Portugal: A long-delayed reckoning over reparations
What does Portugal owe the countries it colonized and plundered? asked Leonor Rosas and João Moreira da Silva in Público. Centuries after our heyday as a world power, that unexpected question has been thrust onto the national agenda by “an even more unexpected actor”—the president, whose post is largely ceremonial. Over the past few weeks, President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa has repeatedly said that Portugal must “pay the costs” of its past crimes, which included slavery and colonization. It should open a dialogue with former colonies, he said, and raise the issues of financial compensation and the return of looted artifacts. The right-wing government of Prime Minister Luís Montenegro immediately denounced the idea, saying “history is history” and the past does not “require penance.” But Rebelo de Sousa is right. Other colonizers, including the Netherlands, Germany, and France, have long since begun discussing their responsibilities for their colonial crimes. “It’s our turn.” The first step could be simply to open the dialogue: Set up a colonialism truth commission to determine what sins were committed and what kinds of restitution could be made.
There’s plenty to apologize for, said Luís Delgado in Visão. I am, “like everyone else, immensely proud” of most of Portugal’s history, but we can’t deny that some of it was “reprehensible.” Over some 400 years, Portugal kidnapped, transported, and enslaved more than 6 million Africans and all but wiped out Indigenous Brazilians. “With wisdom, serenity, and openness, we must now hand over what does not belong to us.” In fact, Portugal has been quietly making amends for decades, said Duarte Marques in Expresso. In recognition of a historic “responsibility,” we send the bulk of our state foreign aid and private foreign development investment to former African colonies Angola, Mozambique, Guinea, Cape Verde, and São Tomé and Principe. Yet this isn’t a one-way street: Angolan businessmen, rich with oil wealth, have bought up Portuguese newspapers, real estate, and sports teams. The result is mutual “sympathy” between Portugal and the peoples it once colonized. We cheer their football teams, and they cheer ours. It is a “relationship of blood, of brothers.”
For Brazil, where I live as a foreign correspondent for this newspaper, the issue is more complicated, said João Almeida Moreira in Diário de Notícias. Brazil is “a giant, with tremendous potential,” largely because Portugal didn’t carve it up into smaller colonies but did bequeath it “all the benefits of having developed the land.” At this point, Brazil’s economy is more than 10 times the size of Portugal’s, even if the Portuguese GDP per capita is bigger—why should Brazil get anything from Portugal? Plenty of Portuguese politicians and pundits have also been pointing out that slavery wasn’t just Portugal’s sin, but Brazil’s, said Malu Fontes in Metro 1 (Brazil). After Brazil became independent in 1822, it “multiplied human trafficking many times over” for another six decades, becoming the “world champion in importing slave labor.” Black and Indigenous Brazilians may have a right to demand reparations—but from white Brazilians descended from the Portuguese, not from Portugal.