Spanish galleon may contain biggest treasure haul ever found on seabed
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
This is going to be a long fight because traditionally those ships and its content belong to the owner. There are some international rules that some countries have agreed on (UNESCO): http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=13520&URL_DO=DO_TO.... Colombia hasn't signed that, but it doesn't mean they shouldn't obbey.
I don't know about this topic, so I won't add much more. However I wouldn't be so ingenous to think that the full treasure belongs to Colombia or to Spain. I suppose they will end up in international legal figths and they will end up agreeing on sharing the treasure. In any case, they CAN'T sell it (I believe) so it'd be as worthy as the tickets of the museum. It's more of a patriotic fight than a practical fight.
It says nothing about Spain asking anything.
Are you from North America? Canada or US? Because following the same rules you state the land in which you live is not yours, but from the native Indians you exterminated before.
Or in a more recent example, ISIS would be the rightfully owners of the modern day gold, oil, that is under their territory the US wants to steal from them.
Aztecs - Mexico Maya - Guatemala and neighbouring countries.
Here's some reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Legend
As someone that loves to study history, read old mediaeval documents, I know pretty well what our ancestors did.
I get it, condemning their actions gives you the higher moral ground, you feel like a mensch and somehow detach you from whatever shared responsibility you think you shoulder.
IMHO, we can't judge old-day actions with current-day ethics. The same way we don't generally allow ex post facto law, we should be careful to deliver ex post facto moral judgement. If there's a place for moral relativism, it is probably when comparing different times in history.
That is not to say I excuse everything that was done during the colonial times —there are plenty of recollections of senseless atrocities— but there's definitely a tendency to look at all this in a reductionistic and emotional way that I don't think is fair.
As for it being mostly monolingual under the imagined circumstance, I can't say, but it's possible Gran Colombia (current-day Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Panama, etc.) would have naturally formed and, under it, a monolingual pidgin.
The spaniards have been better prepared for war and overcame the local population in bloody conquest — this is a historical fact that no one will argue with.
How, from this fact, do people come to an assumption that local population had higher moral values than invading spaniards?
Have you completely no idea what pre-columbian era indian cultures were like? I mean, not today's "New Age" versions that have been adopted for Californian yappies, but actual kingdoms, chiefdoms and empires that resided there several hundred years ago.
The spaniards alone were a skeleton crew, not enough to conquest anything that big, despite having better technology.
And I would like to think that most of the Spaniards agree with that.
Also, all the global empires have been built on the same coercive foundation, and that doesn't make them "regimes".
http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/7302
Well, it looks like there was, in fact, a vast genocide. In the north and also the south americas. Really sad...
http://www.tulanemaritimejournal.org/finders-weepers-losers-...
However, I realise there's not much demand for such a move, so it's not going to happen any time soon, if at all.
Are you referring to some particular legal entity here, or just an overall concept?
In other cases, Spain has won the rights over salvaged treasure from sunken Spanish ships, as the countries they plundered the gold from weren't countries at the time, but colonies of Spain (for example: Peru).
Sincerely, if this is in International waters, you would think there was a expiry date of shipwrecks and it's finders-keepers after, Oh, I dunno, a few hundred years or so.