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The most brutal cases of genocide that have shocked the world in recent times were examined by nearly two hundred specialists from all continents, who met in more than forty panels in Los Angeles, California from June 23 to 26.
At the opening of the event, Kimberley Morales Johnson, a member of the Tongva indigenous people, revisited the wars of extermination against her people, ancestral owners of the territory on which the current city of Los Angeles was founded.
Research was presented on the Jewish Holocaust, and the cases of Cambodia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, with the partition of countries such as: India, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Rwanda, Namibia, Congo, Armenia, the former Yugoslavia, Yanomami indigenous people in Brazil, migrants to the United States, missing persons and indigenous people harassed by oil and mining companies in the southern cone of Latin America, including the Yanomami on the Brazil-Venezuela border.
In her keynote address, Marcia Esparza addressed the case of Guatemala and the disastrous consequences of the 1954 intervention from which state terrorism arose.
Cakchiquel expert Lolmay Pedro García Matzar and Brigittine French spoke about the need to use the native language when collecting testimonies about the genocide in Mayan lands.
At the closing of the event, Camilla Boisen spoke of the “moral horror” represented by the current genocide against the Palestinian people, and the way in which the Israeli occupation forces use the arguments of “natural law” and “just war” invoked more than 500 years ago by Spanish theologians to legitimize the extermination of the American Indians.
In the closing lecture, Shibley Telhami lamented that more than 80 percent of American specialists in the history of Palestine-Israel relations have chosen the path of self-censorship.
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