I am also grateful for the gift of repentance. This is not easy to come by. I am not sure about other faiths but it is a central tenant to being a Christian. Repentance comes from acknowledging that we have done wrong, have wronged others, have wronged ourselves, have gone in the wrong direction. It isn't so much an act of lamentation and grief so much as an intentional turning our lives around, changing direction, choosing the good, the right way. It means that we want to have good and transparent relations with God, with our neighbour (even the person sharing your bus seat is your neighbour), our dear ones and with the world, which includes strangers on the street, people in other countries, and the natural environment of our Mama Tierra, or Mother Earth.
Whenever others have somehow suffered due to our actions or neglect there remains an imbalance in the relationship until repentance is expressed and enacted. It isn't simply incumbent upon the injured party to forgive (this is still part of the equation), but equally so that the offender recognize and acknowledge their wrongdoing, admit this to the hurt party, express sorrow and regret, and do everything in their power to make reparation.
This is equally so between nations as between individuals, between employers and employees as between occupying powers and indigenous peoples. These things do not happen very often. There was a time, till very recently in our human history, that these things never happened at all. Indeed, the Turkish government still refuses to acknowledge the genocide their troops committed against the Armenian people in 1917; the Japanese government still refuses to accept responsibility for the rape of Nanking, the bombing of Pearl Harbour and the vicious assaults against the Korean Comfort Women: the American government still refuses to apologize for dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; The Spanish government still has not apologized for the havoc they wreaked on the indigenous peoples of the Americas, nor have any of the Latin American governments.
There is a process of reconciliation taking place between FARC and the Colombian government and people. This is a first step. I am not sure about other countries. There was also a public apology to the victims of Agosto Pinochet's dictatorship by former Chilean president Patricio Alwyn. Another first of many steps that need to be taken to ensure the healing of nations.
“ 'Apologies cannot completely remove or undo the pain or loss suffered by survivors and victims’ families, but they can be a meaningful way of recognizing the dignity of victims and an important step for a society trying to build peace,” says Ruben Carranza, director of ICTJ’s Reparative Justice program...'
The Spanish Conquistadores were not given to making apology. They were on the side of the Spanish Crown and Holy Mother Church, therefore, how could they possibly do wrong, though we know now that with such thinking, how could they not possibly do wrong? The Spanish, following more than seven years of Moorish occupation truly saw themselves as victims, and after driving the Muslims out of their part of Europe they still saw themselves as victims thus incarnating the wrongs inflicted on them for almost eight hundred years by the occupying North Africans, in order to inflict far worse upon the hapless indigenous peoples of Mexico, the Caribbean, Central and South America.
Even now continues the legacy of impunity as social and economic inequality ensures that the indigenous peoples of the Americas (Canada has nothing to crow about here!) remain at the very bottom of the social hierarchies in these countries, as well as a good number of the Mestizaje. This legacy of arrogant pride dehumanizes both victim and victimizer and no real healing can begin, nor any movement of significant social justice in any of these countries until public acts of reconciliation and healing are enacted.
Continued impunity only repeatedly retraumatizes the already traumatized, while leaving the offenders locked inside their harm-inducing arrogance which they simply continue to perpetuate against the vulnerable. I believe that it is highly possible that some moral and spiritual leaders and mentors could arise in some Latin American countries with the prophetic voice of Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi in order to truly break and heal this vicious cycle of violence in much of Latin America. This not only could happen. It needs to happen. Soon.
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