Spain's foreign minister on US independence: 'All they did was kill four Indians'
Josep Borrell under fire for saying US more politically integrated due to having "practically no previous history"
Spain's Minister of Foreign Affairs Josep Borrell is under fire again after appearing to trivialize the mass killing of Native Americans.
"All they did was kill four Indians," he said to justify why the United States is more politically integrated than other countries.
"Why has the US a higher level of political integration? Firstly, they all speak the same language. And secondly, they have practically no previous history. They got independence with practically no history. All they did was kill four Indians," he said.
The Spanish minister made this comments while taking part in an event at a Madrid university. The German foreign minister, Heiko Maas, was also present. The title of the conference was 'The European Union as a global economic actor that protects its citizens'.
Racist Spanish Foreign Minister @JosepBorrellF says this about US pre-independence history: "The only thing that they had done was kill 4 Indians".
— AIndianMovement (@AIndianMovement) November 27, 2018
What a supremacist, denialist, and pathetic way to describe a genocide.
Long live Free @CataloniaHelp2 pic.twitter.com/0M4Y0unu3o
Borrell's remarks sparked outrage, with the American Indian Movement dismissing him as "racist" on Twitter: "What a supremacist, denialist, and pathetic way to describe a genocide."
Minister already under fire
Borrell is already in a fragile situation after he was fined to pay €30,000 by the securities regulator for taking advantage of private information from a company to order the sale of shares.
In 2015, at a time when he held no public, Borrell was a board member of the renewable energy firm Abengoa. He advised a person close to him sell company shares worth €9,030.
According to the securities regulator, his position allowed him to know "price sensitive information that had not yet been disclosed."