The reported mass hysterectomies on migrant women in an ICE detention camp in the U.S. point to a long and dark history of forced sterilizations of the oppressed and marginalized.
Here are some of the other instances white racists in the U.S. drove through genocidal policies via the reproductive organs of people of color:
- From 1930 to 1970, one-third of the women in Puerto Rico were sterilized through the programs designed by the Eugenics Board of the United States, to "catalyze economic growth" and respond to the "depression-era unemployment."
- By 1939, around 30,000 sterilizations were performed in the U.S., over 50% in California, mainly on Latina and Asian women.
- Between 1929 and 1974, North Carolina's eugenics program allegedly forced sterilizations of nearly 7,600 men and women, the majority of them were African-Americans.
- In the 1970s, at least "25% of Native American women of childbearing age" were sterilized.
- Famous civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, underwent a hysterectomy without her consent in 1961 while on a minor surgery to remove a tumor. She spoke about her sterilization to bring consciousness on the subject of forced sterilizations.
- Forced sterilizations have also been particularly prevalent in countries where the U.S. has backed right-wing military regimes like in Latin America, many financed through population control plans by the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala and Peru are some examples where forced sterilizations have taken place, especially on poor and Indigenous populations.
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This week would've marked the 73rd birthday of Burkinabé socialist revolutionary Thomas Sankara. He became the President of Burkina Faso at the age of 33. lasting only 4 years, because he was killed in a military coup, suspected to have had support from the US and France.🧵
Sankara gained the love of his people because of his humble lifestyle, socialist programmes & economic prosperity, but also his confrontation with the national elite, as he stripped power away from them and for challenging Western imperialism and neo-colonialism in the continent.
In those 4 short years he:
• Lowered his salary to $450 a month, limited his possessions to a car, 4 bikes, 3 guitars, a fridge and a broken freezer.
• Sold off the government fleet of Mercedes cars & made the cheapest car in Burkina Faso the official service car.
The Dutch Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, has apologized for slavery and pledged €227 million for "awareness raising" and a slavery museum. The sum is nowhere near the €50 billion in reparations campaigners demand from the Netherlands to address the legacy of the slave trade. 🧵
Adequate reparations are vital to address the modern legacy of the Dutch Transatlantic Slave Trade. The Netherlands’ wealth today is drenched in the blood of enslaved people in its former colonies in West Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.
Over 600,000 enslaved people produced super profits on Dutch sugar, coffee, cocoa, tobacco and cotton plantations. The wealth of institutions that still exist, like the royal family and the Dutch Central Bank, was born on those plantations.
Today marks the anniversary of one of the worst massacres in modern Latin American history, the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador committed by a right-wing US-trained death squad.
The soldiers killed 1,000 people, almost the entire village of El Mozote. 🧵
The majority of the victims were women, children and the elderly. Soldiers separated the men from the women and children, then they tortured and executed the men in several locations.
The soldiers separated women and older girls from the children, raped them and then executed them with machine guns. Girls as young as 10 were raped. They slit the throats of the children, hanged them from trees & after killing almost the entire population, set the homes on fire.
On #HumanRightsDay, here are a mere handful of atrocities committed by the U.S. in recent memory, for which the victims still have no sight of justice. 🧵
In March 2019, U.S. drones bombed a crowd of civilians in Baghuz, Syria. The drone operators in Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar recognized the crowd of civilians but dropped the bombs anyway, killing over 70 civilians in what was the worst civilian death toll in the war against ISIS.
In 2008, a U.S. airstrike massacred at least 47 civilians, including 39 women & children, who were escorting a bride to her wedding in Haska Meyna, Afghanistan. The bride of the wedding was also killed in the strike. Weeks later, another US attack killed 90 civilians in Azizabad.
On this day in 1984, thousands of people in Bhopal, India, were gassed to death in the pesticide plant of U.S. company Union Carbide (UCC) It remains the worst corporate massacre in history and the victims are still fighting for justice. 🧵
During the night of December 3, 1984, the leakage of 27 tons of toxic chemicals turned the UCC plant in Bhopal into a gas chamber. 3,800 people died instantly, and until today over 22,000 have died due to injuries from the leak. The disaster was entirely preventable.
In its drive to maximize profits, UCC, today owned by Dow – one of the largest chemical producers in the world – cut safety corners and built the plant using untested technology. Aware of the dangers, it wrote them off as an acceptable “business risk”.