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Portugal would actually have to possess spare cash, for them to pay any of their former colonies so much as a penny in reparations

Pretty sure spain and portugal used to be muslim colonies themselves, shouldn't they get paid first then?

Sorry but being held responsible for what your ancestors did is bullshit. The very same bullshit as trying to reclaim the land your ancestors had. Both are not mine, it's in the past and I have nothing to do with it.

Also, it is most likely that everyone's ancestors did some bad things. Sad but it is a process in the human history.

Duh. No country is going to do this, it will do nothing but open up a can of worms. I mean, what about the ancestors of the African tribes that rounded up the slaves and sold them? Shouldn't they pay something? What about the countries who fought for slaves to be free? What about all the families of the union soldiers in the US Civil War, shouldn't they get something? Or, is this whole "reparations" thing only for black Americans whose great, great, great, great grandparents were slaves? It's silly.

Shame, I was hoping for that stolen gold...

Canada looks disappointed.

For a country that both established the transatlantic slave trade and was one of the last to continue reaping its profits – it was still using de-facto slave labour in its colonies in the 1960s – Portugal has been slow to reckon with its past.

The national school curriculum, museums and tourism infrastructure all amount to a grandiose rendering of the country’s 15th to 17th-century “discoveries” in Africa, Asia and the Americas, and a selective recollection of its 20th-century colonial exploits in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, Cape Verde, São Tomé & Principe, Goa, Macau and East Timor.

There are monuments and statues up and down the country dedicated to navigators, missionary priests responsible for the conversion of Africans and Indigenous people to Catholicism, or soldiers who fought against African independence in the colonial wars. Meanwhile, it is often said that “Portugal is not a racist country”, despite enormous structural inequalities and decades of documented discrimination. “There has been a silencing here of centuries of violence and trauma,” says Kia Henda.

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2021/3/10/how-portugal-silenced-centuries-of-violence-and-trauma

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The statement comes in response to remarks by President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, who said Portugal could find ways to compensate its former colonies.

Portugal said in a statement that it seeks to "deepen mutual relations, respect for historical truth and increasingly intense and close cooperation, based on reconciliation of brotherly peoples."

Portugal's colonial era lasted more than five centuries, with the decolonization of some African countries happening as late as 1974 after the fall of the authoritarian Estado Novo regime.

Portugal's president called on Lisbon to initiate a reparations process in comments made to reporters on Saturday, saying that the issue could not be swept "under the carpet."

He suggested that Portugal could pay reparations by canceling the debt of former colonies, developing special cooperation programs or providing financing.

The election was called after former Prime Minister Antonio Costa of the center-left Socialist Party stepped down over corruption allegations.

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