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462 reviews for:
Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
Eduardo Galeano
4.29 AVERAGE
462 reviews for:
Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
Eduardo Galeano
4.29 AVERAGE
Been listening to ‘Open Veins of Latin America’ and I can’t even begin to describe how shocking the systematic plunder of Latin America has been. I think this book is a must read for all those who want to understand how the exploitation of markets today, is built off the back of the exploitation of colonialism.
"Aid" works like the philanthropist who put a wooden leg on his piglet because he was eating it bit by bit. p. 227
... ruling classes crush the forces of change, tear them up by the roots, perpetuate the internal orders of privilege, and generate economic and political conditions that would seduce foreign capital: scorched earth, tranquility and order, workers cheap and meek. There is nothing more orderly than a cemetery.
[..]
... it is no longer necessary to ban any book by decree. The new Penal Code penalizes, as always, the writer and publisher of a book considered subversive. But it also penalizes the printer (so that no one will dare to print a text that is merely doubtful) and the distributor and the bookstore (so that no one will dare sell it); and as if this weren’t enough, it also penalizes the reader, so that no one will dare read it, much less keep it.
[...]
it is a crime not to inform on your neighbor. Students entering the university swear in writing that they will denounce anyone who indulges on campus in “any activity outside the functions of study.” The student assumes co-responsibility for whatever occurs in his presence.
... ruling classes crush the forces of change, tear them up by the roots, perpetuate the internal orders of privilege, and generate economic and political conditions that would seduce foreign capital: scorched earth, tranquility and order, workers cheap and meek. There is nothing more orderly than a cemetery.
[..]
... it is no longer necessary to ban any book by decree. The new Penal Code penalizes, as always, the writer and publisher of a book considered subversive. But it also penalizes the printer (so that no one will dare to print a text that is merely doubtful) and the distributor and the bookstore (so that no one will dare sell it); and as if this weren’t enough, it also penalizes the reader, so that no one will dare read it, much less keep it.
[...]
it is a crime not to inform on your neighbor. Students entering the university swear in writing that they will denounce anyone who indulges on campus in “any activity outside the functions of study.” The student assumes co-responsibility for whatever occurs in his presence.
challenging
dark
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Friedrich List, father of the German customs union, once observed that free trade was Britain's chief export.[...]But free trade only became revealed truth for them after[...] they had developed their own textile industry under the umbrella of Europe's toughest protectionist legislation. In the difficult early days, when British industry was still at a disadvantage, an Englishman caught exporting raw wool was sentenced to lose his right hand, and if he repeated the sin he was hanged. It was prohibited to bury a corpse without prior certification from the parish priest that the shroud came from a British factory.Decades after Galeano wrote this work, the author discussed how it, in some ways, disappointed him: he acknowledged that he had been no expert in political economy at the time of the writing, and he also expressed disdain for the stodgy nature of the prose. Practically everyone with some major say in the media playing field, right and left, fascist and anarchist, viewed this as a permanent smear on the book's legacy, enough that some, especially those whose oligarchical stabilities were most threatened by what the work had to say, proclaimed that this meant that the writer himself had officially taken back his words. As someone whose writings often take on the passionate, sarcastic, and prolix tone that indelibly characterizes Galeano's writing, I know what it's like to work extremely hard in pulling together a great deal of resources, most of them entirely abstruse in their relation to the common reader, in an effort to not only inform those around you, but in great measures yourself, that the hand pushing everyone under water is not a matter of deity, or fate, or some other 'chain of being' principle that absolves the mortal coil of any responsibility for anything, conscious or otherwise. So, when reading this, I myself thought the prose grew very heavy at times, especially during the section on financial intricacies of loans and debts, which felt both redundant compared to the earlier sections as well as lifelessly droning, as if it had been more wholesale transplanted from the materials cited in this work's extensive bibliography. Considering, however, the times, the events both recent and in the new future, and how hard it is to find works contemporaneous to all this that, in many ways, are an ancestor to [b:The Shock Doctrine|1237300|The Shock Doctrine The Rise of Disaster Capitalism|Naomi Klein|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1442590618l/1237300._SY75_.jpg|2826418], that come out of a love for the people, rather than out of yet another CIA/Chicago School thinktank, I think Galeano did as well as he could with the resources he had. Much like any major text that lacks of method of incorporating critical, yet well reasoned, commentary directly into its veins, its credibility has not kept pace with its ideals since its publishing half a century ago, and these are still the neoliberal times when many an ivory tower learning institution in many a 'first world' country would argue that this more than justifies throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I'd say, such a fearmongering reaction more than justifies keeping it on, in service to those whose dreams are much bigger and infinitely more humanity-sustaining than the latest Tesla model and a well funded stock portfolio.
With petroleum, as with coffee or meat, rich countries profit more from the work of consuming it than do poor countries from the work of producing it.Having first gotten through Galeano's [b:Memory of Fire|2104355|Memory of Fire|Eduardo Galeano|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1331154801l/2104355._SY75_.jpg|8351624] in its full, nearly thousand page form, a work such as this that barely amounted to one of its three volumes didn't seem as bad. To those tempted to interpret that as that they should dive into this work, beginning to end, as their introduction to Galeano, I have to counsel that, while the MoF trilogy is much longer, its facts and figures and technically nonfiction material is much more narratively engaging throughout than this text is. Frankly, this work would best serve as quick lookup for those jumping off from a name to a fact to a date to a context to yet another work that contains the same segment of information but perhaps in a much more focused, specialized, and thoroughly argued form, and the fact that I made my way through much as I would a novel attests more to my stubbornness than anything else. Even then, the road was uneven, and I had the easiest, aka I was the most lusciously engaged, time with anything that was more history than economics, something that was probably impacted by Galeano's own varying comfort level with the material that he was putting together. As such, I wouldn't be surprised if there were certain sections where the work completely falls apart, but, much as is the case with [b:The Rape of Nanking|95784|The Rape of Nanking|Iris Chang|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348687411l/95784._SY75_.jpg|31912], if the main text disappoints you, there's plenty of cited material for you to undertake in search of nonfiction that better suits your standards of credibility. This is a work that probably could have easily been written on the scale of [b:The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire|19400|The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire|Edward Gibbon|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1435759367l/19400._SY75_.jpg|3209631] were there the time and the resources and the safety to do so, and the fact that it wasn't is more a condemnation of the difference in circumstances that dictated the composition of one work versus the other than it is of the author.
[T]he lack of democracy only disturbed people who were nostalgic for lost privileges.
Hermetic language isn't the invariable and inevitable price of profundity. In some cases it can simply conceal incapacity for communication raised to the category of intellectual virtue. I suspect that boredom can thus often serve to sanctify the established order, confirming that knowledge is a privilege of the elite.I learned there are bisexual indigenous deities, as well as that there had been a Paraguayan "dictatorship" where every citizen had their quality of necessary life more than matched through a combination of high protectionism and nonexistent aristocratic/theological control, before Opium War style puppeteering cracked open the country and spilled its guts to rot. I learned about the power of monocultures, the extent to which it applies to both the Banana Republic and the US South, as well as how many of those who fled Cuba after the revolution may have well been members of the families that amputated that country piece by piece and ate its marginalized denizens for breakfast. I learned that cocoa and sugar had their parts to play in the ongoing histories of violence in Brazil and Haiti, just as there were potatoes in Ireland and rice in Bengal, and that just as there is more than one way to skin a cat, so too are there ever developing, ever refining ways of seducing the head of the country to put the body to work and permanently deprive those lower parts of reaching their true potential. I learned that the obsession that certain sectors of the "liberal" US of the modern day have with the concept of diversity has as much to do with the humanization of the postcolonial/neoliberal brain drain, wherein no one will stick around long enough to push through the more intricate legal/social/political/IMF/World Bank/etc structures through so long as Chile's Allende is held up as one of many examples of what will inevitably come to pass. I learned that you can hold up certain portions of the history/modern day of Latin America to certain portions of the United States in terms of the weakening of labor laws, the persisting threat of the military industrial complexed police force, the sharp divide in reality centered around the fact that there are more empty homes than homeless people at any given point in the country during the year, the socialism for the rich, the slavery for the poor, the bigotry that both propels and distracts from the cold and calculated legalisms and contracts that pump money upstream, the buying off of those in the position to do something and the assassination of everyone else: your money, or your life. I'm sure Galeano could have been more through in his citations in certain places, and the strength of his arguments probably isn't what it was back in the day, but considering how much it scared the kind of people who view history as a trebuchet that they must constantly work to keep pointed at everyone else, this is not a text that will, or can afford to, fall into obscurity any time soon.
A legacy of those colonial days which continues is the custom of eating dirt. Lack of iron produces anemia, and instinct leads Northeastern children to eat dirt to gain the mineral salts which are absent from their diet of manioc starch, beans, and—with luck—dried meat. In former times this "African vice" was punished by putting muzzles on the children or by hanging them in willow baskets far above the ground.For the first time in five to seven years, my shelves are free of any yet to be read works by Eduardo Galeano. There are many works I could take up in the place of the trilogy and then the single piece, both first first coming to my attention through many a list that acknowledged the need for one or more token Latin American authors, and I'm sure I've even come across at least one of the author's published musings on soccer once or twice. I suppose my problem is, one that I've only recently recognized as something that requires a certain measure of persistent combatting, is that, like many complacent denizens of the US, I read works sourced from certain locations with the expectation that they will, in one way or another, make me a better person. To move, then, from powerful and wide ranging indictments of Anglo imperialism and all its voracious descendants to slightly less intensive writerly meanderings that haven't yet survived long enough to become classics in and of themselves seems a less than enticing prospect. And yet, simply skimming the summaries of these shorter, more contemporary books with less than invigorating titles, I'm discovering that I'm misinformed as to what they are actually on about, and that Galeano, even in a less authoritative text sanctioned form, will probably still engage me on the level of writing as well as on idea. So, a thought for a future, when casual browsing of library sales is once again a thing and thin, battered, non-Anglo works sell for half a buck to those who know what to look for. For now, I'll leave others to begin or continue their own journey of discovering the intellectual titan that is Eduardo Galeano, as he was the one who crawled so that many of us could fly.
Anatole France aptly said that the law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor from sleeping under bridges, begging in the streets, and stealing bread.
The United States depends on foreign sources for most of the minerals it needs to maintain its ability to wage war.
Four women and 14 children, who had come to La Paz from the tin mines, then started a hunger strike.
"This isn't the moment," pronounced the wiseacres. "We'll let you know when..."
The women sat down on the floor.
"We're not asking you," they said, "we're telling you. The decision has been taken. Up there at the mine it's a permanent hunger strike. You get born and the hunger strike starts right then and there. And that's where we have to die too. It's slower, but we have to die too."
I read this book in three different stages - in January 2021, July 2021, & March 2022. Each time I returned to it I had more knowledge of the framework Galeano was operating in, and each time I liked the book even more. The most poetic portrayal of imperialist history I’ve ever seen.
Quien se compromete a leer el libro, debe estar preparado para cambiar su vida. Aquí empezamos los latinoamericanos a liberarnos: Galeano expone datos, propuestas, teorías y hechos de la historia de esclavización, colonialismo y opresión que ha vivido América Latina desde épocas inmemoriales.
challenging
dark
informative
inspiring
sad
medium-paced
dark
informative
reflective
slow-paced