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

by Eduardo Galeano

Ecuador’s economy depends on the sale of bananas, coffee, and cacao, three food products highly subject to price fluctuations. According to official data, seven of every ten Ecuadoreans suffer from basic malnutrition, and the country has one of the highest death rates in the world.

More than one-fifth of all cotton consumed by the world’s textile industries comes from Latin America.

The United States’ agricultural surpluses are, as we know, the result of fat subsidies to its producers; it spills the surpluses out across the world at dumping prices as part of its foreign aid program. Cotton was Paraguay’s chief export until the ruinous competition of U.S. cotton displaced it in the market, and Paraguayan production has fallen by 50 percent since 1952. (In the same way Uruguay lost the Canadian market for its rice, and the wheat of Argentina, once the world’s granary, virtually vanished from international markets.)

US has a strabglehod on Latin American export prices due to their vast resources and subsidies to agriculture

World trade of Latin American cotton nevertheless remains lively thanks to its extremely low production costs. Even reality-concealing official figures betray the wretched standards of pay for actual work. In Brazil it is done either for hunger wages or on a serf basis. In Guatemala, plantation owners boast of paying 19 quetzals (about $10) a month, most of it in kind at prices they themselves determine. Mexican migrant workers, moving from harvest to harvest at $1.50 a day, suffer from underemployment and consequent undernutrition. The lot of Nicaraguan cotton workers is much worse, and Salvadorans, who supply cotton to Japanese textile industries, consume fewer calories and proteins than the hungry peasants of India.

Profits from low production costs due to wages that are barely enough to survive

The best lands, those along the coast, belonged to U.S. enterprises or to landlords who, like the Lima bourgeoisie, were only nationals in a geographical sense.

At the beginning of the 1950s Latin America was supplying four-fifths of the coffee the world consumed; since then the competition of “robust” African coffee, lower in quality but also in price, has reduced Latin America’s share.

Brazil is the world’s top producer, getting about half of its export income from coffee. El Salvador, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Haiti also largely depend on coffee, and it accounts for two-thirds of Colombia’s foreign exchange.

Extent of reliance on coffee exports

Today São Paulo is the most developed state in Brazil, containing the country’s industrial center, but its coffee plantations still teem with “vassal inhabitants” who pay rent for their land with their and their children’s toil.

paying rent in the form of wageless labor.

Modern slavery

In Colombia, where suitable slopes abound, coffee is king. According to a Time magazine report in 1962, only 5 percent of the price yielded by coffee in its journey from tree to U.S. consumer goes into the wages of the workers who produce it.

In 1889 coffee was worth two cents and six years later it had risen to nine; three years later it was down to four, five years after that to two. A typical period. The graph of coffee prices, like those of all tropical products, has always resembled a clinical epilepsy chart

Rise and fall of coffee prices

When President Getulio Vargas put a bullet through his heart in 1954, the price of coffee played a role in the tragedy: “The crisis in coffee production came,” he wrote in his moving final testament, “and the price of our chief product went up. We tried to defend the price and the answer was such violent pressure on our economy that we had to give in.” Vargas hoped that his blood would buy salvation for the Brazilian people.

With the price falling continually between 1964 and 1968, the consuming country—the United States—helped itself to more and more millions from the producing country, Brazil. But for the benefit of whom? Of the coffee-drinking citizen? In July 1968 Brazilian coffee cost 30 percent less in the United States than in January 1964, but U.S. consumers did not pay less: they paid 13 percent more. Thus in the 1964-1968 period middlemen kept the 13 percent as well as the 30 percent, feathering their nests twice over. In the same period the price Brazilian producers received for each sack of coffee dropped by half.28 Who are the middlemen? Six U.S. concerns control more than a third of the coffee that leaves Brazil, and another six control more than a third of what enters the United States: these firms dominate the business at both ends.29 Just as United Fruit monopolizes the sale of bananas from Central America, Colombia, and Ecuador, as well as their importation and distribution in the United States, so U.S. firms run the coffee business and Brazil only participates as supplier and victim. The Brazilian state takes over the stocks when overproduction demands the accumulation of reserves.

Profits of middlemen

It is much more profitable to consume coffee than to produce it. In the United States and Europe coffee creates income and jobs and mobilizes substantial capital; in Latin America it pays hunger wages and sharpens economic deformation. It provides work for more than 600,000 people in the United States: those who distribute and sell Latin American coffee there earn infinitely more than the Brazilians, Colombians, Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and Haitians who plant and harvest it on the plantations. And incredible as it seems, coffee—so ECLA tells us—puts more wealth into European state coffers than it leaves in the hands of the producing countries. In effect, in 1960 and 1961 the total taxes levied on Latin American coffee by European Economic Community countries amounted to about $700 million, while supplier countries (in terms of the f.o.b. value of exports) only got $600 million.30 The rich countries that preach free trade apply stern protectionist policies against the poor countries: they turn everything they touch—including the underdeveloped countries’ own production—into gold for themselves and rubbish for others.

***The most important aspect of international trade that serves as an example of theories by Marx and Wallerstein regarding globalization and thd accumulation of capital

The strongest premise for normality in the functioning of Colombian political life has been the attainment of our own kind of economic stability.

***The importance of economic circumstances determining cultural flourishing or political order

The bitter taste of hatred, long in the peasants’ mouths, provoked an explosion; the government sent police and soldiers to cut off testicles, slash pregnant women’s bellies, and throw babies in the air to catch on bayonet points—the order of the day being “don’t leave even the seed.” Liberal Party sages shut themselves in their homes, never abandoning their good manners and the gentlemanly tone of their manifestos, or went into exile abroad. It was a war of incredible cruelty and it became worse as it went on, feeding the lust for vengeance. New ways of killing came into vogue: the corte corbata, for example, left the tongue hanging from the neck. Rape, arson, and plunder went on and on; people were quartered or burned alive, skinned or slowly cut in pieces; troops razed villages and plantations and rivers ran red with blood. Bandits spared lives in exchange for tribute, in money or loads of coffee, and the repressive forces expelled and pursued innumerable families, who fled to seek refuge in the mountains. Women gave birth in the woods. The first guerrilla leaders, determined to take revenge but without clear political vision, took to destroying for destruction’s sake, letting off blood and steam without purpose.

Proletarian resistence met with violent suppression...

The bitter taste of hatred, long in the peasants’ mouths, provoked an explosion; the government sent police and soldiers to cut off testicles, slash pregnant women’s bellies, and throw babies in the air to catch on bayonet points—the order of the day being “don’t leave even the seed.” Liberal Party sages shut themselves in their homes, never abandoning their good manners and the gentlemanly tone of their manifestos, or went into exile abroad. It was a war of incredible cruelty and it became worse as it went on, feeding the lust for vengeance. New ways of killing came into vogue: the corte corbata, for example, left the tongue hanging from the neck. Rape, arson, and plunder went on and on; people were quartered or burned alive, skinned or slowly cut in pieces; troops razed villages and plantations and rivers ran red with blood. Bandits spared lives in exchange for tribute, in money or loads of coffee, and the repressive forces expelled and pursued innumerable families, who fled to seek refuge in the mountains. Women gave birth in the woods. The first guerrilla leaders, determined to take revenge but without clear political vision, took to destroying for destruction’s sake, letting off blood and steam without purpose.

...which inevitable led to an justifiably more violent uprising

In Colombia many just ran amok, yet that violent decade gave birth to the political guerrillas who later raised the banner of social revolution over broad areas they came to occupy and control.

Outcome of violent revolution was eventualy a social revolution

the horror of all the violence merely exposed the horror of the system.

***THE point***

In Colombia over a million children do not attend school. This does not discourage the system from running forty-one public and private universities, each with its own faculties and departments, to educate the children of the elite and middle class.

Good ol class disparity

Central American lands were comparatively unmolested up until the middle of the past century.

Great tracts of idle land—belonging to no one, or to the Church, or to the state—passed into private hands, and Indian communities were frenetically plundered. Peasants who declined to sell their land were hauled off into the army; plantations became human compost pits for Indians.

Western land grabs forcibly dispelled native families who has long occupied the land of Central America

In general—but especially in Guatemala—this structure of labor force appropriation is visibly identified with racism: Indians suffer the internal colonialism of whites and mestizos blessed ideologically by the dominant culture, just as Central American countries suffer foreign colonialism.

Race

U.S. concerns took over these railroads and built others, to carry the products of their own plantations exclusively, while monopolizing electric light, the mails, telegraph and telephone, and—a no less important public service—politics: in Honduras a mule costs more than a deputy, and throughout Central America U.S. ambassadors do more presiding than presidents. The United Fruit Company swallowed up its competitors in the production and sale of bananas and became Central America’s top latifundista, while its affiliates cornered rail and sea transport. It took over the ports and set up its own customs and police. The dollar in effect became the national currency of Central America. THE FILIBUSTERERS COME ABOARD In the geopolitical concept of imperialism, Central America is no more than a natural appendage of the United States. Not even Abraham Lincoln, who also contemplated annexation, could resist the “manifest destiny” of the great power to dictate to its contiguous areas.

Central America essentially became US satellite states

In the middle of the nineteenth century the filibusterer William Walker, operating on behalf of bankers Morgan and Garrison, invaded Central America at the head of a band of assassins. With the obliging support of the U.S. government, Walker robbed, killed, burned, and in successive expeditions proclaimed himself president of Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras. He restored slavery in the areas that suffered his devastating occupation, thus continuing his country’s philanthropic work in the states that had just been seized from Mexico. He was welcomed back to the United States as a national hero. From then on invasions, interventions, bombardments, forced loans, and gun-point treaties followed one after the other. In 1912 President William H. Taft declared: “The day is not far distant when three Stars and Stripes at three equidistant points will mark our territory: one at the North Pole, another at the Panama Canal, and the third at the South Pole. The whole hemisphere will be ours in fact as, by virtue of our superiority of race, it already is ours morally.”35 Taft said that the correct path of justice in U.S. foreign policy “may well be made to include active intervention to secure for our merchandise and our capitalists opportunity for profitable investment.”36 In the same period ex-President Theodore Roosevelt loudly recalled his successful amputation of land from Colombia: “I took the Canal Zone and let Congress debate,” said the proud Nobel Peace Prize winner as he ...

US action is blantantly imperialistic and US presidents are saying the quiet out loud

General Smedley D. Butler, who headed many of the expeditions, indicated the sort of merchandise that was wrapped inside the flag when he wrote in 1935 of his own experience: I spent thirty-three years and four months in active service as a member of our country’s most agile military force—the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from a second lieutenant to major-general. And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.… Thus I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank to collect revenues in. … I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras “right” for American fruit companies in 1903.37 In the first years of our century the philosopher William James passed the little-known judgment that the country had finally vomited the Declaration of Independence. To cite but one example: the United States occupied Haiti for twenty years and, in that black country that had been the scene of the first victorious slave revolt, introduced racial segregation and forced labor, killed 1,500 workers in one of its repressive operations (according to a U.S. Senate investigation in 1922), and when the...

****in the interest of business

General Smedley D. Butler, who headed many of the expeditions, indicated the sort of merchandise that was wrapped inside the flag when he wrote in 1935 of his own experience: I spent thirty-three years and four months in active service as a member of our country’s most agile military force—the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from a second lieutenant to major-general. And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.… Thus I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank to collect revenues in. … I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras “right” for American fruit companies in 1903.37 In the first years of our century the philosopher William James passed the little-known judgment that the country had finally vomited the Declaration of Independence. To cite but one example: the United States occupied Haiti for twenty years and, in that black country that had been the scene of the first victorious slave revolt, introduced racial segregation and forced labor, killed 1,500 workers in one of its repressive operations (according to a U.S. Senate investigation in 1922), and when the...

Introduced horrific, racist laws in the interest of US businesses

In Europe and the United States people had started to eat bananas, so they cut down the jungles through Central America to plant bananas, and built railroads to haul the bananas, and every year more steamboats of the Great White Fleet steamed north loaded with bananas, and that is the history of the American empire in the Caribbean, and the Panama canal and the future Nicaragua canal and the marines and the battleships and the bayonets.40 The land was as exhausted as the workers—the land was robbed of humus and the workers of their lungs—but there were always new lands to exploit and new workers to exterminate.

Me when when the when i uh banana

An agrarian reform law, aimed basically at developing a peasant capitalist economy and an agricultural capitalist economy in general, was approved in 1952. By 1954 over 100,000 families had benefited, although the law only affected idle lands and paid expropriated owners an indemnity in bonds. But since United Fruit was using a mere 8 percent of its land, which extended from ocean to ocean, its unused lands began to be distributed to the peasants. A frenetic international propaganda campaign was launched: “The Iron Curtain is falling over Guatemala,” roared the radio, newspapers, and the bigwigs of the Organization of American States. Colonel Rodolfo Castillo Armas, a graduate of the Fort Leaven-worth military post, invaded his own country with troops trained and equipped for the purpose by the United States, and with support from U.S.-piloted F-47 bombers.

Big business

An agrarian reform law, aimed basically at developing a peasant capitalist economy and an agricultural capitalist economy in general, was approved in 1952. By 1954 over 100,000 families had benefited, although the law only affected idle lands and paid expropriated owners an indemnity in bonds. But since United Fruit was using a mere 8 percent of its land, which extended from ocean to ocean, its unused lands began to be distributed to the peasants. A frenetic international propaganda campaign was launched: “The Iron Curtain is falling over Guatemala,” roared the radio, newspapers, and the bigwigs of the Organization of American States. Colonel Rodolfo Castillo Armas, a graduate of the Fort Leaven-worth military post, invaded his own country with troops trained and equipped for the purpose by the United States, and with support from U.S.-piloted F-47 bombers.

US support of accumulating capital and overthrowing democracy

The same forces that bombed Guatemala City, Puerto Barrios, and the port of San José on the evening of June 18,1954, are in power today. Foreign intervention was followed by a series of ferocious dictatorships—including the administration of Méndez, who lent democratic trappings to the tyranny.

Plantation owners and managers had the legal status of local authorities, with the right to carry arms and form punitive squads.

The systematic butchery set no teletypes humming; no news-hungry reporters flew to Guatemala, nor was any reproving voice heard. The world turned its back

Corpses—although not quite so many—continue to turn up in rivers and on roadsides, their featureless faces too disfigured by torture to be identified.

Landowners and businessmen increased their fortunes while poverty grew among the masses.

Latin America quickly gave birth to bourgeois constitutions well varnished with liberalism, but there was no creative bourgeoisie in the European or U.S. style to accompany them, one which would undertake as its historical mission the development of a strong national capitalism. The bourgeoisies of our countries came into being as mere instruments of international capitalism, liberally oiled cogs in the global mechanism that bled the colonies and semicolonies.

Western vs LA capitalism

Foreign intervention wiped it all out. The oligarchy reared its head and took vengeance. The validity of Artigas’ land distribution was legislatively repudiated. From 1820 until the end of the century, the poor patriots who had benefited from the agrarian reform were violently evicted.

In our day the Uruguayan countryside looks like a desert: 500 families monopolize half of all the land and, to crown their power, also control three-quarters of the capital invested in industry and banking. Agrarian reform projects pile up in the parliamentary cemetery while the countryside is depopulated: unemployment proliferates and the number of people occupied in agriculture steadily dwindles from one dramatic census to another.

The big landowners send their profits abroad, spend their summers at Punta del Este, and do not reside at their latifundios even in winter,