Ancestors?

By the middle of the 1920s, the whole of Angola was under control. Slavery had officially ended in Portuguese Africa, but the plantations were worked on a system of paid serfdom by African labour composed of the large majority of ethnic Africans who did not have resources to pay Portuguese taxes and were considered unemployed by the authorities. After World War II and the first decolonization events, this system gradually declined, but paid forced labor, including labor contracts with forced relocation of people, continued in many regions of Portuguese Africa until it was finally abolished in 1961.[55]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_Colonial_War

There are people alive right now who were slaves in Portuguese Africa.

Colonialism is a structure, not a historical event. So it still needs to be dealt with. Just because you’re not to blame doesn’t mean you’re not the only one who can do the right thing as voting citizens. Nations that colonise absorbed wealth of other nations and that advantage can still be seen today in infrastructure that was built, wealth amassed. Museums today hold stolen artefacts and even bodies from lands they colonised.

Please don’t use ancestors as a smokescreen for what is happening right in front of our eyes.

Many people were fed up with the Spanish king at that point and invited the Muslims to take over. Spain would not be captured so easily if the inhabitants fought for it instead of against their current rulers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_Spain

"The last Visigoth king, Roderick, was not considered a legitimate ruler by all of the inhabitants of the Spanish Kingdom, and some Visigothic nobles aided the Islamic conquest of Spain. One name frequently mentioned is Count Julian of Ceuta who invited Tariq ibn-Ziyad to invade southern Spain because his daughter had been raped by King Roderick. "

Those Italians dug a lot of gold and silver out of the Iberian peninsula too.

Spain and Portugal aren't full of disease and poverty despite the fact that they used to be colonies, while their former colonies are full of disease and poverty.

The Fascists were the ones who loved and spread all over all that iconography celebrating The Discoveries, to make up for a country which was incredibly poor except for a handful of selected Families. It was pretty standard Fascist ultra-nationalism in the same style as Moussulini's Italy.

A lot of those ill-gotten gains were blown up centuries ago, and whatever was left never actually made its way down from the Old Wealth to most people.

Real compensation should go to the ones that were being exploited much more recent in the "colonies" before the Revolution that brought Democracy to Portugal and should be coming from the ones doing the exploitation, many of whom are still alive, got given a whole lot of benefits as "Returnees" following the Revolution and many who whom are still today in the top political parties.

It should also be done in a way that it ends up with the most in need, not in the hands of the rich and crooked of places like Angola.

As I said elsewhere, group blame is how the wealthy who benefited from such abuses get to diffuse the blame through entire etnicities/nationalities so that they don't have to loose a significant chunk of their wealth for compensation. Curiously, the President Of Portugal who started with all this talk is the son of a Minister of the old Fascist Dictator - Salazar - and got to go study in France at a time were most of the country was way too poor to even dream of going for a week all expenses paid to Lisbon, much less a couple of years to Paris.

It was also the first country in the entire world to abolish slavery (European Portugal, that is)

Canada is an interesting demonstration, we've actually been going hard into funding reservation services and returning land that the government controls. I think the transparency of the government w.r.t. truth and reconciliation has also been helpful... but legitimate reparations? Canada can't afford to make right the damage that's been done - the scars we've left on some communities is difficult to fully grasp. So what's the solution? It's a fucking hard problem.