Bloody classic on Latin America's evolution that Chávez gifted to Obama
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/0429/1224245598109.htmlJOHN MORAN BOOK OF THE DAY: JOHN MORAN reviews Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent By Eduardo Galeano (Translated by Cedric Belfrage) Monthly Review Press 313pp, €17.95
HUGO CHÁVEZ, the controversial Venezuelan president, caused a sensation recently in the capital of Trinidad and Tobago at the fifth Summit of the Americas, a quadrennial gathering of all countries on the American continent bar one.
Huddles of diplomats gathering in Port of Spain had been fretting about the reception US president Barack Obama might receive from the fiery Chávez who had earlier referred to Obama as an “ignoramus”.
To the relief of all the envoys on the tiny Caribbean island, Chávez greeted Obama warmly, saying: “I want to be your friend”, and proffered a book, Las Venas Abiertas de América Latina/Open Veins of Latin America . Inside the cover, Chavez had written: “For Obama with affection.”
Suddenly at the summit all media attention focused on that book – which has since become a publishing phenomenon. (Within days it was top of Amazon’s bestseller list and a new edition from Serpent’s Tail is coming out on May 21st.)
The book is revered throughout the “Other America”. It is a learned treatise that shines a dazzling light on the dark imperial pasts in South America of old Europe, the Catholic Church, the US and certain of its business interests, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, by Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano , published first in Spanish in 1971, is the classic left-leaning text covering the epic suffering of the indigenous Indian population and African slaves in the region at the hands of colonial powers for more than 500 years.
One of Galeano’s great achievements is to have written so engagingly and beautifully about such terrible suffering.
The “open veins” of the title refers both to the spilt blood of the millions worked to death by the colonial powers; and to the veins of gold, silver and other precious minerals and sugar, cocoa and cotton taken from the continent during that period.
Galeano sequences his story in sections, dealing with specific “veins” of the continent’s natural wealth. In the chapter on gold and silver, the appalling European impact on the continent is revealed. Galeano tells us that some eight million Indians alone died in the silver mines of Cerro Rico, high above Potosí in Bolivia; that Britain could not have taken on Napoleon without its South American gold; and that Portugal imported 10 million African slaves to Brazil.
Isabel Allende has written in a foreword to a later edition: “This breath of hope is what moves me the most in Galeano’s work. Like thousands of refugees all over the continent, I also had to leave my country after the military coup of 1973.” One of the few belongings she took after fleeing Gen Augusto Pinochet’s regime was Open Veins . She thanked the writer for his contribution to her “awareness as a writer and as a citizen of Latin America”.
Galeano himself was forced to flee Uruguay after a military coup. His book was banned too, as it was in the military dictatorships of Argentina and Chile.
This is an important study for anyone interested in understanding modern South American and Caribbean sensibilities concerning their past and why what they pointedly call “Our America” has changed so radically in recent years, as military dictatorships tumbled and left-leaning democracies emerged and became closer to each other.
One example of the new disposition is that 33 of the 34 American states expect Cuba to be invited to the sixth Summit of the Americas in 2013.
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John Moran is an Irish Times journalist
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