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. Our inquisitor-hangman systems function not only for the dominating external markets; they also provide gushers of profit from foreign loans and investments in the dominated internal markets. Back in 1913, President Woodrow Wilson observed: “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.

The gap widens. Around the middle of the last century the world’s rich countries enjoyed a 50 percent higher living standard than the poor countries. Development develops inequality: in April 1969 Richard Nixon told the Organization of American States (OAS) that by the end of the twentieth century the United States’ per capita income would be fifteen times higher than Latin America’s. 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 oppressor countries get steadily richer in absolute terms—and much more so in relative terms—through the dynamic of growing disparity. The capitalist “head office” can allow itself the luxury of creating and believing its own myths of opulence, but the poor countries on the capitalist periphery know that myths cannot be eaten. The United States citizen’s average

income is seven times that of a Latin American and grows ten times faster. And averages are deceptive in view of the abyss that yawns between the many poor and the rich few south of the Río Grande. According to the United Nations, the amount shared by 6 million Latin Americans at the top of the social pyramid is the same as the amount shared by 140 million at the bottom. There are 60 million campesinos whose fortune amounts to $.25 a day.

The best Antillean rum, “West Indian Rum,” was not even made in the Antilles. With capital obtained from this trade in slaves, the Brown brothers of Providence installed the foundry that provided George Washington with guns for the American Revolution.

Today Paraguay’s population is barely double what it was then and, with Bolivia, it is one of the poorest and most backward countries in the hemisphere. The woes of the Paraguayans stem from a war of extermination which was the most infamous chapter in South American history: the War of the Triple Alliance, they called it. Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay joined in committing genocide. They left no stone unturned, nor male inhabitants amid the ruins. Although Britain took no direct part in the ghastly deed, it was in the pockets of British merchants, bankers, and industrialists that the loot ended up. The invasion was financed from start to finish by the Bank of London, Baring Brothers, and the Rothschild bank, in loans at exorbitant interest rates which mortgaged the fate of the victorious countries.

The U.S. agent Hopkins informed his government in 1845 that in Paraguay there was no child who could not read and write. It was also the only country that did not have its eyes riveted on the other side of the ocean. Foreign trade was not the axis of national life; liberal doctrine, the ideological expression of the global market, had no answer to the defiant attitude that Paraguay—forced by its inland isolation to grow inward—adopted from the beginning of the century.

Extermination of the oligarchy enabled the state to gather its economic mainsprings into its own hands, to put this autarchic

internal development policy i...

When the invaders appeared on the horizon in 1865, Paraguay had telegraphs, a railroad, and numerous factories manufacturing construction materials, textiles, linens, ponchos, paper and ink, crockery, and gunpowder. Two hundred foreign technicians, handsomely paid by the state, made a decisive contribution. From 1850 on, the Ibycui foundry made guns, mortars, and ammunition of all calibers; the arsenal in Asunción produced bronze cannon, howitzers, and ammunition. The steel industry, like all other essential economic activities, belonged to the state. The country had a merchant fleet, and the Asunción shipyard turned out many of the ships flying the Paraguayan flag on the Paraná and across the Atlantic and Mediterranean. The state virtually monopolized foreign trade; it supplied yerba maté and tobacco to the southern part of the continent and exported valuable woods to Europe. The trade balance produced a big surplus. With a strong and stable currency, Paraguay was wealthy enough to carry out great public works without recourse to foreign capital. It did not owe one penny abroad, yet was able to maintain the best army in South America, hire British technicians to serve the state instead of putting the state

at their service, and send some university students to finish their studies in Europe. The economic surplus from agricultural production was not squandered by an oligarchy (which did not exist); nor did it pass into the pockets of middlemen and loan sharks, or swell the profits of the British Empire’s freight and insurance men. The imperialist sponge, in short, did not absorb the wealth the country produced. Ninety-eight percent of Paraguayan territory was public property: the state granted holdings to peasants in return for permanently occupying and farming them, without the right to sell them.

The invaders came to redeem the Paraguayan people, and exterminated them. When the war began, Paraguay had almost as large a population as Argentina. Only 250,000, less than one-sixth, survived in 1870. It was the triumph of civilization. The victors, ruined by the enormous cost of the crime, fell back into the arms of the British bankers who had financed the adventure. The slave empire of Pedro II, whose armies were filled with slaves and prisoners, nevertheless won more than 20,000 square miles of territory—plus labor, for the Paraguayan prisoners who were marched off to work on the São Paulo coffee plantations were branded like slaves.

In 1965 Roberto Campos, economic czar of the Castelo Branco dictatorship, announced that “the era of charismatic leaders surrounded by a romantic aura is giving place to a technocracy.”7

Testifying before the parliamentary commission on the denationalization of Brazilian industry, two government ministers admitted that indigenously owned factories had been put at a disadvantage by the Castelo Branco regime’s measure permitting the direct inflow of external credit. They were referring to the famous Order 289 of early 1965, which allowed

foreign concerns operating in Brazil to get loans from abroad at 7 or 8 percent interest, with a government-guaranteed exchange arrangement in case the cruzeiro was devalued. Brazilian concerns had to pay almost 50 percent interest on credits they obtained—with difficulty—at home. The inventor of the measure, Roberto Campos, offered this explanation: “Obviously the world is unequal. Some are born intelligent, some stupid. Some are born athletes, others crippled. The world is made up of small and large enterprises. Some die early, in the prime of life; others drag themselves criminally through a long useless existence. There is a basic fundamental inequality in human nature, in the condition of things. The mechanism of credit cannot escape this. To postulate that national enterprises must have the same access to foreign credit as foreign enterprises is simply to ignore the basic realities of economics. …”* According to this brief but meaty “Capitalist Manifesto,” the law of the jungle is the natural code governing human life; injustice does not exist, for what we know as injustice is merely an expression of the cruel harmony of the universe: poor countries are poor because… they are poor; our fate is written in the stars and we are born only to fulfill it. Some are condemned to obey, others

are appointed to command. Some put their necks out and others put on the rope. The author of this theory was the creator of Internat...

The only objective of nationalism, he wrote, is to satisfy the human being’s primitive need for hate.

As in other Latin American countries, application of IMF formulas opened the gates to let foreign conquerers into an already scorched land. From the end of the 1950s economic recession, monetary instability, the credit drought, and a decline in internal purchasing power all helped to capsize national industry and put it at the mercy of imperialist corporations. With the magical incantation of “monetary stabilization,” the IMF—which not disinterestedly confuses the fever with the disease, inflation with the crisis of existing structures—has imposed on Latin America a policy that accentuates imbalances instead of easing them. It liberalizes trade by banning direct exchanges and barter agreements; it forces the contraction of internal credits to the point of asphyxia, freezes wages, and discourages state activity. To this program it adds sharp monetary devaluations which are theoretically supposed to restore the currency to its real value and stimulate exports. In fact, the devaluations merely stimulate the internal concentration of capital in the ruling classes’ pockets and facilitate absorption of national enterprises by foreigners who turn up with a fistful of dollars.

of agreements guaranteeing investments against

Dictator Somoza, son of dictator Somoza, peered out through the keyhole. Various businesses were put to the torch by the angry people. One of them, Plasmaféresis by name, specialized in vampirism. This concern which went up in smoke at the beginning of 1978 was the property of Cuban exiles, and its business was selling Nicaraguan blood to the United States. (In the blood business, as in all others, what the producers receive is barely a tip. The Hemo Caribbean

outfit, for example, pays Haitians $3 per liter of blood, which it resells for $25 in the U.S. market.)

The Congressional Record of the United States is replete with irrefutable evidence of interventions in Latin America. Guilt-ridden consciences purge themselves in the imperial confessionals. Recently official admissions of U.S. responsibility for various disasters have multiplied. Full public confessions have proved among other things that the U.S. government directly participated in Chilean politics by bribery, espionage, and blackmail.

The strategy for the crime was planned in Washington. Kissinger and the intelligence services were carefully preparing the fall of Allende ever since 1970. Millions of dollars were distributed among enemies of the legal Popular Unity government. That, for example, was how the truck owners in 1973 could keep going their long strike which paralyzed much of the country’s economy. The assurance of impunity loosens tongues. When the coup took place against Goulart, the United States had in Brazil its largest embassy anywhere on earth. Lincoln Gordon, the ambassador, admitted to a journalist thirteen years later that his government had long been financing the forces opposing the reforms. “What the hell,” said Gordon, “that was more or less a habit in those days.… The CIA used to dole out political funds.”6 In the same interview Gordon explained that when the coup took place the Pentagon had a huge aircraft carrier and four supply ships stationed off the Brazilian coast “in case the anti-Goulart forces should ask for our help.” That help, he

said, “wouldn’t be just moral. We would back them up logistically, with supplies, munitions, oil.” 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. The U.S. Congress resolved in 1976 and 1977 to suspend economic and military aid to various countries. But most U.S. external aid doesn’t go through the congressional filter. So despite pronouncements, resolutions, and protests General Pinochet’s regime got $290 million of direct U.S. aid in 1976 without congressional authorization. When General Videla’s dictatorship in Argentina was a year old it had received $500 million from private U.S. banks and $415 milli...

in 1975, had risen to $700 million tw...

President Carter’s concern about the butchery in some Latin American countries seems healthy, but the present dictators are not self-taught: they have learned the techniques of repression and the arts of government at academies run by the Pentagon in the United States and the Panama Canal Zone. These courses are still being given today, and no change is known to have been made in their content. The Latin American military men who are now causing a scandal in the United States have been good pupils. A few years ago when he was defense secretary, Robert McNamara, now president of the World Bank, spelled it out: “They are the new leaders. I don’t need to expatiate on the value ...

Dictators, torturers, inquisitors: the terror has its officials, just as it has post offices and banks, and they apply it because it is necessary. It isn’t a case of a plot by the perverse. General Pinochet may look like a figure in Goya’s “black art,” a prize specimen for psychoanalysts, or the inheritor of a savage tradition from the banana republics. But the clinical or folkloric roots of this or that dictator, which provide seasoning for history, are not history. Who would dare maintain today that World War I broke out because of the complexes of Kaiser Wilhelm, who had one arm shorter than the other? As Bertolt Brecht wrote at the end of 1940 in his working diary: “In democratic countries the violent character inherent in the economy doesn’t show itself; in authoritarian countries the same holds true for the economic character of violence.”

In Latin America’s southern lands the centurions have taken over power as a function of the needs of the system: the terrorism of the state

is put into action when the dominant classes can pursue their business by no other means. Torture wouldn’t exist in our countries if it weren’t effective; formal democracy would continue if it could be guaranteed not to get out of the hands that hold power. In difficult times democracy becomes a crime against national security—that is, against the security of internal privilege and foreign investment. Our devices for mincing human flesh are part of an international machinery. The whole society is militarized, the state of exception is made permanent, and the repressive apparatus is endowed with hegemony by the turn of a screw in the centers of the imperial system. When crisis begins to throw its shadow, the pillage of poor countries must be intensified to guarantee full employment, public liberties, and high rates of devel...

Furthermore in our day, importation of the most advanced economies’ technology coincides with expropriation of locally capitalized industries by the all-powerful multinationals. The capital-centralizing movement is achieved by “ruthless wiping out of ’obsolete’ entrepreneurial levels which, not by accident, are precisely those of national ownership.”14 The speeded-up denationalization of Latin American industry carries with it a growing technological dependency. Technology, the decisive key to power, is monopolized in the capitalist world by the metropolitan centers. It comes to us second-hand but those centers charge for the copies as if they were the originals. In 1970 Mexico paid twice as much as in 1968 for importation of foreign technology. Between 1965 and 1969 Brazil doubled its payments, and so did Argentina over the same period.

Centuries ago the conquest cleared our lands to plant crops for export and annihilated the indigenous populations in the mines to satisfy the demand abroad for silver and gold. The diet of the pre-Columbian population that could survive the exterminations deteriorated as the foreigners progressed. In our day the people of Peru produce fishmeal very rich in protein, for the cattle of the United States and Europe, but proteins are conspicuously absent from the diet of most Peruvians. The Volkswagen affiliate in Switzerland plants a tree for every car it sells—gracious ecological gesture—while the Volkswagen affiliate in Brazil uproots thousands of acres of forest to dedicate them to intensive production of meat for export.

Slave ships no longer ply the ocean. Today the slavers operate from the ministries of labor. African wages, European prices. What are the Latin American coups d’état but successive episodes in a war of pillage? The dictators hardly grasp their scepters before they invite foreign concerns to exploit the local, cheap, and abundant work force, the unlimited credit, the tax exemptions, and the natural resources that await them on a silver tray.

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 In this program for a society of deaf mutes, each citizen has to become his own Torquemada.

In these lands we are not experiencing the primitive infancy of capitalism but its vicious senility. Underdevelopment isn’t a stage of development, but its consequence. Latin America’s underdevelopment arises from external development, and continues to feed it. A system made impotent by its function of international servitude, and moribund since birth, has feet of clay. It pretends to be destiny and would like to be thought eternal.