We are gathered in order to hear the piercing outcry of the
excluded of the nation, the continent, and the world, and to
share their cry, proclaiming our militant, intellectual,
emotional, and practical identification with them.

To hear this cry and to capture its message, it seems
opportune to place ourselves in a historical moment where it
resounded with particular force: the moment of the
countercelebrations of the 500th anniversary of the invasion
of America, which marked the entire decade of the 90s and
which have culminated in this, the year 2000, in Brazil,
mobilized around the theme "Another 500 Years".

Geopolitical context

The historical importance of this turning point can be
perceived by placing it in its geopolitical context. Two
events of transcendental importance mark the end of the
second millennium. The first, which has profoundly jolted
the world's public opinion and compelled the restructuring of
its economic and political strategies, is the collapse of
European communism with its immediate consequences: the end
of the Cold War, and the establishment of a unipolar "new
world order".

The second event, no less significant, but completely
disregarded by world opinion, is the indigenous, black, and
popular mobilization of '92, which represents a cultural
revolution more important, in my opinion, than that which
occurred in Europe in 1968-69, or in 1989 throughout the
world. A cultural revolution which constitutes a turning
point in the history of the black and indigenous peoples; but
also, potentially, in the history of the indo-afro-latin-
american continent and of the world, because it may be the
seed and the harbinger of a political and economic
revolution.

The indigenous, black, and popular movement, rejecting the
celebrations of the "discovery of America" and the "founding
evangelization" which the Northern powers and the Catholic
hierarchy tried to impose, rejected the point of view from
which these celebrations arose, that of the conquistadors of
both yesterday and today. And they rejected them in the name
of an antagonistic point of view which emerged in this
climate, that of the indigenous, black, and popular
resistance; that is to say, the oppressed peoples who are
rising up to reclaim their consciousness and dignity as
historical subjects. The same confrontation that occurred in
'92 is taking place in Brazil in the year 2000, on the 500-
year anniversary of the country's invasion.

These two points of view were and are opposed not only in
their evaluation of the conquest and of the so-called
"founding evangelization" which laid the groundwork for other
conquests, but also in their interpretation of all of
history, culture, and civilization. They have been and
continue to be opposed, furthermore, in their plans for the
future. The powers of the North, in celebrating the
conquest, intended to reaffirm the dominance of Western
Christian civilization and, by extension, the relations of
domination that characterize it; on the other hand, the
indigenous, black, and popular resistance, in rejecting the
celebrations, revived the urgent possibility of an
alternative civilization, based on the right of all peoples
to life and self-determination.

These two events also demonstrate two antithetical points of
view regarding the problem which concerns us, that of
exclusion. The unipolar order, that is to say the market's
domination of the world, is the world organization which
engenders and legitimizes the exclusion of the great
majority. In contrast, the indigenous, black, and popular
movement is the cry of the excluded who rebel against the
world disorder and proclaim the urgent necessity of a
civilization without exclusion. Therefore, those excluded
from the prevailing disorder arise as the potential
protagonists of a new history.

But what, exactly, is the content of this cry? What does it
mean for us to hear and echo it?

A cry of pain

To voice the cry of the excluded signifies, for us, a
conscious identification with the tragic reality of suffering
and with the feeling of powerlessness, to the point of
despair, that accompanies exclusion. But what, more
precisely, does exclusion consist of? What are the great
majority excluded from? They are excluded, essentially, from
the economy, from culture, and from power.

Excluded in the first place from economic life. From the
perspective of big capital and the world market, the majority
of people are neither producers nor consumers. They aren't
even worth exploiting: they are superfluous masses who have
no reason for existing. Their deaths, the premature deaths
of poor children, are not a problem for the market; one could
almost say it forms part of the solution. For this reason,
the phenomenon of exclusion occupies the place in our
analysis that was occupied in other eras by exploitation.
This change in perspective becomes necessary once we
understand that today exploitation has become a privilege,
because it means having a job, however humiliating and
exhausting it may be.

The ordinary majority find themselves also excluded from
culture and education, and therefore from the ability to
analyze the situation of which they are victims, to become
conscious of their trampled rights, to rebel and to mobilize.
Consequently, exclusion is a tragically objective phenomenon,
but one whose injustice does not reach the consciousness of
the majority, and does not provoke their rebellion. They
experience their exclusion as a fate to which they must
resign themselves. This explains how an ideology as opposed
to the interests of ordinary people as neoliberalism has been
able to take hold with the consent of those same ordinary
people; how it has imposed itself at a global level as the
"only way of thinking". In this sense, cultural exclusion
is, from a subjective viewpoint, the most radical aspect of
exclusion, because it conditions people to accept other
exclusions.

The great majority find themselves excluded above all from
power. In the new world order, the self-determination of the
market is supplanting, both in practice and in theory, the
self-determination of local peoples. National sovereignty
disappears beneath the impact of transnational businesses and
organizations. The dominance of the market, promoted in the
name of democracy, is in reality destroying democracy on the
national and world levels, because it deprives the people of
the chance to direct their own economy, their own politics,
their own culture and education; it deprives them, in a word,
of the chance to be the subjects of their own history.

The exclusion from power is the most universal aspect of
exclusion, and from an objective point of view, the most
radical. It affects not only the poor sectors of society,
but also the middle class, who are not totally excluded from
economy and culture and therefore do not feel themselves to
be excluded. The standard of living which they manage to
provisionally maintain frequently leads them to passively
accept their exclusion from decision-making power and to
ignore the poverty of the lower classes. Nevertheless, their
exclusion from power deprives them as well of the possibility
of defending their and their children's standard of living,
faced with the process of impoverishment and marginalization
created by neoliberal globalization and the "adjustments" it
imposes. Exclusion from power prefigures, for a very broad
spectrum of society, exclusion from wealth and culture.

The cry of excluded women

On the one hand, it is necessary to recognize and denounce
women's particular exclusion, and particularly that of poor
women, working women, indigenous women, black women, etc.,
which stretches across all of history. We must recognize
that they are the main victims of the neoliberal
globalization process. We must recognize, along with the
many social analysts who are currently verifying this at a
world level, a feminization of poverty and misery; a
feminization of exclusion.

On the other hand, women and women's movements are
strengthening their crucial role in the struggle for the
survival of their families and in the search for economic and
social alternatives. Women, who have a preponderant role in
the education of the new generations, have a decisive role to
play in the formation of their social consciousness, in their
mobilization, and in the validation of their cultures. It's
clear, nonetheless, that only liberated women can fulfill an
authentic mission of liberation. A liberating education can
only be brought about by women who perceive, on a practical
level, the close ties between the liberation of their people
and their personal liberation.

An outburst of indignation and rebellion

The cry of the excluded which we want to echo is also an
outburst of indignation and rebellion, because the exclusion
which we have denounced is completely unjust. It tramples on
the fundamental rights of both individuals and communities:
the rights to self-determination, life, culture, and love.

Right now, this exclusion is not an unavoidable fate; rather,
it is the fruit of a system constructed and defended by the
egoism and lust for power of a minority of humanity.

This exclusion is the logical conclusion of a civilization
founded on the basis of a crime against humanity, the
physical, cultural, and religious genocide of original
peoples; a crime which has converted itself into a criterion
of normality and a fundament of the law.

It is an exclusion which concludes a centuries-long process
of expropriation of the people of the South on the part of
the powerful minorities of the North.

It is an exclusion which, after centuries of exploitation and
looting, considers the excluded peoples to be debtors, and
thus claims the right to continue exploiting and looting
them.

A call to mobilization and the construction of a new history

The most dangerous temptation of the excluded is that of
resignation, of fatalism, of a lack of self-confidence and of
submission to the law of the most powerful. Mahatma Gandhi
decried this attitude, saying, "In India, 300,000 Englishmen
rule over 300 million Indians. But this would not be
possible without the consent of the 300 million Indians."
Starting from this analysis, Gandhi believed that the
fundamental problem for the liberation of India was how to
lead the 300 million Indians to a consciousness of their
stolen rights and to a confidence in themselves and their
historical force: a force whose source he identified in
Satiagraha, the force of truth, of right, of love, and of
solidarity. In his perspective, these values become forces
of history when they can penetrate and mobilize the
consciousness of the people.

And now, it seems to me that it is possible to translate
Gandhi's analysis into the context of neoliberal
globalization, understood as a process of worldwide
colonization. In this context, 300 or so transnational
companies rule over the 5000 million people of the world.
I'm not trying to cite specific statistics, but rather to
symbolize the relation between the minority of owners and the
great majority of slaves. This relation can be seen to exist
not only between the North and the South, but also in the
interior of every country: because thanks to globalization,
there is a lot of North in the South and a lot of South in
the North.

The fundamental reason for the absence of a rebellion is, in
my judgement, a reason more profound even than ignorance: the
great majority of people do not think for themselves and lack
critical capacity. We are all victims of the most serious
expropriation, whose goal is precisely our intellectual,
moral, and religious autonomy, and thus our capacity to
define, autonomously, our identity and the sense of our own
life. Here cultural exclusion emerges, once again, as the
root of all exclusions and as the condition of their
persistence.

This expropriation is the fruit of an entire system of
education aimed at forming intellectual, religious, and moral
dependence. Among the agents of the system are families,
schools, universities, political parties both conservative
and revolutionary, unions, economic and political propaganda,
and the mass media, especially television. And here we have
to underscore particularly, in this formation of dependence,
the role of religions, of churches, religiously affiliated
schools, seminaries, and other religious institutions. All
of these system components are aimed toward bringing about
the most serious expropriation of individuals, communities,
and peoples, which is, in the final analysis, a mass
kidnapping of human beings.

How to transform the cry of pain and indignation into a call
to action

Here we come to the central theme of our reflection: how can
our cry of pain and indignation be transformed into a call to
all excluded people to mobilize and construct a new history,
and into the establishment of a millenium without exclusion?

1. All of us today who believe in the need to develop a
nonviolent strategy must take as a starting point the
condemnation of intellectual, moral, and religious
violence, and the search for liberatory alternatives at
these levels.
2. A call to action by the excluded demands the rejection of
fatalism, which the dominant ideology presses on us and
which it has succeeded in inculcating. The only way the
excluded can reject fatalism is to regain confidence in
their own selves. Confidence in the possibility of a
global economic and political alternative cannot be
separated from confidence in the intellectual, moral, and
political capacities of the excluded to construct it.
3. Rejecting fatalism means reclaiming a belief in the
historical force of truth, right, justice, and love, which
in penetrating the consciousness of the people is capable
of deposing the law of force, money, and weapons. We can
and will someday depose it, if we do not grow tired of
believing and fighting. To believe in the excluded means,
especially, to discover the spirit of generosity and
solidarity of which they are capable, and which
constitutes their strength.
4. To believe in the excluded means regaining confidence in
the intelligence, wisdom, creativity and imagination of
the people. The right contemptuously repeats that the
poor and their intellectuals may know how to criticize the
prevailing economic model, but can't put forth any
alternatives; and, to tell the truth, we are sometimes
assaulted by the temptation to believe that this is true.
Let's ask, then: what are we doing in our organizations,
in our communities, in our parties, our unions, our
schools, and our churches to validate the intelligence and
creativity of the poor in the search for alternatives? In
what medium, for example, are we using research methods
involving popular participation? What right do we have to
talk about the incapacity of the poor, when we are doing
nothing to discover and liberate their enormous potential?
5. But the strongest and most decisive argument on which to
base our confidence is the discovery of the subterranean
history which the excluded are already constructing.

We believe that history has not ended, precisely because we
look at it from the point of view of the excluded who are
conscious of their exclusion; and guided by this compass, we
discover many things that the neoliberal analysis conceals
from us.

The decade of the '90s was marked, in every country on the
continent, by a great number of uprisings, protest movements,
and reclamations, which had very different features, but
which can be unified beneath a general label: the rebellion
of those excluded from the economic model. In moving
forward, they are gaining an awareness that the root of
almost all their problems lies here; and with their
mobilization, they demonstrate the desire for a different
society, and the conviction that this is possible.

Mobilization in the liberatory movement and the reclamation
of the movement of Jesus

6. In the final analysis, our mobilization as Christians in
the liberatory struggle of the excluded finds a
particularly strong motivation in the rediscovery of the
original Christians in all their diversity and creativity.
If on the one hand the indigenous and black peoples, with
their historic mobilization, demand of us a radical
critique of Constantinian Christianity, both historically
and today, they also require of us the recognition that
this Christianity is not the movement of Jesus, but rather
a betrayal of his plan of liberation. We are therefore
pushed toward a rediscovery of this plan, and toward
discovering in it not only a sense of our own life, but
also our inspiration in the fatiguing search for an
alternative civilization.

The major conclusion of this rediscovery is that Jesus
communicated to his disciples, not a message of orthodoxy or
an organizational schema, but a passion for liberty and love,
a reflection of the liberating love of God, which the
disciples gave expression to in very different directions.
Jesus, in other words, did not found a church, but rather a
movement of liberating love, which bears witness throughout
history to the liberating love of God. Today, it is much
more important for the rediscovery of Christian identity to
study the period in which the Spirit could unfold itself
freely, than the period of ecclesiastical
institutionalization. What that means for us, then, is the
need to break our institutional chains and recover, with
respect to the person and the message of Jesus, that freedom
of interpretation and creation which characterized the first
disciples and which is part of the essence of his legacy: not
a table of laws, not a system of dogmas, but a passion for
liberty and love, capable of creatively developing the
intuitions of a teacher, a friend, or a companion in
struggle.

This rediscovery and renewal, toward which we have a dramatic
responsibility, commits us to the communal creation of a new
synthesis, honoring the most significant contributions of the
original Christians. Among these, I would like to call
attention to: setting down roots in a community and a place,
in a spirit of liberating love; liberatory solidarity,
expressed by sharing goods and seeking a communal mode of
production; a characteristic self-reliance which recognizes
the community, not the hierarchs, as the subject of movement
and power; a lay character, which considers priests to be
ministers of their communities, and not a separate, sacred
caste; an antagonistic attitude toward the Roman Empire, and
by extension toward all empires; the central role of women
which forms a living, militant alternative to the patriarchal
society; and the grassroots diffusion of the movement through
the force of truth and the propagation of solidarity, and not
through social conformity.

Giulio Girardi is a theologian. This text was presented at
the National Gathering of the Cry of the Excluded of Ecuador,
held in Quito on August 26, 2000.

(Abridged version: for the complete version, see the
Spanish
text)