The full title of this book is: 'Open Veins of Latin America, Five Centuries of The Pillage of A Continent' with a foreword by Isabel Allende (also Latin American writer).
I have heard and read so much about this book. I was so excited, beginning of this week, to actually have it in my hands, I just had to start reading it immediately. It did not take me long.
People say that it is a must-read for anyone interested, even a bit, in the history of Americas. And I could not agree more. In the book, the history of Latin America is analyzed from the moment Europeans arrived and made it their colonies till now - I mean till the 70's as the book was published first in 1971 and then one chapter was added in 1978. Exploitation, dominance by Europeans and then by United States are described as well as the long term effects. The book is packed with so many facts and data that I must admit I could not understand all of it and sometimes just got the general idea.
I was warned that the book is very sad. And, yes, so it is. Bloodbaths, tortures, murders, slaughters, inhumane living conditions, injustice, slavery through out centuries - the Latin American history is just so full of it.
In the foreword, Isabel Allende says: "He has more first-hand knowledge of Latin America than anybody else I can think of, and uses it to tell the world of the dreams and disillusions, the hopes and the failures of its people. He is an adventurer with a talent for writing, a compassionate heart, and a soft sense of humor....Galeano denounces exploitation with uncompromising ferocity, yet this book is almost poetic in its description of solidarity and human capacity for survival in the midst of the worst kind of despoliation".
She also said: "Like all his countrymen, Eduardo (the author) wanted to be a soccer player. He aslo wanted to be a saint, but as it turned out he ended up committing most of the deadly sins, as he once confessed 'I have never killed anybody, it is true, but it is because I lacked the courage or the time, not because I lacked the desire.'"
After reading this book, I think I can understand why he felt this way. It is also true for Che Guevara's reasoning - I can just see it so much better.
Not long after publishing 'The Open Veins..' , the author had to go into exhile, and his book was banned not only in his country - Uruguay - but also in Brasil, Argentina and Chile by the military goverments of the countries at the time.
In his other book, 'Days and Nights of Love and War (1983), he wrote: "...we are what we do, especially what we do to change what we are..." - well, he definetely did something to change others' views on Latin America.
In the introduction ('The Open Veins..'), Eduardo Galeano says:
"Along the way we have even lost the right to call ourselves Americans, (...). For the world today, America is just the United States; the region we inhabit is a sub-America, a second-class America of nebulous identity. 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."
"The human murder by poverty in Latin America is secret; every year, without making a sound, three Hiroshima bombs explode over communities that have become accustomed to suffering with clenched teeth. This systematic violence is not apparent but is real and constantly increasing: its holocausts are not made known in the sensational press but in Food and Agricultural Organization statistics."
From Part I - Mankind's poverty as a consequence of the wealth of the land:
"In 1912 President William H.Taft declared: 'The day is not far distant when three Stars and Stripes at three equidistant points will mark our territory: one at the North Pole, another at the Panama Canal, and the third at the South Pole. The whole hemisphere will be ours in fact as, by virtue of our superiority of race, it already is ours morally'."
From Part II - Development is a voyage with more shipwrecks than navigators:
"Brazil, the biggest coffee producer, does not have the right to compete by exporting its own soluble coffee...(...) only has the right to supply the raw material to enrich foreign factories."
From Part III - Seven years after:
"That reality and those books show that underdevelopment in Latin America is a cosequence of development elsewhere, that we Latin Americans are poor because the ground we tread is rich, and that places privileged by nature have been cursed by history."
"Slave ships no longer ply the ocean. Today the slavers operate from ministries of labor."
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