Although Chavismo did not invent Hispanophobia, it has always promoted the Black Legend against Spain in particular and against the Hispanic world of America in general as a political weapon, especially when things are going so badly that they cannot escape the media spotlight.
By “Black Legend” we mean the dark and negative propagandistic narrative that looms over Spain in particular and Hispanic people in general, that is, an image of backwardness, intolerance, pessimism; and even with certain racist touches, since the Spanish are not “pure Europeans.”
The term “Black Legend” was coined by the Spanish intellectuals Emilia Pardo Bazán and Julián Juderías and represents a reality insofar as these prejudices that distort our history and our culture are not based on reality, but on propaganda, which in its day was a weapon wielded by the rival powers of the Spanish Monarchy.
However, in our time Spain is not exactly a great power and those who most use this false and unjust narrative are the Hispanics themselves, starting with Spain itself.
The Spanish Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun (grandson of a Falangist, by the way), speaks of “decolonizing museums.” But he is not the only one, nor the first. Whether the Popular Party or the Socialists have governed, especially through diplomacy, Spain has encouraged, if not directly financed, the discourse against our history and our culture.
By the way: There is no record of Urtasun holding France accountable for the brutal plundering that Spain suffered as a result of the Napoleonic invasion; crimes that were never paid for and for which not even a meager apology was made.
The grotesque figures we saw in Chavez and see in Maduro, in the president of Mexico known as AMLO (who has Spanish blood, like Diosdado Cabello), Sheinbaum (with an “Aztec” surname and pure as can be… include a touch of irony here even if it cannot be felt in writing), Correa (descendant of royalists) and so many others, are nothing more than the product of the Sao Paulo Forum, the same one that Fidel Castro and Lula founded in their day to recycle the left in light of the fall of the Soviet Union.
There are naive people who say that Fidel Castro once had a “Hispanic” speech, when the truth is that the tyrant whose regime continues to oppress Cuba was capable of saying one thing and its opposite in those soporific speeches.
And there are also naive people who say that “at least this left will not bring us the progressive”, when the reality is that the entire “woke” agenda has spread across the continent thanks to Castro-Chavism for the greater glory of the caviar left that rejoices from Canada and the United States to Europe.
As Emilio Acosta rightly states, “every time there is a political conflict between the Venezuelan regime and the Spanish government, the first thing the Chavistas do is attack the Spanish government by using the anti-Spanish black legend, but this is not new and has been going on for years… let us remember that incident between Hugo Chavez and King Juan Carlos I at the Ibero-American summit and the famous “Why don’t you shut up?” of the Spanish monarch. From there they attacked the Spanish royal house, calling them genocidal. Now recently and due to the exile of Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia in Spain and the recognition of him as president-elect of Venezuela by the Spanish parliament and the European Community, the use of the black legend to attack Spain has resurfaced on the side of Chavismo.”
And it is part of the agenda of these tyrants who oppress their people and who seem more like organized crime bosses than politicians to spit on their own history and their own blood. Of course… when it suits them to claim their Spanish blood; something in which Maduro imitates Fidel Castro. By the way, a Fidel who always despised Chavez and took advantage of his superstitions and illiteracy to dominate him and plunder Venezuela at will.
The truth is that at the beginning of the 19th century, Spanish America was much richer than the newly independent Thirteen Colonies. Our America was neither poor nor uneducated, even though the black-legendary myths insist on that.
Except that the United States followed a very different path, among other aspects, because it always had a very clear idea of territorial expansion and unity, as well as a strong idea of property.
And in the Hispanic world we went in the opposite direction, dividing territories that were united, leaving European Spain isolated in the far west and a divided and indebted Hispanic American continent for the benefit of powers that were lurking like vultures.
And Spain is now just another piece in the ideological machinery of the Sao Paulo Forum, one of the most brutal forms of ideological imperialism; fomenting separatism in Spain and indigenism in America, movements that do not cease to share a relationship based on hatred, but hatred of themselves, in the end; which causes a real social schizophrenia on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Black Legend is not “just against Spain”; it is propaganda that seeks to destroy our culture and our values, everything that unites us, starting with a language that since the 18th century has been more American than properly European.
They want to deprive us of the great deal of Spain in America and the great deal of America in Spain, of that magnificent cultural fusion that is still alive and kicking, and that was a practical and real Atlanticism, as the Quito historian Francisco Núñez del Arco recalls; just as it was the civilization that united the Mediterranean, the Atlantic and the Pacific and that is the essence of the West.
We could be a fantastic and decisive geopolitical bloc, but the more uprooted and unaware of what unites us, the more easily tyrannies will prevail.
Thus, Chavismo and its minions will continue to use Hispanophobia as a political weapon. They have a very clear agenda. The question is whether those of us who oppose this wave of (self)destruction have it. And to do so, it is essential to wage the cultural battle, because there will be no real political victory as long as the “world of culture” continues to be dominated by the same people as always in its multiple facets.
PS: Speaking of conquests, colonizations and pardons, the descendants of Phoenicians/Punics, Greeks, Romans, Germans (Goths, Suevi, Vandals…), Alans, Arabs, Berbers, Vikings, English and French, among others, can now march on their knees through Spain.
Antonio Moreno Ruiz Nacido en Bollullos de la Mitación (Sevilla, España), en 1981. Historiador licenciado por la Universidad de Sevilla, con máster en Educación Secundaria y especializado en Historia de América. Comunicador y escritor. Amplia experiencia en periodismo, así como en docencia, traducción y proyectos de formación académica y cultural. *Co-fundador de la página “Spanish Heritage”
