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.