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

by Eduardo Galeano

“it’s worthwhile to die for things without which it’s not worthwhile to live.”

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

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.

The rain that irrigates the centers of imperialist power drowns the vast suburbs of the system.

Around the middle of the last century the world’s rich countries enjoyed a 50 percent higher living standard than the poor countries.

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

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.

How many Hiroshimas did these successive exterminations add up to?