The history of the region that came to be known as the Americas can be told as a story of resistance from the beginning of the European invasion at the end of the 15th century. Both Christopher Columbus on Hispaniola in 1493 and Amerigo Vespucci on Curaçao in 1499, fled from the natives after trying to occupy territory on the islands. Indigenous resistance was directed against the forced appropriation of their lands, the brutal enslavement of laborers forced to work in mines, pearl banks, and plantations, as well as the rape of Native women. To this day, the struggles of Indigenous women and men in resistance against colonial systems, not only the Spanish and Portuguese, but also the Dutch, English, French, and other European powers, have been deeply rooted in the popular history of Latin America and the Caribbean. Before the end of the 19th century, the newly established nation-states managed to conquer most of the territories where Indigenous peoples had lived for centuries. They continue to fight for their land rights against exploitation, violation of their rights, dispossession, and destruction of the environment.
The staunch resistance of Indigenous Americans defending their territories (the unfinished conquest), led to the import of enslaved Africans by European (and Euro-African) slave traders. From the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade, however, enslaved Africans resisted the brutal sys¬tem. While it continued for centuries, there were numerous uprisings and rebellions against the oppressors, and palenques, quilombos, mocambos, and other examples of maroonage were established in the mountains. tropical forests and marginal spaces, where those who managed to flee lived autonomously, at times with the Indigenous people. Indisputably, the slave rebellions in the French colony of Saint Domingue in 1791, marked the beginning of the abolition of slavery that ended with the Dutch colonies (1863), Cuba (1886), and Brazil (1888). Afro-Americans from various countries continue to confront racism and other forms of discrimination, but they are advancing their strugglest for social, cultural, and political equality.
The fight against the ruling classes was not limited to the resistance of Indigenous Americans and enslaved Africans. Already during the early period of the colonial era, self-determined men and women born in the Ibero-American colonies fought against oppression by the so-called “motherland.” At the beginning of the 19th century, this resistance led to bloody wars of independence, which were victorious in all the Iberian colonies, except in Cuba and Puerto Rico. But the new ruling classes, mostly members of the Creole upper class, who brazenly exploited the support of the impoverished masses against colonial power, continued to exploit the common people. The ruling system was sustained by international and national capital, and it continued to depend on Europe and on the new great power the United States. The confrontation with capital the methods of exploitation and oppression that it cultivated in in the 19th and 20th centuries, such as imperialism, military dictatorships, and neoliberalism, would give rise to new forms of resistance. Starting with the Mexican Revolution of 1910, several revolutions in the 20th century targeted the power structure in Latin America and the Caribbean. In the British, French, and Dutch colonies, this resistance, mostly led by workers, after 1960, resulted in independence or autonomy. In some Latin American countries, it led to freedom from US political and economic control, a process solidified by the Cuban Revolution in 1959.