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Open Veins of Latin America
Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
By Eduardo Galeano

Introduction: 120 Million Children in the Eye of the Hurricane
The division of labor among nations is that some specialize in winning and others in losing
...
Centuries passed, and Latin America perfected its role
...
But our region still works as a menial
...
The taxes collected by the buyers
...
Olive/;" said in July
1968, to speak of fair prices is a "medieval" concept, for we are in the era of free trade
...
Our inquisitor hangman systems function not only for the dominating external markets;
they also provide gushers of profit from foreign loans and investments in the dominated internal markets
...
You do not hear of concessions to foreign capitalists in the United States
...
to grant concessions are in this
condition, that foreign interests are apt to dominate their domestic affairs
...
1
Along the way we have even lost the right to call ourselves Americans, although the Haitians and the
Cubans appeared in history as new people a century before the Mayflower pilgrims settled on the Plymouth
coast
...

Latin America is the region of open veins
...
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
...
To each area has been assigned a function, always for the benefit of the foreign metropolis of
the moment, and the endless chain-of dependency has been endlessly extended
...
In Latin America it also includes the oppression of small countries by their larger
neighbors and, within each country's frontiers, the exploitation by big cities and ports of their internal
sources of food and labor
...
)
For those who see history as a competition, Latin America's backwardness and poverty are merely
the result of its failure
...
But the winners happen to have won thanks to our losing: the
history of Latin America's underdevelopment is, as someone has said, an integral part of the history of world
capitalism's development
...
In the
colonial and neocolonial alchemy, gold changes into scrap metal and food into poison
...
Northeast
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Brazil's sugar and Argentina's quebracho belts, and communities around oil-rich Lake Maracaibo, have
become painfully aware of the mortality of wealth which nature bestows and imperialism appropriates
...
In the same way,
and symmetrically, the well-being of our dominating classes-dominating inwardly, dominated from outside-is
the curse of our multitudes condemned to exist as beasts of burden
...
Around the middle of the last century the world's rich countries enjoyed a 50
percent higher living standard than the poor countries
...
The strength of the
imperialist system as a whole rests on the necessary inequality of its parts, and this inequality assumes
ever more dramatic dimensions
...
The capitalist "head office" can allow
itself the luxury of creating and believing its own myths of opulence, but the poor countries on the capitalist
periphery know that myths cannot be eaten
...
And averages are deceptive in view of the abyss that yawns
between the many poor and the rich few south of the Rio Grande
...
There are 60 million campesinos whose fortune amounts to $
...

At the other extreme, the pimps of misery accumulate $5 billion in their private Swiss or U
...
bank accounts
...
Harnessed as they have
always been to the con-(page14) stellation of imperialist power, our ruling classes have no interest
whatsoever in determining whether patriotism might not prove more profitable than treason, and whether
begging is really the only formula for international politics
...
" The oligarchies' cynical alibis confuse the impotence of a social class with the presumed empty
destinies of their countries
...
" In the eye of this hurricane 120 million children
are stirring
...

One child dies of disease or hunger every minute, but in the year 2000 there will be 650 million Latin
Americans, half of whom will be under fifteen: a time bomb
...
Latin America's three largest markets-Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico-together
consume less than France or West Germany, although their combined population considerably exceeds
that of any European country
...

For its foreign masters and for our commission-agent bourgeoisie, who have sold their souls to the
devil at a price that would have shamed Faust, the system is perfectly rational; but for no one else, since the
more it develops, the greater its disequilibrium, its tensions, and its contradictions
...
New factories are built in the privileged
poles of development-Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Mexico City-but less and less labor is needed
...
And the people keep reproducing
...
Ever more people are left beside the road (page 15) without
work in the countryside, where the latifundios reign with their vast extensions of idle land, without work in
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the city where the machine is king
...
United States' missionaries sow pills,
diaphragms, intrauterine devices, condoms, and marked calendars, but reap children
...

At the beginning of November 1968 Richard Nixon loudly confirmed that the Alliance for Progress
was seven years old and that malnutrition and food shortages had nevertheless intensified in Latin America
...
Ball wrote in Life: "But at least for the next several decades, the
discontent of poorer nations does not threaten world destruction
...
Unjust as it may be, the power of
poor countries is limited
...
S
...

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
...
Ball says that it is
still possible to act with impunity because the poor cannot set off a world war, but the Imperium is worried:
unable to multiply the dinner, it does what it can to suppress the diners
...
What do the heirs to Malthus propose but to kill all the
beggars-to-be before they are born? Robert McNamara, the World Bank president who was chairman of
Ford and then Secretary of Defense, has called the population explosion the greatest obstacle to progress
in Latin America; the World Bank, he says, will give priority in its loans to countries that implement birth
control plans
...
" Lyndon B
...
" 3 Dwight D
...

The United States is more concerned than any other country with spreading and imposing family
planning in the farthest outposts
...
Plato and Aristotle considered the question before Malthus and McNamara; in our day this global
offensive plays a well-defined role
...
While intrauterine devices compete with bombs
and machine-gun salvos" to arrest the growth of the Vietnamese population, in Latin America it is more
hygienic and effective to kill guerrilleros in the womb than in the mountains or the streets
...
S
...
Most Latin American countries have no real surplus of people; on the contrary, they
have too few
...
Haiti and El Salvador, the
human antheaps of Latin America, have lower popula-(page 17) tion densities than Italy
...
No less than half the territory of
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Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Venezuela has no inhabitants at all
...
Uruguay is empty, and its fertile
lands could provide food for infinitely more people than those who now suffer in such penury
...
" Now that the
Alliance for Progress is dead and buried the Imperium proposes, more in panic than in generosity, to solve
Latin America's problems by eliminating Latin Americans; Washington has reason to suspect that the poor
peoples don't prefer to be poor
...
Those who
deny liberation to Latin America also deny our only possible rebirth, and incidentally absolve the existing
structures from blame
...
In lands that are empty it proposes to avoid births; in countries where
capital is plentiful but wasted it suggests that capital is lacking; it describes as "aid" the deforming
orthopedics of loans and the draining of wealth that results from foreign investment; it calls upon big
landowners to carry out agrarian reforms and upon the oligarchy to practice social justice
...
The Marines undertake their criminal
expeditions only to restore order and social peace; the dictatorships linked to Washington lay foundations in
their jails for the law-abiding state, and ban strikes and smash trade unions to protect the freedom to work
...
Redemptive years of revolution pass; the ruling
classes wait and meanwhile pronounce hellfire anathema on everybody
...
If
the future turns out to be a Pandora's box, the conservative has reason to shout, "I have been betrayed
...
The bronze eagle of the Maine, thrown down on the day the Cuban Revolution triumphed,
now lies abandoned, its wings broken, in a doorway in the old town in Havana
...
Recovery of the resources that have always been usurped is
recovery of our destiny
...
History is a prophet who looks back: because of what was, and against what was,
it announce~ what will be
...
And, too, the defeated heroes and revolutions of our time, the infamies and the
dead and resurrected hopes: the fertile sacrifices
...
Quihica meant" door"; the death of each chosen victim opened the door to a new cycle
of 185 moons
...
At the same time there have been
fierce policy debates over how the region
should progress to overcome enormous
problems of poverty and economic underdevelopment, debates which have
mostly centred on the contention between neo-liberal and socialist prescriptions
...

Francisco Panizza, a senior lecturer in
politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science of Uruguayan
background, has written a nuanced description of the evolution of development
policy beginning in the late 1980s, when
it seemed like socialist prescriptions were
no longer a threat to what he calls the
economic orthodoxy
...
” John
Williamson coined the term in a 1990
edited book, Latin American Economic
Adjustment? How Much has Happened?
(Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics)
...

These prescriptions were in line with laissez-faire neo-liberalism
...
Williamson was agnostic on the
question of which model of capitalism

– Anglo-Saxon (closest to neo-liberalism), European social market, or Japanese-style – provided the best guidance
for developing societies
...

From the late 1980s to the late 1990s
the Washington Consensus achieved
clear hegemony among policy makers
...
Privatization and free market
reforms, while initially promising to their
proponents, did not usher in a new epoch
of clear sailing economic growth
...
There is now a
more serious focus on poverty alleviation
through state action, and on the need for
some steps toward developing equality of
opportunity, though not of outcomes
...
In the latter there was a significant
Latin American backlash against neo-liberalism and the Washington Consensus,
which were blamed for causing the crises
and aggravating the traditional problems
of poverty and inequality as well as allowing an explosion of crime, drugs, and other social problems
...
Panizza accurately notes that a number of these, including Carlos Andrés Pérez in Venezuela
and Lucio Gutiérrez in Ecuador, used bait
and switch tactics: they ran against neoliberalism but then, once in office, adopted economic shock programs
...

In large part because of failures of
Washington Consensus policies, the late

REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS / 285

1990s and the 2000s saw a resurgence of
left-wing governments
...
Venezuela, Bolivia,
and Ecuador sought to completely break
with neo-liberalism and the Washington
Consensus and, in the case of Venezuela,
adopted the goal of creating socialism for
the twenty-first century
...

Panizza devotes considerable time to
comparing the opposite trajectories of
Venezuela and Brazil
...
But once in
office, Lula accommodated to many neoliberal prescriptions to the consternation
of many in his party
...
But he moved steadily to
the left, especially after the 2002 coup,
and in 2006 ran on a platform of socialism for the twenty-first century
...

He has produced a good synthesis of the
evolution of part of the debates around
market reforms; and his treatment of the
left-wing governments is fair despite his
not appearing to share their goals
...
Despite
often referring to external constraints
as being important for explaining policy
choices, he does not more than abstractly
note their importance
...
He leaves readers
with the impression that policy develops according to its own logic and validity for reflecting economic realities and

predicting successful courses of action –
a kind of idealism that neglects material
circumstances
...
It occurred in the aftermath of brutal Washington-supported military dictatorships
and massacres of left-wing activists who
had promoted socialist alternatives
...
”
There is no analysis, even in passing,
of the enormous power that the United
States has exercised over Latin America
...
The United States through
the Central Intelligence Agency, the influence that it wields in international financial institutions such as the World Bank
and International Monetary Fund, and
Pentagon-coordinated alliances with Latin American militaries insured that Latin
American development would not be inimical to its own interests
...

Is it any wonder that the neo-liberalinspired Washington Consensus would
appear to be “the common core of economic wisdom embraced by all serious
economists” after ten years of Reagan and
Bush governments in the United States? Is
it any wonder that Washington in its traditional imperial mode would seek to impose that set of prescriptions after it had
been complicit in the killing or intimidation into silence of potential opponents?
Strangely, there are only two in-passing references in the book to the whole

286 / LABOUR /LE TRAVAIL 66

Cuban revolutionary experience
...
Ignoring Cuba in the book
is the intellectual parallel to Washington’s economic blockade of the island
...
Much better works in those respects
include Ximena de la Barra and Richard
A
...

James W
...
Whitney, Mobilizing Youth:
Communists and Catholics in Interwar
France (Durham and London: Duke
University Press 2009)
In this important study, Susan B
...
Both sponsored
vibrant youth organizations during the
1920s and 1930s, and both wrestled
with how to incorporate young people
into their ideological vision, while at
the same time incorporating new ideas
that youth could bring to them as a way
of ensuring their organizations’ popular
appeal and future success
...
She argues convincingly that
both Communists and Catholics devoted
much attention to youth politics, though
both insisted upon adult control of youth
organizations
...

Whitney places her book within the
historiography of youth in interwar Europe, a topic that has received much attention in recent years
...
The idea of a period of
life between childhood and adulthood,
symbolized in particular by the increased
amount of formal education required of
young people, has usually been considered not just a recent phenomenon but
a hallmark of modernity
...
In contrast, Whitney studies working-class young people,
in part because they were so much more
numerous
...
The
author generally looks at the period from
the ages of 13, when most working-class
children left school for good and took up
full-time work, to the mid-20s
...
The Communist and Catholic youth movements she studies confronted the challenge of addressing these



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