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

by Eduardo Galeano

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 recent years, with a crisis that would seem to drag it into the last circle of hell. Uruguay is empty, and its fertile lands could provide food for infinitely more people than those who now suffer in such penury.