AP European Students:

These documents give evidence and explanation saying that Columbus and the other European explorers are to be blamed for the millions of Natives who died after their arrival. Think about what they say and if you agree. What would your explorer have to say about it?

'There's nothing to celebrate. What they did here was massacre the indigenous people.' THE Current PRESIDENT OF VENEZUELA Hugo Chavez CONDEMNS COLUMBUS

By Stephen Ixer / The Associated Press

Caracas - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez paid tribute to indigenous peoples of the Americas on Sunday and said the arrival of Christopher Columbus sparked "the biggest genocide in history."

"There's nothing to celebrate," Chavez said. "What they did here was massacre the indigenous people."

Last year Chavez signed a decree changing the name of Venezuela's Oct. 12 Columbus Day to the Day of Indigenous Resistance.

On Sunday, he described how Spanish, Portuguese and English invaders slaughtered millions of native inhabitants. The indigenous population of the Americas plummeted from 100 million at the time of Columbus' arrival to just three million 150 years later, Chavez claimed.

"They executed an aboriginal every 10 minutes - the biggest genocide in registered in history," Chavez said during his weekly TV and radio program.

Chavez devoted most of the four-hour show to the plight of indigenous groups. Guests from Peru and Ecuador wearing traditional brightly coloured dresses praised Chavez for his defence of indigenous rights.

Chavez hooked up with a live broadcast of an international gathering of indigenous peoples being held in Caracas.

He also announced the creation of Mission Guaicaipuro to promote development among Venezuela's indigenous groups. The project - named for an Indian chief in Venezuela who fought the Spaniards - will include demarcation of aboriginal lands and offer cheap credit to indigenous people.

There are approximately 350,000 indigenous peoples from 28 distinct ethnic groups in this country of 24 million. Most Venezuelans are considered to be "meztizo," a mix of Spanish, African, and native indigenous bloodlines. Columbus first stepped on South American soil Oct. 12, 1498 in what is now the town of Macuro, located some 500 kilometres east of Caracas, the capital city.

Examining the Reputation of Columbus

An Essay by Jack Weatherford - Baltimore Sun, October 6, 1989

Christopher Columbus' reputation has not survived the scrutiny of history, and today we know that he was no more the discoverer of America than Pocahontas was the discoverer of Great Britain. Native Americans had built great civilizations with many millions of people long before Columbus wandered lost into the Caribbean.

Contrary to popular legend, Columbus did not prove that the world was round; educated people had known that for centuries. The Egyptian-Greek scientist Erastosthenes, working for Alexandria and Aswan, already had measured the circumference and diameter of the world in the third century B.C. Arab scientists had developed a whole discipline of geography and measurement, and in the tenth century A.D., Al Maqdisi described the earth with 360 degrees of longitude and 180 degrees of latitude. The Monastery of St. Catherine in the Sinai still has an icon — painted 500 years before Columbus — which shows Jesus ruling over a spherical earth. Nevertheless, Americans have embroidered many such legends around Columbus, and he has become part of a secular mythology for schoolchildren. Autumn would hardly be complete in U.S. elementary schools without construction-paper replicas of the three ships that Columbus sailed to America.

After he failed to contact the emperor of China, the traders of India, or the merchants of Japan, Columbus decided to pay for his voyage in the one important commodity he had found in ample supply — human lives. He seized 1,200 Taino Indians from the island of Hispaniola, crammed as many onto his ships as would fit, and sent them to Spain, where they were paraded naked through the streets of Seville and sold as slaves in 1495. Columbus tore children from their parents, husbands from wives. On board Columbus' slave ships, hundreds died; the sailors tossed the Indian bodies into the Atlantic.

Because Columbus captured more Indian slaves than he could transport to Spain in his small ships, he put them to work in mines and plantations which he, his family, and followers created throughout the Caribbean. His marauding band hunted Indians for sport and profit — beating, raping, torturing, killing, and then using the Indian bodies as food for their hunting dogs. Within four years of Columbus' arrival on Hispaniola, his men had killed or exported one-third of the original Indian population of 300,000.

This was the great cultural encounter initiated by Christopher Columbus. This is the event celebrated each year on Columbus Day. The United States honors only two men with federal holidays bearing their names. In January we commemorate the birth of Martin Luther King, Jr., who struggled to lift the blinders of racial prejudice and to cut the remaining bonds of slavery in America. In October, we honor Christopher Columbus, who opened the Atlantic slave trade and launched one of the greatest waves of genocide known in history.

"We shall take you and your wives, and your children, and shall make slaves of them, and we shall take away your goods, and shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can, and we protest that the deaths and losses which shall accrue from this are your fault ." - Christopher Columbus

Christopher Columbus, you see, was a slave trader, a gold digger, a missionary, and even a war profiteer in the name of Ferdinand and Isabella. The arrival of Columbus's small fleet on what is now San Salvador (that's Spanish for "Holy Savior") was greeted by the "decorous and praiseworthy" Taino Indians (Columbus's words) and was followed almost immediately by mass enslavement, amputation for sport, and a genocide that claimed over four million people in four years. That's quite a saving.

His arrival also marked the beginning of 500 years of imperialism, enslavement, disease, genocide, and a legacy of impoverishment and discrimination that our nation is only beginning to come to terms with. Today American Indians lack adequate healthcare and housing, receive pitiful education, face daunting barriers to economic opportunity, and see their lands (that would be the whole of the continent) overrun with pollution and big business.