Juan Ramón Alvarez Cobelas

Nowadays the idea of celebrating colonial fairs, where native peoples of the overseas territories  could perform their ethnic habits in front on an European audience (who besides had payed for it), could seems nasty to us, disgusting or even more a crimen of slavery, but along side the 20s and the 30s of the last century, organised colonial fairs were at its hight to show to metropolitan populations and other Western country audiences, which were the benefits furnised  to the natives by the Metropolitan country, and at the same time, how lucky those  backward  native peoples were, who thanks  to their  white masters, could be taken out from the darkness of the ignorance. This colonial effort, was sometimes carried out in good faith, but others it was no any other  thing but looting, and greediness, a demonstration of racial imperialism and self-sufficiency, whose  actors were (from the top to the bottom) governments officials, white settlers (mainly farmers), religious communities and a wide panoplia of bizarre people, such as  traders, smugglers,  Indiana Jones´ adventures and prodigal  sons. All of them represented a vivid  fresco of Western racial superiority over the colonized local people. In this paper we are going to examinate which was: 1st). the reaction of the  International Community (if any) by the time those  fairs were hold, and which  international institutions ( remarkably the League of the  Nations and the International Labour Organization) could have faced such degrading  spectacle, and hence its legal tools to put an end to it, 2nd.) in a sort of contrafactual exercise, which one could  be the enforceable law today, applicable by the international  bodies, entitled to prosecute such crimes,and which  crimes could  be fitted (or penal types) into such behaviours.