Los valores de igualdad y libertad con los que Simón Bolívar fundó en 1825 Bolívar —poco después, Bolivia— se vinieron pronto abajo. Con la idea de romper cualquier lazo con la colonia, el libertador abolió el imperante sistema de castas y el tributo a los indígenas. Pero la utopía duró poco: el país nació en quiebra por la larga guerra de la independencia y se restableció el impuesto indigenal para sostener a la nación. Este y otros agravios postergaron los derechos ciudadanos de los nativos. Así lo sentencia el fallecido historiador Ramiro Condarco en su libro recientemente reeditado Zárate, el temible Willka. Historia de la rebelión indígena de 1899 (1965).

CIA whistleblower John Stockwell died this month in Texas at the age of 88. Few people have had as much impact on FAIR and our determination to bring to light the underreported realities of US foreign policy.

Stockwell joined the CIA in 1964, and in the course of his career was chief of base in the breakaway Katanga province of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), the officer in charge of Vietnam’s Tay Ninh province (the area between Saigon and Cambodia), and chief of the Angola task force, running the secret war against that country’s first post-colonial government.

The United States holds hundreds of governments in subordination. Not historically. Today. It dominates these governments and their peoples, exploits their resources, prohibits political independence, withholds representation, and imposes its own laws, values, and norms upon these governments without consent. Mere decades ago, the United States forcefully sterilized citizens of these nations3 and removed a quarter or more of Native children from their families.4 At the same time, the Supreme Court stripped these governments of the ability to police crimes in their own communities,5 unleashing widespread sexual violence and leaving more than one in three Native women vulnerable to rape.6 Just over a hundred years ago, the United States invaded these nations and held them under decades of martial law before unilaterally appointing civil governments.7 It ran detention camps on the lands of these governments8 and forced their children into boarding schools that promised to “[k]ill the Indian in [them], and save the man.”9 Federal agents beat Native children in such schools for speaking Native languages,10 held them in unsanitary conditions,11 and forced them into manual and dangerous forms of labor.12 Thousands died.13 Federal law also criminalized political and spiritual practices14 and outlawed traditional marriage and family structures.15 In the last two hundred years, the United States has engaged in campaigns of mass execution16 and slaughter against citizens of these governments to a level that many have called genocide.17

he General Commission on Religion and Race (GCORR) shares this powerful and necessary statement from the Native American International Caucus (NAIC) of The United Methodist Church as a public act of solidarity, truth-telling, and commitment to equity and justice.

As GCORR is charged with challenging, leading, and equipping the Church to become more interculturally competent, to embody institutional equity, and to engage in vital conversations about race, culture, and power, this includes listening deeply to the voices of Indigenous communities and acknowledging how systemic erasure, dehumanization, and exclusion continue to impact Native peoples—within our denomination and beyond.

We invite all United Methodists to read, reflect, and engage with this statement with humility, openness, and a willingness to be transformed by the witness of Native peoples who continue to say, “We are still here.”