WHAT IS HISTORICAL DEBT?

Eco Debt means calling in the historical debt that the industrialized countries from the North have with the Third World arising from the former’s plunder, destruction and devastation of the latter countries during their invasion, conquest and subsequent colonization.

Throughout the colonial period, the European countries appropriated minerals such as gold, silver, precious stones, fine timber and genetic resources pillaged from the American colonies. Not content with obliging the local population to pay tithes, their European conquerors also imposed upon them an economic model, based on extraction and production, to fuel the European economy and subsequently buttress the industrial revolution.

The price paid by the native population was slavery and death. When the Spanish conquerors first arrived on the shores of the Americas, an estimated 70 million people lived on the continent. Within 150 years, that number had been reduced to 3½ million. It has also been calculated that the slave traders seized approximately 70 million people to work as slaves, but only 10 million arrived in the Americas. It was a conquest founded on violence and domination, with no respect for life: the imposition of one culture upon others, by disregarding, subjecting or eliminating established traditions. A period of devastation and genocide for which no one was held to account.