Eduardo Galeano - Children of the Days - A Calendar of Human History

Rafuema told the story that the Huitotos were born from the words that told the story of their birth. And every time he told it, the Huitotos were born again.

Carlos and Gudrun Lenkersdorf were born and raised in Germany.

In the year 1973, these two illustrious professors arrived in Mexico. They entered the world of the Mayas in a Tojolabal community and they introduced themselves by saying, “We have come to learn.”

The Indians remained silent.

After a while, one of them explained the silence: “This is the first time anyone has told us that.”

And there they remained, Gudrun and Carlos, learning year after year.

From the Mayan language they learned that no hierarchy separates subject from object, because I drink the water that drinks me and I am watched by all that I watch. And they learned to greet people in the Maya way:

“I’m another you.”

“You’re another me.”

In the Andes, the Spanish conquistadors banished the indigenous gods and stamped out all idolatry.

But somewhere around the year 1560, the gods returned. They traveled on their long wings from who knows where, and they entered the bodies of their children from Ayacucho to Oruro, and inside those bodies they began to dance. The dances, which spelled rebellion, were punished with lash or noose, but the gods kept dancing on and on, announcing the end of all humiliation.

In the Quechua language the word ñaupa means “was,” but it also means “will be.”

In 1895 the Lumière brothers, Louis and Auguste, shot a very short film of workers leaving a factory in Lyon.

That movie, the first in history, was seen by a small circle of friends and no one else.

Not until December 28 did the Lumière brothers give it a public showing, along with nine more of their shorts, which also recorded fleeting moments from real life.

In the basement of the Grand Café in Paris, that marvelous spectacle, child of the magic lantern, the wheel of life and other arts of illusionists, had its premiere.

Full house. Thirty-five people at a franc a seat.

Georges Méliès was in the audience. He wanted to buy their movie camera. Since they wouldn’t sell it to him, he had to invent his own.

On March 20 in the year 2003, Iraq’s air force bombed the United States.

On the heels of the bombs, Iraqi troops invaded US soil.

There was collateral damage. Many civilians, most of them women and children, were killed or maimed. No one knows how many, because tradition dictates tabulating the losses suffered by invading troops and prohibits counting victims among the invaded population.

The war was inevitable. The security of Iraq and of all humanity was threatened by the weapons of mass destruction stockpiled in United States arsenals.

There was no basis, however, to the insidious rumors suggesting that Iraq intended to keep all the oil in Alaska.

In the entire history of human butchery, World War II was the war that killed the most people. But the accounting came up short.

Many soldiers from the colonies never appeared on the lists of the dead. They were Australian aborigines, Indians, Birmanians, Filipinos, Algerians, Senegalese, Vietnamese, and so many other black, brown and yellow people obliged to die for the flags of their masters.

When they are alive, people are ranked first, second, third or fourth class. When they are dead too.

We are made of water.

From water life bloomed. Rivers of water are the blood that nourishes the earth, and of water too are the cells that do our thinking, the tears that do our crying and the recollections that form our memory.

Memory tells us that today’s deserts were yesterday’s forests and that the dry world knew well enough to stay wet in those remote days when water and earth belonged to no one and to everyone.

Who took the water? The monkey that raised the club. If I remember correctly, that’s how the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey begins. The unarmed monkey, meanwhile, got clubbed to death.

Sometime later, in the year 2009, a space probe discovered water on the moon. The news sparked plans of conquest.

Sorry, moon.

With a well-aimed swipe, General Efraín Ríos Montt overthrew another general in the year 1982 and proclaimed himself president of Guatemala.

A year and a half later, the president, a pastor of the California-based Church of the Word, claimed victory in the holy war that exterminated four hundred and forty indigenous communities.

He said the feat would not have been possible without the assistance of the Holy Spirit, who commanded his intelligence services. Another important collaborator, his spiritual advisor Francisco Bianchi, explained to a correspondent of the New York Times:

“The guerrillas have many collaborators among the Indians. Those Indians are subversives, aren’t they? And how do you put an end to subversion? Obviously, you have to kill those Indians. And then people will say, ‘You are massacring innocents.’ But they are not innocent.”

On this day in the year 1976, the military dictatorship that would disappear thousands of Argentines was born.

Twenty years later, General Jorge Rafael Videla explained to a journalist, Guido Braslavsky:

“No, they could not be shot. Let’s pick a number, say five thousand. Argentine society would not have put up with so many executions, two yesterday in Buenos Aires, six today in Córdoba, four tomorrow in Rosario, and on and on until we reached five thousand. No, that would not have worked. Should we reveal where the remains lie? But in the sea, in the River Plate, in the Riachuelo, what could we possibly show? At one point, consideration was given to making the list public. But then we realized that as soon as they are declared dead there will be questions to which we cannot reply: who killed them, when, where, how. ”

On a day like today, more or less, the archangel Gabriel came down from heaven and the Virgin Mary learned that the child of God was living in her womb.

Relics of the Virgin are now worshipped in churches all over the world:

the shoes and slippers she wore,

her nightgowns and her dresses,

hairnets, diadems, combs,

veils and locks of hair,

traces of the milk that Jesus sucked

and her four wedding rings, even though she married only once.

On this night in 1936, Felipa Poot, a Maya Indian, was stoned to death in the town of Kinchil.

Dying with her under the hail of stones were three other women, also Mayas, who had fought at her side against sadness and fear.

They were killed by “the divine caste,” which is what those who owned the land and people of the Yucatán called themselves.

In the year 2010, the public relations firm Murray Hill Inc. told the politicians who claim to govern to stop play-acting.

A short while before, the United States Supreme Court had removed all limits on corporate donations to electoral campaigns; for a much longer while, the bribes legislators received from lobbyists had been legal.

Applying the same logic, Murray Hill Inc. launched its own candidacy for US Congress in the state of Maryland. It was high time to do away with intermediaries: