Empire Inc. Conquistadors, Colonizers, and Corporations
Ten masked men jump out of the vehicles holding guns and aiming bear spray at everyone. Confused, you both freeze.
December 31, 2025
Articles on Culture & Creativity.
Ten masked men jump out of the vehicles holding guns and aiming bear spray at everyone. Confused, you both freeze.
December 31, 2025
Gabriel N Elizondo
It’s Saturday morning, and your family is at the park. Your daughter’s sixth birthday has been relatively smooth thus far. She’s settling into the swing you’re holding when you both watch two black SUV’s bounce over the curb. Ten masked men jump out of the vehicles holding guns and aiming bear spray at everyone. Confused, you both freeze.
The masked men target anyone who is dark skinned. Terrified children are rounded up, thrown to the grass, their parents rush to get them but are slammed to the concrete. Zip ties ratchet down on brown wrists as fathers scream for someone to help their children.
You just look on.
The masked men begin to walk towards you but see you’re white, so they simply advise you to stand back and don’t interfere.
It takes ten minutes, and more than half of the park is empty. Some cars still have the doors open, strollers are broken and scattered like bodies. The SUV pulls away and your daughter begins to cry.
Just to your right, the bushes rustle, and two brown children stumble out, eyes wide, confused, and shaking. The younger one has peed all over themselves.
A shiver of guilt runs down your spine…and you wish you had done something.
In the historical fiction novel Feed the Gods, Rutukuri is a Zacatecatl elite combat specialist who has been tracking an army of conquistadors who devastated his village. Among the steel-covered soldiers is an iron cage of enslaved tribes. A mixture of neighboring elders, women, and children sit in shackles as the army searches for a rumored silver mine.
When Rutukuri encounters three Rarámuri healers searching for a missing member of their tribe, he invites them along on his tracking mission to confirm their worst suspicions. In the dusk light, he tells the Raramuri a simple truth:
“These pale-skinned invaders, they take everything they see. They rape, murder, and enslave us. The only language they know is death and silver. They won’t stop. Ever. If you do nothing, it's the blood of your family on your hands. If you fight, it's the blood of our enemies. And I’ve always preferred the blood of my enemies to my friends.”
A long standing tenant of empires is the exchange of blood for profit. Though many attempts to dress this particular dichotomy up as a legitimate and “civilized” form of business have failed throughout the centuries, it remains an established protocol of the imperial world.
As mercantile capitalism replaced standard economic models of feudalism at the turn of the 14th century, the evolution of exploitation turned away from extorting poor Europeans and exploiting rich indigenous civilizations.
After having oppressed the majority of the world’s indigenous populations, European empires rebranded to nations in the 19th century. An attempt to assuage the trepidation found in their religious backers, national governments created nationalism as a means of power, pride, and control. Religious institutions could publicly align their support for national interests without the guilt they had amassed since their inception.
This imperial rebranding also required a lot of money. Mercantile capitalism evolved in lock-step with nationalism, and eventually became the unregulated capitalism that's strangling the modern world. This economic model powers national governments that in turn, provide military support to protect corporate interests. All this power requires a lot of people to labor in service of the empire (nation). People traditionally require food and shelter to live long enough to extract their labor. This means having to pay people enough money to afford living to serve the empire.
However, imperial traditions remain as national colonizers search for ways to legitimize not paying people for their labor and instead working them to death. National governments and corporations rely on the same answer to this imperial greed: dehumanize the population, enslave whoever doesn’t fight, and take everything they have.
The American colonizer government has always placed profit over everything else. During the first American gold rush, the General Mining Act of 1872 was passed providing full access to actively mine on public lands, regardless of indigenous populations' connection to that land. It allows for the full destruction of sacred ritual sites, belief sites, and harvest sites in the name of extracting minerals for profit. These precedents solidified self-righteous colonizer-capitalists perspectives that continue to exploit indigenous resources to this current day.
In December 2014, a land transfer was quietly conducted in a defense bill passed by the American government, allowing for the exploitation and destruction of Chi'chil Biłdagoteel (Oak Flat), a sacred site for the Ndé. Resolution Copper, a project owned by Rio Tinto and BHP, a global conglomerate, is a joint combination of international corporations set on exploitation for profit. The proposed project would create a 1,000 foot crater, horrendous shifts in ecological life, and destruction of water resources and environment. The Resolution Copper website attempts to position itself as a “culturally sensitive” company with images of indigenous employees smiling alongside corporate team members. It’s colonizer propaganda.
In 1865, American soldiers massacred a group of Paiute people along the Nevada landscape for no discernible reason. More than 150 years later, the tribe has taken on another fight against colonizer aggression: the Thacker Pass Lithium Mine Project. The site is not only preserved to honor the memory of those murdered Paiute lives but serves as a sacred place for the tribe. Yet, the corporate interests of Lithium Americas and General Motors have been prioritized by the American colonizer government. The Trump regime has even gone into business with the company, granting permits and loans for a 5% stake in the profits. Blatant colonizer collusion with corporate interests.
Enbridge, an international oil and gas company, ignored the sovereignty of the White Earth Band tribe by seeking to dredge over 5 billion gallons of water to serve their pipeline maintenance processes across the northern portions of Minnesota. In the following years, the pipeline project was completed with exponential environmental damage across tribal lands. Corporate interests and colonizer partnerships in the legal systems allowed profits to take priority over indigenous history, livelihoods, and land. An American tradition.
In the same tradition established by their imperial predecessors, modern colonizer governments treat laws as a means of political theater. A public-facing performance that frames the colonizer as an astute and considerate institution while it privately ignores constitutional rights and dismisses tribal sovereignty with corporate bribes and partnerships. Just as the Spanish Crown viewed the New World as a treasury to be emptied, the corporations view indigenous land as a balance sheet asset for colonizer profits.
Corporations view everything as a commodity for exploitation. The land is their first concern, however, land resources are only as good as the human labor that’s required to extract it.
Colonizers openly enslaved indigenous populations during their invasion. In our modern era, indigenous populations are labeled “immigrants” and exploited for their labor for the least amount of expense on behalf of colonizer corporations. With the recent fascist takeover in the American colonizer government, it now includes a return to open enslavement and murder of indigenous lives. However, America has never left its position as a colonizer ideological nation, as seen throughout the history of its exploitation of Mexican and indigenous labor.
Throughout the early part of the 20th century, the American colonizer government enacted a variety of programs to help supplement its labor force during times of war or economic depression. These programs treated Mexican laborers, predominantly of indigenous tribes, like cattle. Men, women, and children were lined up, sprayed with hazardous, cancer-causing chemicals, and forced to endure the horrid conditions as day-laborers for little pay. Throughout the decades, hostilities against these indigenous people aligned with the interest of colonizer narratives. The result was generations of indigenous Latin Americans subjected to violence, abuse, terror, and permanent health issues that were never acknowledged by the corporations that exploited them.
After enduring inhumane and humiliating immigration processes on behalf of the American colonizer government, Mexican indigenous laborers, alongside indigenous populations, were subjected to pesticide exposure. While working grueling hours from sunrise to sunset, indigenous farm laborers endured countless rounds of exposure to toxic chemical pesticides. The farm owners and business leadership who authorized the pesticide treatments knowingly exposed these laborers to life-threatening toxins. The result, once again, were generations of indigenous lives damaged and ended for the sake of colonizer corporate profit.
Maintaining its legacy of slavery, American colonizer government institutions often enslave and force indigenous and oppressed populations to generate corporate profits. Though recent fascist policies have brought the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) to the forefront of national consciousness, its position as the government's terrorist organization has a long-running practice of enslaving indigenous people. One of ICE’s major corporate partners, notorious private prison company GEO Group, has faced several lawsuits in its practice of forcing detainees to work for $1 a day. GEO Groups slavery practices have been documented for more than ten years. However, with the advancement of racist government policies, GEO Group and others like them, are facing less regulation and more empowerment in their slave practices of indigenous and oppressed populations.
The blatant disregard and lack of humanity corporations have for indigenous populations does not start at labor sites but in their own homes. Prior to colonial practices, empires throughout the centuries understood the importance of damaging indigenous populations' ability to remain healthy in order to prevent resistance.
In the deep history of imperial oppression, one of the lesser known ways colonizers remove indigenous sovereignty is by manipulation of food production and cultivation. Throughout history, European and American colonizers actively work to limit indigenous populations' ability to create self-sustaining communities that are not reliant on colonizer agendas.
In the modern Americas, these practices have been conducted at the behest of international corporations like Syngenta, who control a considerable amount of the agricultural seed market. Syngenta, and companies like them within their market, have genetically modified their seed products to effectively remove their ability to reproduce. This natural reproduction cycle eliminates one’s ability to grow more food without paying corporations for more seed. For indigenous populations throughout the Americas, the land and crops have been the primary source of survival for more than millenia.
Yet, their sacred lands used for harvest have not only been acquired by corporate colonizer giants, even the very crops have been stolen on a genetic level. The result is a forced dependence on colonizer governments, creating a crippling break from tribal sovereignty and further submission to colonizers.
A forced dependence on colonizer governments to supply food damages indigenous lives beyond their ability to grow their own crops. For centuries, the American colonizer government has manipulated, and conspired with corporate interests, to restrict, damage, and eliminate tribal health by systematically removing nutrition-rich resources for families. After stealing indigenous lands for over a century, surviving tribes were forced onto reservations by American colonial institutions. The indigenous diet was removed, replaced by starvation, and supplemented by a mandate of government-approved commodities that slowly kill the body.
The Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations was toted up as a treaty-ration system. After the systematic slaughter of the buffalo, the main source of food and life for countless native tribes, the American government forced tribal survivors to subsist off of sub-quality rations. Canned meats, bleached flour, sugars, and lard were the staples of these food systems but often arrived rancid, rotten, or entirely inedible. The evolution of modern tribal diets stemmed from the forced ingenuity of working with sub-par ingredients. The end result is a diet of high-sugar, high-fat diets that damage indigenous bodies faster due to a lack of genetic adaptation to processing the ingredients involved.
Additionally, a lack of cohesive food access has created “food deserts”, areas in which readily available complete foods are inaccessible. The result forces indigenous populations to either drive three hours round-trip to purchase healthy ingredients or rely on corporate-sponsored fast food and convenience store chain offerings. Once again, the result is a slowly damaged, unhealthy population, unable to create healthy resources to maintain a healthy life.
The arrival of European-settlers signaled a shift in the dynamic of indigenous worlds throughout the Americas. Beyond the absolute destruction of their way of life, indigenous tribes also contended with the shift in their territorial rituals, access to ancestral lands, and the mixture of new vices offered by Europeans.
In North America, American-settlers introduced alcohol to native tribes. Entirely unaware of the repercussions this substance had, indigenous tribes traded furs, foods, and resources for the inhibition of their leadership. American colonizers immediately recognized their advantage of slowly poisoning indigenous tribes with a substance their own predecessors struggled to control. Notorious slave-owner Benjamin Franklin stated:
“And, indeed, if it be the design of Providence to extirpate these savages in order to make room for cultivators of the earth, it seems not improbable that rum may be the appointed means. It has already annihilated all the tribes who formerly inhabited the seacoast.”
Alcohol was a devastating weapon against indigenous sovereignty. Over time, indigenous North American tribes began to succumb to the effects of long-term alcohol abuse, seeing a break in discipline due to dependency and neglect.
For decades, imperial governments (turned national colonizers) have allowed indigenous populations to suffer in exchange for colonizer power. Throughout the history of the United States, multiple government agencies have quietly worked in partnership with Mexican drug cartels and Mexican government officials, allowing the exploitation of indigenous populations on both sides of their borders.
For the American government, deals were made for high-profile cartel targets in exchange for the advancement of drug and human trafficking on behalf of the Sinaloa cartel. Additionally, American weapons were allowed into the hands of the cartel in the name of profit. Indigenous blood is an easy price to pay on behalf of a colonizer’s marketshare, even if it is the black market. The result of these long-term shared colonizer strategies was a severely damaged culture of drugs, weapons, prison, and death in the indigenous and Latin American indigenous communities.
Seeded by American colonizer greed and Mexican government corruption, the United States was able to establish ICE in the early 21st century. The heavily-funded terrorist organization justifies its violence in the name of ending illegal drug cartels by leveraging racist terrorist tactics to enslave indigenous and latin american indigenous populations without the consideration of rights granted by the constitution. This colonizer systemic abuse of power feeds the American fascist empire and its corporations in a variety of ways.
First, ICE carries out the enslavement of indigenous populations via detainment centers that are privately owned. These businesses can take advantage of colonizer funding while saving costs via slave labor.
Second, ICE reinforces colonizer terrorism by harassing indigenous communities without any regulatory oversight. This established fear of American colonizer forces further reinforces the submission of indigenous populations that serves a colonizer narrative.
Third, ICE proactively displaces families, breaks them apart, and recreates the cartel recruitment pipeline that feeds addiction or violence by removing previously held resources from indigenous families like established jobs, residence, finances, and support systems.
The proactive partnership between colonizer governments, cartels, and corporations are modern versions of the imperial slave trades from over 400 years ago. Spain, Britain, Portugal, France, and eventually America, would work to dehumanize innocent indigenous populations that were entirely unaware of European arrogance.
Maintaining a heritage of capitalism and profits, modern day colonizers have entered partnerships with international corporations that are far more powerful than any state-run institution. Serving this paradigm are the propaganda and cultural manipulation branches of colonizer power that create colonizer narratives with reductionist stereotypes that dehumanize indigenous populations across the Americas.
For any indigenous population, their way of life, belief systems, and cultural practices create the foundations of cultural narratives. These narratives define who the population is in relation to the external world, other tribes, and most importantly, who they are to one another. These narratives remain by generational traditions, passed down from one family to another. Each lesson, story, parable, keeps the legacy of their ancestry alive.
Imperial powers came to understand this powerful cultural narrative among their enslaved populations. Over time, empires actively worked to destroy them in an attempt to redefine indigenous populations' identities as servants and slaves.
Spain was one of the first empires to attempt a world-wide public relations campaign to simultaneously enslave human beings for the sake of their soul. The Catholic church allowed the Spanish Crown to use its powers of “divine origin” to effectively genocide and enslave millions of indigenous tribes across Central America for hundreds of years.
Throughout their campaigns, Spanish governors and priests claimed their efforts were to help save the “savages”. The imperial government dehumanized indigenous life and erased the identity of entire peoples, replacing their complexities with a caricature of beasts and simpletons. For Europeans, self-righteousness started with dehumanization and ended with enslaving, beating, starving, and murdering the land's original inhabitants.
The same pattern continued in North America, where early European colonizers dismissed advanced indigenous social structures and systems with the same arrogance that allowed them to steal from the dead in the name of their god.
As early Americans began the largest land theft in North American history, indigenous tribes were further reduced in the eyes of the white settler. A perpetual depiction of “violent tribes” created a white-victimhood on behalf of settlers stealing land, homes, resources, and food. David E Stannard explores this topic in American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World. White settlers were constantly claiming to be victims, framing themselves as innocent and worthy of carrying out frontier justice against their perceived enemies.
The same system responsible for this paradigm carried into modern American culture with racist depictions of North American tribes as violent criminals, drunken imbeciles, lazy servants, or simpletons in cinema. These reductionist stereotypes allowed white America to feel justified in their land theft, genocide, and abuse of indigenous peoples.
For Latin American indigenous populations, the sentiment of “foreign invader” translated to “violent drug criminal” across pop culture and into American history. Latin-Americans were depicted as gangsters, drug cartel operators, petty criminals, prisoners, addicts, lazy, and dangerous for white America. The systemic approach of the Narcotic Industrial Complex, coupled with the rampant terrorism and exploitation of Mexican indigenous populations, only added false credence to these depictions, solidifying the stereotypes that remain to modern day.
As the 21st century continues to press forward, older institutions are forced to evolve, rebrand, and reaffirm their positions of power in modern society. For every policy written by a national government on behalf of a corporation, millions suffer. The recent rise of fascism across many of the developed first world nations indicate a fear that is surfacing among the ailing elite. The indigenous populations of the world are no longer privy to propaganda, populist ideologies, and perpetual threats.
Instead, the world’s oppressed populations have begun to unite in the name of necessity, human rights, and justice. For many of the colonizer populations, this shift in the world is a looming threat for their existence. Suddenly, a real sense of danger finds them, and in its wake, a collapsed system that has provided the oppressed populations with the very leverage required to topple empires.
The realization of power in reclaiming cultural identity.
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