Columbus Day under President Hugo Chávez, the holiday was changed to "Día de la Resistencia Indígena" (Day of Indigenous Resistance) to commemorate the Indigenous peoples' resistance to European settlement. On October 12, 2004, a crowd of pro-government activists toppled the statue of Christopher Columbus in Caracas and sprayed allusive graffiti over its pedestal. The pro-Chávez website Aporrea wrote: "Just like the statue of Saddam in Baghdad, that of Columbus the tyrant also fell this October 12, 2004 in Caracas". The famous toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue had occurred the previous year. On September 21, 1994, Costa Rica changed the official holiday from
The Heirs of Columbus the novel is that the Mayans were the first civilization in the world, and that they had taken their civilization to Europe during the time of Antiquity. Columbus was a descendant of the Mayans through his secret Sephardic Jewish ancestry, and his ancestral memories called him to return to the ancestral homelands in America. During his first landing in the Americas, he was visited by a Native American healer named Samana, who took him to bed and became pregnant by him. The heirs of the title are the present-day (1990s) descendants of Samana and Columbus. The plot of the novel