Who should ask for forgiveness—and who can give it?The Jamestown settlers who survived the Starving Time (1609–1610) by cannibalism? Their descendants (or their institutions) who experimented with biological warfare—British officers at Fort Pitt in 1763 distributing smallpox-contaminated blankets to Indigenous people? The oligarchs postulated Manifest Destiny and hired a thousand “ordinary men” to do the sacred work of theft with a hymn on their lips?The owners of the country who authored the Monroe Doctrine (1823) and the enforcers sent to colonize the Americas? The Mexican state and its own campaigns of “pacification” against the Apache and Navajo?The U.S. government that annexed California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming from Mexico in 1848?The Latin American oligarchies who bent the knee—first to European empires, then to the American one—while billing the misery to the public?Or the American Empire itself, which seems unable to imagine Latin America except as a map of resources to be extracted and governments to be managed—by invasion when it can, and by coercion when its more suitable?Why does a dog bark? Same reason an empire bites: it’s what it does.Same reason the United States—now in full-fledged decline—moves to seize control of Venezuelan oil flows and stages operations that end with Maduro kidnaped and a raid that killed more than a hundred people. And the spectacle—its “mission accomplished” aesthetics, the wall-to-wall coverage of the aftermath—does what spectacle always does: it eats the oxygen. Meanwhile, the Justice Department is still reported to have released less than 1% of the Epstein files, and Epstein’s Israeli government ties rarely get the airtime they deserve. So—who should ask for forgiveness, and who can give it?The soldiers who pose with Palestinian women’s lingerie for social media while Israel wages a genocide that the world watches in horror? The Palestinians—for fighting back?The oppressed—for failing to die quietly, neatly, and on schedule? Who should ask for forgiveness, and who can give it?If forgiveness is a moral act, it can’t be demanded at gunpoint, under rubble, or after the fact. When tyranny reigns, resistance is duty.Honoring 32 years since the Zapatista Uprising in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico on January 1, 1994.