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

by Eduardo Galeano

“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.”

From another novel, Cacao (1935): “Not even the children touched the cacao fruit. They were afraid of those yellow berries, so sweet on the inside, which enslaved them to this life of breadfruit and dried meat.” For, after all, “cacao was the great senhor feared even by the colonel.”

Since President Jimmy Carter announced a policy of human rights, it has become the custom for Latin American regimes imposed by U.S. intervention to formulate indignant pronouncements against U.S. intervention in their internal affairs.

In Argentina 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. Thus the consumer of a book gets the same treatment the law applies to consumers of drugs.25