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

by Eduardo Galeano

The more freedom is extended to business, the more prisons have to be built for those who suffer from that business.

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 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.

Over a century ago a Guatemalan foreign minister said prophetically: “It would be strange if the remedy should come from the United States, the same place which brings us the disease.”

When Alexander von Humboldt investigated the customs of the ancient inhabitants of the Bogotá plateau, he found that the Indians called the victims of ritual ceremonies quihica. Quihica meant “door”; the death of each chosen victim opened the door to a new cycle of 185 moons.

The metals taken from the new colonial dominions not only stimulated Europe’s economic development; one may say that they made it possible.

The Indians of the Americas totaled no less than 70 million when the foreign conquerors appeared on the horizon; a century and a half later they had been reduced to 3.5 million.

Tourists love to photograph altiplano natives in their native costumes, unaware that these were imposed by Charles III at the end of the eighteenth century. The dresses that the Spaniards made Indian females wear were copied from the regional costumes of Estremaduran, Andalusian, and Basque peasant women, and the center-part hair style was imposed by Viceroy Toledo.

Exiled in their own land, condemned to an eternal exodus, Latin America’s native peoples were pushed into the poorest areas—arid mountains, the middle of deserts—as the dominant civilization extended its frontiers. The Indians have suffered, and continue to suffer, the curse of their own wealth; that is the drama of all Latin America.

Each region, once integrated into the world market, experiences a dynamic cycle; then decay sets in with the competition of substitute products, the exhaustion of the soil, or the development of other areas where conditions are better. The initial productive drive fades with the passing years into a culture of poverty, subsistence economy, and lethargy. The Northeast was Brazil’s richest area and is now its poorest; in Barbados and Haiti human antheaps live condemned to penury; in Cuba sugar became the master key for U. S. domination, at the price of monoculture and the relentless impoverishment of the soil.

The more a product is desired by the world market, the greater the misery it brings to the Latin American peoples whose sacrifice creates it.

The Brazilian Northeast is today the most underdeveloped area in the Western hemisphere.† As a result of sugar monoculture it is a concentration camp for 30 million people—on the same soil that produced the most lucrative business of the colonial agricultural economy in Latin America.

Jamaica entered the eighteenth century with ten times more slaves than white colonists. Its soil too was soon exhausted.

The extensive plunder-culture of sugarcane meant not only the death of the forest but also, in the long run, the death of the island’s fabulous fertility.

“A people that entrusts its subsistence to one product alone commits suicide,” the national hero José Martí had prophesied.

From the U.S. standpoint, Puerto Ricans are not good enough to live in a country of their own but are good enough to die in Vietnam for a country which is not theirs.

SUGAR WAS THE KNIFE, IMPERIALISM THE ASSASSIN

According to Sergio Bagú, the most potent force for the accumulation of mercantile capital was slavery in the Americas; and this capital in turn became “the foundation stone on which the giant industrial capital of modern times was built.”

Back in 1562 Captain John Hawkins had smuggled 300 blacks out of Portuguese Guinea. Queen Elizabeth was furious: “It was detestable and would call down vengeance from heaven upon the undertakers,” she cried.12 But Hawkins told her that in exchange for the slaves he had a cargo of sugar, hides, pearls, and ginger in the Caribbean, and she forgave the pirate and became his business partner.

Although the Catholic religion officially embraces 94 percent of the population of Brazil, black Brazilians today maintain their African traditions and keep alive their religious faith, often camouflaged behind Christian saints; cults of African origin are widely practiced by the oppressed, whatever their skin color. The same is true in the Antilles. The voodoo gods in Haiti, Cuba’s bembé, and Brazil’s umbanda and quimbanda are more or less the same, despite the greater or smaller transfiguration that rites and original gods have undergone through American naturalization.

Tropical lands produced sugar, tobacco, cotton, indigo, turpentine; a small Caribbean island had more economic importance for England than the thirteen colonies that would become the United States.

In fact, according to the newspaper Correio da Manhã, “more than twenty foreign religious missions, mainly of the U.S. Protestant church, are occupying Amazonia, functioning in places that are richest in radioactive minerals, gold, and diamonds.… They make extensive use of sterilization, using the intrauterine device, and teach English to the catechized Indians. … Their areas are surrounded by armed elements and no one can enter them.”

Note that Amazonia is the largest of all the habitable deserts on our planet. Birth control has been introduced into this great empty space to avoid demographic competition by the very few Brazilians who live and reproduce in remote corners of the immense forests and plains.

Guilty consciences are thus relieved of the need for alibis, for no one is guilty: today’s imperialism radiates technology and progress, and even the use of this old, unpleasant word to define it is in bad taste. But when imperialism begins exalting its own virtues we should take a look in our pockets.

Latin America provides the saliva as well as the food, and the United States limits its contribution to the mouth.

In international markets there is a virtual monopoly of demand for raw materials and of supply of industrial products, while suppliers of basic products, who are also buyers of finished goods, operate separately. The former, grouped around, and dominated by, the United States—which consumes almost as much as all the rest of the world—are strong; the latter are isolated and weak: the oppressed competing against the oppressed.

The din of development shatters its eardrums; factories and skyscrapers, bridges and highways, sprout with the suddenness of tropical plants. But if accuracy had a place in publicity, the slogan would be: “Grow at the expense of Brazil.” Despite its deceptive splendors, this development is a banquet to which few are invited and whose main dishes are reserved for foreign stomachs.

Huaico means landslide in the Quechua language, and that is what Peruvians call the human avalanche let loose from the mountains upon the coastal capital: nearly 70 percent of Lima’s inhabitants come from the provinces.

And the most favorable reviews came not from any prestigious critic but from the military dictatorships that praised the book by banning it. For example, Open Veins is unobtainable either in my country, Uruguay, or in Chile; in Argentina the authorities denounced it on TV and in the press as a corrupter of youth. As Bias de Otero remarked, “They don’t let people see what I write because I write what I see.”

Veneration for the past has always seemed to me reactionary. The right chooses to talk about the past because it prefers dead people: a quiet world, a quiet time. The powerful who legitimize their privileges by heredity cultivate nostalgia.

History is studied as if we were visiting a museum; but this collection of mummies is a swindle. They lie to us about the past as they lie to us about the present: they mask the face of reality. They force the oppressed victims to absorb an alien, dessicated, sterile memory fabricated by the oppressor, so that they will resign themselves to a life that isn’t theirs as if it were the only one possible.

Our countries are becoming echoes and losing their own voice. They depend on others, they exist to the extent that they respond to others’ needs.