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

by Eduardo Galeano

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 reign of General Augusto Pinochet.

“You hear of ‘concessions’ to foreign capitalists in Latin America. You do not hear of concessions to foreign capitalists in the United States. They are not granted concessions.” He was confident: “States that are obliged … to grant concessions are in this condition, that foreign interests are apt to dominate their domestic affairs.… ,” he said, and he was right.1 Along the way we have even lost the right to call ourselves Americans, although the Haitians and the Cubans appeared in history as new people a century before the Mayflower pilgrims settled on the Plymouth coast. For the world today, America is just the United States; the region we inhabit is a sub-America, a second-class America of nebulous identity.

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 did not foresee this small headache, this surplus of people. And the people keep reproducing. They make love with enthusiasm and without precaution.

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.”

Is everything forbidden us except to fold our arms? Poverty is not written in the stars; underdevelopment is not one of God’s mysterious designs. Redemptive years of revolution pass; the ruling classes wait and meanwhile pronounce hellfire anathema on everybody.

In Don Quixote de la Mancha—which was banned for a long time in Latin America—Cervantes drew a portrait of the society of his time. A mid-sixteenth-century decree stopped the importation of foreign books and barred students from taking courses outside Spain; the Salamanca student body was reduced by half in a few decades; there were 9,000 convents and the clergy multiplied almost as fast as the cloak-and-sword nobility; 160,000 foreigners monopolized foreign trade; and the squanderings of the aristocracy condemned Spain to economic impotence.

By 1700 there were 625,000 hidalgos, knights of the battlefield, although the country was emptying: its population had dwindled by half in somewhat more than two centuries, and was equal to that of England, which had doubled in the same period. The Hapsburg regime finally ended in 1700 amid total bankruptcy. Chronic unemployment, idle latifundios, chaotic currency, ruined industry, lost wars, empty coffers, central authority ignored in the provinces: the Spain that Philip V faced was “hardly less defunct than its dead master.”

Marx wrote in Chapter 3 of the first volume of Capital: “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation.”

As the money economy extended, more and more social strata and regions of the world became involved in unequal exchange.

“The city which has given most to the world and has the least,”

Latin American silver and gold—as Engels put it—penetrated like a corrosive acid through all the pores of Europe’s moribund feudal society, and, for the benefit of nascent mercantilist capitalism, the mining entrepreneurs turned Indians and black slaves into a teeming “external proletariat” of the European economy.

Tupac was tortured, along with his wife, his children, and his chief aides, in Cuzco’s Plaza del Wacaypata. His tongue was cut out; his arms and legs were tied to four horses with the intention of quartering him, but his body would not break; he was finally beheaded at the foot of the gallows. His head was sent to Tinta, one arm to Tungasuca and the other to Carabaya, one leg to Santa Rosa and the other to Livitaca. The torso was burned and the ashes thrown in the Río Watanay. It was proposed that all his descendants be obliterated up to the fourth generation.

David Viñas’s novel Los dueños de la tierra (1959) opens with an Indian hunt: “For killing was like raping someone. Something good. And it gave a man pleasure: you had to move fast, you could yell, you sweated and afterward you felt hungry.… The intervals got longer between shots. Undoubtedly some straddled body remained in one of these coverts—an Indian body on its back with a blackish stain between its thighs.…”

The demand for sugar produced the plantation, an enterprise motivated by its proprietor’s desire for profit and placed at the service of the international market Europe was organizing. Internally, however— since it was to a considerable extent self-sufficient—the plantation was feudal in many important aspects, and its labor force consisted mainly of slaves. Thus three distinct historical periods—mercantilism, feudalism, slavery—were combined in a single socioeconomic unit.

Subordinated to foreign needs and often financed from abroad, the colonial plantation evolved directly into the present-day latifundio, one of the bottlenecks that choke economic development and condemn the masses to poverty and a marginal existence in Latin America today. The latifundio as we know it has been sufficiently mechanized to multiply the labor surplus, and thus enjoys an ample reserve of cheap hands. It no longer depends on the importation of African slaves or on the encomienda of Indians; it merely needs to pay ridiculously low or in-kind wages, or to obtain labor for nothing in return for the laborer’s use of a minute piece of land.

with the Amazonian rubber plantations, which became the cemeteries of Northeastern workers recruited for a few pennies; with the devastated quebracho forests in northern Argentina and Paraguay; with Yucatán’s henequen plantations, where Yaqui Indians were sent for extermination.

At first there had been orange and mango plantations, but these were left to their fate, or reduced to small orchards surrounding the sugarmill-owner’s house, reserved exclusively for the family of the white planter. Fire was used to clear land for canefields, devastating the fauna along with the flora: deer, wild boar, tapir, rabbit, pacas, and armadillo disappeared. All was sacrificed on the altar of sugarcane monoculture.

Reminds me of palm oil today

A legacy of those colonial days which continues is the custom of eating dirt. Lack of iron produces anemia, and instinct leads Northeastern children to eat dirt to gain the mineral salts which are absent from their diet of manioc starch, beans, and—with luck—dried meat. In former times this “African vice” was punished by putting muzzles on the children or by hanging them in willow baskets far above the ground.*

“You believe perhaps, gentlemen,” said Karl Marx in 1848, “that the production of coffee and sugar is the natural destiny of the

West Indies. Two centuries ago, nature, which does not trouble herself about commerce, had planted neither sugarcane nor coffee trees there.”3 The international division of labor was not organized by the Holy Ghost but by men—more precisely, as a result of the world development of capitalism.

Revolution broke out in the fall of 1791 and in one month, September, 200 sugar plantations went up in flames; fires and battles were continuous as the rebel slaves pushed France’s armies to the sea. Ships sailed containing ever more Frenchmen and ever less sugar. The war spilt rivers of blood, wrecked the plantations, and paralyzed the country, and by the end of the century production had fallen to almost nothing. By November 1803 almost all of the once flourishing colony was in ashes and ruins. The Haitian revolution had coincided—and not only in time—with the French Revolution, and Haiti bore its share of the international coalition’s blockade against France: England controlled the seas. Later, as its independence became inevitable, Haiti also had to suffer blockade by France. The U.S. Congress, yielding to French pressure, banned trade with Haiti in 1806. In 1825 France recognized its former colony’s independence, but only in exchange for a huge cash indemnity.

Arrowroot

Height

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

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.

In Guatemala in 1933, Jorge Ubico shot one hundred trade union, student, and political leaders while restoring the laws against Indian “vagrancy.” Each Indian had to carry a book listing his days of work; if these were deemed insufficient, he paid the debt in jail or by bending his back over the ground without pay for half a year. On the unhealthy Pacific coast men worked up to their knees in mud for $.30 a day and United Fruit explained that Ubico had forced it to cut wages.

The ambassador was paraded down La Paz’s main street sitting backward on a donkey and then shipped back to London. An infuriated Queen Victoria supposedly called for a map of South America, chalked an X over Bolivia, and pronounced sentence: “Bolivia does not exist.”

Bolivians die with rotted lungs so that the world may consume cheap tin.

Of every two children born in the mining camps, one dies soon after opening its eyes. The other, the survivor, will surely grow up to be a miner. And before he is thirty-five he will have no lungs.

equilibrium. The IMF was created to institutionalize Wall Street’s financial dominion over the whole planet, when the dollar first achieved hegemony as international currency after World War II.

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.

In Uruguay it is a crime not to inform on your neighbor. Students entering the university swear in writing that they will denounce anyone who indulges on campus in “any activity outside the functions of study.” The student assumes co-responsibility for whatever occurs in his presence. In this program for a society of sleepwalkers, all citizens must be their own and others’ policeman. However, the system—with good reason—is mistrustful. There are 100,000 police and soldiers in Uruguay, but there are also 100,000 informers. Spies work the streets, cafes and buses, factories and high schools, offices and the university. Anyone voicing a complaint about life being so expensive and so hard ends up in jail: he or she has committed a “crime against the moral force of the Armed Forces,” for which the price is three to six years behind bars.