-wing government that confronts it. It is a kind of Trojan horse, financed from Venezuela and promoted by figures like Nicolas Maduro and Evo Morales.
A Trojan horse of the Sao Paulo Forum?
Yes, and also of international socialism, because you find foundations that support indigenism in England and Holland, foundations directed by Marxists, and the same happens with prestigious European and American universities that are now centres of indoctrination. Indigenism serves socialism. Then other actors have appeared, such as radical Islam, with whom alliances are made against the common enemy: Western civilisation.
