Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent

by Eduardo Galeano

We were in the midst of the Socialist government of Salvador Allende, the first Marxist ever to become president in a democratic election,

If I had been able to read between the lines, I could have concluded that Salvador Allende’s government was doomed from the beginning. It was the time of the Cold War, and the United States would not allow a leftist experiment to succeed in what Henry Kissinger called “its backyard.”

The Cuban Revolution was enough; no other socialist project would be tolerated, even if it was the result of a democratic election.

On September 11,1973, a military coup ended a century of democratic tradition in Chile and started the long re...

Similar coups followed in other countries, and soon half the continent’s population was living in terror. This was a strategy designed in Washington and imposed upon the Latin American people by the economic and political forces of the right. In every instance the military acted as mercenaries to the privileged groups in power. Repression was organized on a large scale; torture, concent...

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.”

“We live in a world that treats the dead better than the living. We, the living are askers of questions and givers of answers, and we have other grave defects unpardonable by a system that believes death, like money, improves people.”

Can we make ourselves heard in the midst of a deaf-mute culture?

so long as the possessors of power continue to carry on with impunity their policy of collective imbecilization through … the mass media.

Harnessed as they have always been to the constellation 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.

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.

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.

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. “Fight poverty, kill a beggar!” some genius of black humor scrawled on a wall in La Paz.

Lyndon B. Johnson’s remark has become famous: “Let us act on the fact that less than $5 invested in population control is worth $100 invested in economic growth.”3

Dwight D. Eisenhower prophesied that if the world’s inhabitants continued multiplying at the same rate, not only would the danger of revolution be increased, but there would also be a lowering of living standards for all peoples, including his own.

The United States is more concerned than any other country with spreading and imposing family planning in the farthest outposts. Not only the government, but the Rockefeller and the Ford foundations as well, have nightmares about millions of chil...

Its aim is to justify the very unequal income distribution between countries and social classes, to convince the poor that poverty is the result of the children they don’t avoid having, and to dam the rebellious advance of the masses.

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.

Various U.S. missions have sterilized thousands of women in Amazonia, although this is the least populated habitable zone on our planet. Most Latin American countries have no real surplus of people; on the contrary, they have too few. Brazil has thirty-eight times fewer inhabitants per square mile than Belgium, Paraguay has forty-nine times fewer than England, Peru has thirty-two times fewer than Japan. Haiti and El Salvador, the human antheaps of Latin America, have lower population densities than Italy. The pretexts invoked are an insult to the intelligence; the real intentions anger us. No less than half the territory of Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Venezuela has no inhabitants at all. No Latin American population grows less than Uruguay’s—a country of old folk—yet no nation has taken such a beating in...

Over a century ago a Guatemalan foreign minister said prophetically: “It would be strange if the remedy should come from the United States, the ...

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.

Is everything forbidden us except to fold our arms?

Poverty is not written in the stars; underdevelopment is not one of God...

And the ideologists of impotence, the slaves who look at themselves with the master’s eyes, are not slow to join in the outcry.

perpetuation of the existing order of things is perpetuation of the crime.

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 announces what will be.

the current mechanisms of plunder

The feat of discovering America can only be understood in the context of the tradition of crusading wars that prevailed in medieval Castile; the Church needed no prompting to provide a halo for the conquest of unknown lands across the ocean.

Pope Alexander VI, who was Spanish, ordained Queen Isabella as proprietor and master of the New World. The expansion of the kingdom of Castile extended God’s reign over the earth.

Three years after the discovery Columbus personally directed the military campaign against the natives of Haiti, which he called Espanola. A handful of cavalry, 200 foot soldiers, and a few specially trained dogs decimated the Indians. More than 500, s...

On his third voyage, Columbus still believed he was in the China Sea when he was off the coast of Venezuela.

In the Middle Ages a small bag of pepper was worth more than a man’s life, but gold and silver were the keys used by the Renaissance to open the doors of paradise in heaven and of capitalist mercantilism on earth.

The epic of the Spaniards and Portuguese in America combined propagation of the Christian faith with usurpation and plunder of native wealth.

The Caribbean island populations finally stopped paying tribute because they had disappeared: they were totally exterminated in the gold mines, in the deadly task of sifting auriferous sands with their bodies half submerged in water, or in breaking up the ground beyond the point of exhaustion, doubled up over the heavy cultivating tools brought from Spain. Many natives of Haiti anticipated the fate imposed by their white oppressors: they killed their children and committed mass suicide. The mid-sixteenth-century historian Fernández de Oviedo interpreted the Antillean holocaust thus: “Many of them, by way of diversion, took poison rather than work, and others hanged themselves with their own hands.”5 *

America had been given to Queen Isabella. In 1508 another bull granted the Spanish Crown, in perpetuity, all tithes collected in America.

and in 1530 Martim Affonso de Sousa founded the first Portuguese communities in Brazil, expelling French intruders. By

none of the native cultures knew iron or the plow, or glass, or gunpowder, or used the wheel except on their votive carts.

The unequal development of the two worlds explains the relative ease with which native civilizations succumbed.

Montezuma thought it was the god Quetzalcoatl returning: there had been eight prophesies of this not long before.

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.

Bacteria and viruses were the most effective allies. The Europeans brought with them, like biblical plagues, smallpox and tetanus, various lung, intestinal, and venereal diseases, trachoma, typhus, leprosy, yellow fever, and teeth-rotting caries.

Smallpox was the first to appear.

The Indians died like flies; their organisms had no defense against the new diseases.

more than half the aboriginal population of America, Australia, and Oceania died from the contamination of first contact with white men.

The Spaniards “were in seventh heaven,” says the Nahuatl text preserved in the Florentine Codex. “They lifted up the gold as if they were monkeys, with expressions of joy, as if it put new life into them and lit up their hearts. As if it were certainly something for which they yearn with a great thirst. Their bodies fatten on it and they hunger violently for it. They crave gold like hungry swine.”

The sword and the cross marched together in the conquest and plunder of Latin America, and captains and ascetics, knights and evangelists, soldiers and monks came together in Potosí to help themselves to its silver.

“Worth a Peru” was the highest possible praise of a person or a thing after Pizarro took Cuzco, but once the Cerro had been discovered Don Quixote de la Mancha changed the words: “Worth a Potosí,” he says to Sancho.

Only twenty-eight years had passed since the city sprouted out of the Andean wilderness and already, as if by magic, it had the same population as London and more than Seville, Madrid, Rome, or Paris. A new census in 1650 gave Potosí a population of 160,000. It was one of the world’s biggest and richest cities, ten times bigger than Boston—at a time when New York had not even begun to call itself by that name.