Spain Still Fights Colonial Image as It Nears 1992 Columbus Festivities : Event: Planning efforts for the explorer’s 500th anniversary prompts an avalanche of bad publicity from former overseas holdings.

As replicas of Columbus’ ships sail across the Atlantic to mark the 500th anniversary next year of his “discovery” of America, Spain’s preparations for the big event are sailing into rough seas.

Spain had built up 1992 as a re-encounter with its former colonies and as a chance to showcase itself as a modern democracy, setting aside billions of dollars.

But somehow its message is not getting through and the celebration has triggered an avalanche of negative publicity over just what the discovery wrought.

The conquered are telling the former conquerors just what they think of them and some Spaniards are urging an “agonizing reappraisal” of their country’s conquests.

“The (event) has generated thousands of images, and this is partly our fault in explaining it,” Luis Yanez, president of the Fifth Centenary Commission, said in a recent article.

The commission, set up in 1981, is organizing a pageant of commemorative events whose centerpiece is Seville’s Expo ’92. Spain is also promoting rail links in Latin America’s Southern Cone, Central American power grids and satellite communications as part of an ambitious cooperation program.

But preparations for 1992 have been marred by rival U.S. and Spanish bids to explore off Haiti for the wreck of Columbus’ flagship, the Santa Maria, conflicts over an official film about the Genovese sailor and criticism of church plans to mark 500 years of evangelism.

To make matters worse, the commission’s budget has been cut by 65% next year as Spain struggles to get its economy under control.

“The situation is very serious, and many cultural projects won’t get finished,” said Yanes, whose running of the commission ass come under attack from opposition politicians.

Spain, fast emerging from isolation under the Franco regime, sees 1992 as its year and hopes that the Barcelona Olympics, Expo ’92 and the Columbus celebrations will give muscle to its new image as a modern and dynamic society.

It also views the celebrations as an opportunity to forge a role as the leader of an Ibero-American community with pay-backs in increased exports and business investments.

But over the last year, groups in Spain and Latin America have been organizing to oppose the celebrations and draw world attention to the plight of America’s exploited Indians.

More than 80,000 Indians from Mexico to Panama protested on Columbus Day, and in Seville 18 demonstrators were detained after disrupting a Mass in the city’s cathedral.

“The origins of the Third World lie in 1492, when one civilization imposed itself on another by force and exploited it,” says a manifesto of one group, “500 Years of Aggression, 500 Years of Resistance for the Emancipation of the People.”

As a symbol of dissent, Ecuadorean artist Oswaldo Guayasamin is erecting a monument in the town of Puerto Real, near Cadiz, which will be unveiled on Columbus Day next year at a forum for pro-Indian and other anti-1992 groups.

Titled “An Homage to the Victims of the European Invasion since 1492,” it is being built with the full backing of Puerto Real’s left-wing mayor, Jose Antonio Barroso Toledo.

The mayor has waged since 1978 a unique small town campaign for Third World issues, such as financing water projects in Nicaragua, and now wants to help pay some of Spain’s moral debts to the New World.

The 25-foot-high cube-shaped monument will feature murals on its outside walls representing Indian cultures, scenes from the Conquest and the extermination of Indians, the colonial era and the importation of black slaves from Africa.

“We want to change the historical view, to change awareness and above all the unequal model of coexistence,” said Antonio Maira, coordinator of the Bartolome de las Casas Assn.

The association, named for a 16th-Century Spanish friar who wrote against ill-treatment of the Indians by the Conquistadors, is helping organize a counter-summit of Indian leaders in Madrid next July parallel to an Ibero-American summit meeting.

Maira said the $2-million monument on Puerto Real’s seafront will be financed by a subscription campaign in Spain and Europe.

The protests underline a disparity over what the 500th anniversary commemorations should be, ranging from a celebration of church evangelism favored by the Vatican to the formation of a Latin American ecological alliance.

Spain’s King Juan Carlos said in a Columbus Day speech in October that it was an opportunity to forge an Ibero-American community while reinforcing the region’s recent return to democracy.

But many Latin Americans, burdened by debt, poverty and social injustice, see little to celebrate and believe their problems are not appreciated.

According to “500 years of Aggression,” these injustices are being ignored by the official 1992 celebrations, which “are set in the perspective of the rescue of a savage world and the so-called legacy of ‘Western’ civilization.”