Since the news media in the U.S. pretends that the rest of the world either doesn't exist, or doesn't matter, political movements in this country rarely consider anything beyond our borders. It's easy to think that the rest of the world feels the same about whatever is going on in the U.S.
The reality is that most people in other nations are more tuned in to what is happening on this planet than the typical American. That's a good thing.
Because considering the brutal way that the Black Lives Matters protests were crushed last year, you could be forgiven for thinking that people in Latin America would be as indifferent to those protests as our ruling class is.

Fortunately that isn't true. Not only were the hundreds of millions of people in Latin America following the protests closely, they decided to copy them.
Unlike most places, Black Lives Matter came to Brazil years ago. In fact, during the 2016 Olympics they had a BLM protest.

Organized by a group of six activists associated with the U.S.-based movement, Saturday’s march included about 200 Brazilian activists and a ceremony at Candelaria cathedral, the infamous site of a 1993 massacre in which a death squad, including off-duty policemen, killed eight children and adolescents who slept on the church steps.

You may be asking, "why did Brazil BLM catch on so early?"

On May 25, the death of George Floyd in the United States sent shockwaves internationally. That same week, in Rio de Janeiro, 14-year-old João Pedro was shot dead by police – with few repercussions. In Brazil, where 56 percent of the population is Black, compared to 13 percent in the US, racism is deeply rooted in society. Brazilian police, understood to be some of the most violent in the world, kill 17 times more Black people than American officers. Miles from Minneapolis, a Brazilian Black Lives Matter movement is gaining momentum. Our correspondents report.

Although the issue of race helped successive Brazilian governments win votes at the turn of the 21st century, the Black population in Brazil is now witnessing a setback. The country, which has the world's second-largest Black community, is now run by an openly racist president. During his presidential campaign in 2018, Jair Bolsonaro declared descendants of slaves "good for nothing, not even to procreate", while using the slogan "my colour is Brazil".

Essentially, in virtually every meaningful way, the black community in Brazil has it worse.
In 2020, BLM didn't just get more popular in the U.S., it got more popular internationally too.

The campaign to remove Confederate statues and other symbols of white supremacy in the United States is resonating in Latin America, where protesters have destroyed monuments to European colonizers who brutalized Indigenous populations.

The latest target was a statue of Sebastián de Belalcázar, a Spanish conquistador. He founded the Colombian cities of Popayán and Cali in 1537, while leading a military campaign that killed and enslaved of thousands of Misak Indigenous people.

After authorities foiled two previous attempts to remove the statue, located on the outskirts of Popayán, Misak leaders sent decoy protesters into the center of the city on Sept. 16, drawing police attention. Meanwhile, a smaller group of Misak approached the monument, used ropes to pull down it down, then pounded it with rocks, separating the head from the torso.

A few days later, protesters destroyed a statue of another conquistador, Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, who founded the city in 1638.
It didn't stop in Colombia. About 60 statues in Chile were damaged or destroyed during the protests in 2019. This continues to 2021, the statue of General Manuel Baquedano Gonzalez was drenched in blood-red paint and set on fire.
In Mexico, the statue of Christopher Columbus on a main avenue was taken down because it was repeatedly vandalized (will be reinstalled in a park in an upscale Mexico City neighborhood).

Now you may think that this isn't very important, but you would be wrong.
To give you an idea, before the statue of Sebastián de Belalcázar was destroyed, he was put on trial.

A written statement signed by ‘the descendants of the Pubenenses’ was published after the trial: ‘We declare that the statue erected in the 1930s […] when the city of Popayán commemorated the 400th anniversary of the defeat of our peoples under the genocidal Spanish yoke, is part of the symbolic violence which crushed us and put us in a place of oblivion.’

This is where the U.S. could really learn something from Latin America. The statue was symbolic. It's destruction needs to be symbolic too, as does the legal and moral justification for its destruction.
Rather than just the mute destruction of a piece of metal, that can be interpreted in more than one way, taking the extra effort to make the reason for the statue's destruction perfectly clear, seems to be more than worth the effort.
Let me give you another example from Chile.

In the city of Concepción – which Valdivia found in 1550 – a crowd toppled another bust of the Spanish coloniser, impaled it on a spike, and barbecued it at the feet of a statue of his historical nemesis, the Mapuche chieftain Lautaro.
In the nearby town of Collipulli, a bronze of General Cornelio Saavedra – notorious for leading the bloody 19th-century “pacification” of the Mapuche heartland – suffered a similar fate.

Most dramatically of all, a statue in Temuco of the Chilean military aviator Dagoberto Godoy (1893-1960) was decapitated, and his head hung from the arm of a statue of the Mapuche warrior Caupolicán – now also holding the Mapuche flag, or Wenufoye.

Like in the United States, people in Latin America are rethinking colonialism and our past.