Eduardo Galeano

Historia del saqueo de América Latina que muestra cómo funcionan los mecanismos actuales del despojo: los tecnócratas en jet, herederos de los conquistadores en carabela; Hernán Cortés y los infantes de marina; los corregidores del reino y las misiones del Fondo Monetario Internacional; los dividendos del tráfico de esclavos y las ganancias de la General Motors. El tiempo presente ha sido presentido y engendrado por las contradicciones del pasado.

Las venas abiertas de América Latina

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Latin America is the region of open veins. Everything, from the discovery until our times, has always been transmuted into European— or later United States— capital, and as such has accumulated in distant centers of power. Everything: the soil, its fruits and its mineral-rich depths, the people and their capacity to work and to consume, natural resources and human resources. 

Latin American children obstinately continue getting born, claiming their natural right to a place in the sun in these magnificent lands which could give to all what is now denied to almost all.

Horses, like camels, had once been indigenous to Latin America but had become extinct. In Europe, where they were introduced by Arab horsemen, they had proved to be of enormous military and economic value. When they reappeared in Latin America during the conquest, they lent magic powers to the invaders in the natives’ astonished eyes. 

Under every Brazilian constitution they are “the original and natural masters” of the land they occupy, but the richer that virgin land proves to be, the greater the threat hanging over their lives. Nature’s very generosity makes them targets of plunder and crime. 

In the 1970 harvest Cuba had to use three times as many workers as before, mainly volunteers or soldiers or people from different jobs, thereby harming other rural and urban activities--the harvesting of other products, the work-rhythm in the factories. Here one must bear in mind that in a socialist society, unlike in a capitalist one, workers are not motivated by fear of unemployment or by avarice. Other drives--solidarity, collective responsibility, awareness of the duties and rights that move a man beyond selfishness--must be brought into play. 

Hospitals and as many polyclinics, and made medical care free. It multiplied by three the number of students enrolled at all levels and also made education free; more than 300,000 children and youths benefit today from scholarships, and boarding schools and kindergartens have proliferated. A large part of the population pays no rent and no one pays for water, light, public telephones, funerals, or sporting events. Spending on social services increased five times in a few years.

It is much more profitable to consume coffee than to produce it. In the United States and Europe coffee creates income and jobs and mobilizes substantial capital; in Latin America it pays hunger wages and sharpens economic deformation.

Breathing it we could understand why miners lose their senses of smell and taste in a few years. They all chew coca-leaf and ash as they work, and this too is part of the annihilation process, for coca, by deadening hunger and masking fatigue, turns off the alarm system which helps the organism stay, alive. But the worst of it was the dust: circles of light from the miners' helmets danced dimly in the gloom, showing thick white curtains of deadly silica. It does not take long to do its work. The first symptoms are felt within a year, and in ten years one enters the cemetery. Late-model Swedish drills are used in the mine, but the ventilation system and work conditions have not improved with time.

The lively encouragement of Jesuit traditions undoubtedly contributed to this creative process.( Fanatical monks of the Society of Jesus, "the Pope's black guard," had become defenders of the medieval order against the new forces bursting upon the European stage. But in Hispanic America Jesuit missions developed along progressive lines. They came to cleanse by abnegation and ascetic example a Catholic Church which had surrendered to sloth and the untrammeled exploitation of the goods the Conquest had made available to the clergy. It was the Paraguayan missions that reached the highest level; in little more than a century and a half (1603-1768), they fully justified the aims of their founders. The Jesuits used music to draw in Guaraní Indians who had sought shelter in the forest, and who had stayed there rather than join in the "civilizing process" of the encomenderos and landlords. Thus 150,000 Guaranís were able to move back into their primitive community organization and revive their traditional arts and crafts. The latifundio system was unknown in the missions; the soil was cultivated partly to satisfy individual needs and partly to develop projects of common concern and to acquire the necessary work tools, which were common property. The Indians' life was intelligently organized; musicians and artisans, farmers, weavers, actors, painters, and builders gathered in workshops and schools. Money was unknown; traders were barred from entering and had to transact any business from hotels at an appropriate distance. The Crown finally succumbed to the criollo encomenderos' pressure and the Jesuits were expelled from Latin America. Landlords and slave traders went in pursuit of the Indians. Corpses hung from trees in the missions; whole communities were sold in Brazilian slave markets. Many Indians took to the forest again. The Jesuits' libraries were used to fuel ovens or to make powder cartridges.

"We are not in a position to take measures against foreign trade, particularly British, because we are bound to that nation by large debts and would expose ourselves to a rupture which would cause much harm. The use of debt as an instrument of blackmail is not, as we can see, a recent U.S. invention.

 Guilty consciences are thus relieved of the need for alibis, for no one is guilty: today's imperialism radiates technology and progress, and even the use of this old, unpleasant word to define it is in bad taste. But when imperialism begins exalting its own virtues we should take a look in our pockets. We find that the new model does not make its colonies more prosperous, although it enriches their poles of development; it does not ease social and regional tensions, but aggravates them; it spreads poverty even more widely and concentrates wealth even more narrowly; it pays wages twenty times lower than in Detroit and charges prices three times higher than in New York; it takes over the internal market and the mainsprings of the productive apparatus; it assumes proprietary rights to chart the course and fix the frontiers of, progress; it controls national credit and orients external trade at its whim; it denationalizes not only industry but the profits earned by industry; it fosters the waste of resources by diverting a large part of the economic surplus abroad; it does not bring in capital for development but takes it out. 

Servicing the debt consumes a growing proportion of income from exports, which in any case, due to the unremitting fall of prices, cannot finance the necessary imports; new loans to enable the countries to supply themselves thus become as indispensable as air to the lungs. 

The socalled free play of supply and demand in the so-called international market does not exist; the reality is a dictatorship of one group over the other, always for the benefit of the developed capitalist countries.

According to Emmanuel, the world market bases the trading in equality on th eexchange of more work-hours in poor countries for less work-hours in rich countries: the key to the exploitation is that while there is an enormous difference between the wage levels of the poor and rich countries, it is not accompanied by differences of the same magnitude in the productivity of the work. It is the low wages that determine the low prices, says Emmanuel, not the reverse: the poor countries export their poverty--further impoverishing themselves in the process--while the rich countries get the opposite result. According to Samir Amin, if the products exported by underdeveloped countries in 1966 had been produced by developed countries with the same techniques but with their much higher wage levels, the prices would have differed to such an extent that the developed countries would have received $14 billion more.

And in turn the remodeling of the economy as a function of external demand brings us back to the original hangman's rope: it opens the doors for pillage by foreign monopolies and forces us to seek new and larger loans from the international bankers. The vicious circle is perfect: foreign debt and foreign investment oblige us to multiply exports that they themselves devour. The task can't be accomplished with gentlemanly matters. To fulfill their function as hostages of foreign prosperity, Latin American workers must be held prisoner, either inside or outside the bars of the jails.

 Hasn't our experience throughout history been one of mutilation and disintegration disguised as development? Centuries ago the conquest cleared our lands to plant crops for export and annihilated the indigenous populations in the mines to satisfy the demand abroad for saver and gold. The diet of the pre-Columbian population that could survive the exterminations deteriorated as the foreigners progressed. In our day the people of Peru produce fishmeal very rich in protein, for the cattle of the United States and Europe, but proteins are conspicuously absent from the diet of most Peruvians. The Volkswagen affiliate in Switzerland plants a tree for every car it sells-- gracious ecological gesture--while the Volkswagen affiliate in Brazil uproots thousands of acres of forest to dedicate them to intensive production of meat for export. The Brazilian people, who very rarely eat meat, sell more and more meat abroad. 

The so-called “mental health system” served the interest of the patriarchy; that is, it pathologized the socially created problems that women face and reinforced the sex roles that the patriarchy prescribes. 

Since its U.S. debut a quarter-century ago, this brilliant text has set a new standard for historical scholarship of Latin America. It is also an outstanding political economy, a social and cultural narrative of the highest quality, and perhaps the finest description of primitive capital accumulation since Marx. Rather than chronology, geography, or political successions, Eduardo Galeano has organized the various facets of Latin American history according to the patterns of five centuries of exploitation. Thus he is concerned with gold and silver, cacao and cotton, rubber and coffee, fruit, hides and wool, petroleum, iron, nickel, manganese, copper, aluminum ore, nitrates, and tin. These are the veins which he traces through the body of the entire continent, up to the Rio Grande and throughout the Caribbean, and all the way to their open ends where they empty into the coffers of wealth in the United States and Europe. Weaving fact and imagery into a rich tapestry, Galeano fuses scientific analysis with the passions of a plundered and suffering people. An immense gathering of materials is framed with a vigorous style that never falters in its command of themes. All readers interested in great historical, economic, political, and social writing will find a singular analytical achievement, and an overwhelming narrative that makes history speak, unforgettably. This classic is now further honored by Isabel Allende's inspiring introduction. Universally recognized as one of the most important writers of our time, Allende once again contributes her talents to literature, to political principles, and to enlightenment.

Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent

Open Veins of Latin America

farah

lots of amazing things about this book, it has a lot of details. I almost feel like it should have been 2-3 books because it gets a little overwhelming at times.

Las venas abiertas de América Latina

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