OPEN VEINS OF LATIN AMERICA - EDUARDO GALEANO

This is a classic I’d never gotten around to. I’ve heard about it for a while, it’s one of those lefty-classics, and always had it pitched to me as a sort of “South of the Rio Grande A PEOPLE’S HISTORY” which isn’t the worst description. It does the Zinn-thing where it recasts the last 500 years of Latin American history as less of a heroic march of progress and more of a series of unimaginably evil events and programs. Though, if you’ve read A PEOPLE’S HISTORY you might be thinking, “wait, if Zinn’s book is ~700pgs and about 1 country (and only, really over the last 250 years) and this book is about  a dozen or so countries over 500 years, is this book 1,000+ pages or a book in a dozen volumes?” The answer, thankfully, is no. Galeano does assume you know something about Latin American History. He expects you to know about the Paraguayan War and who Papa Doc is. This is a lot to ask from a gringo, our history classes are boring propaganda about the USA and basically nothing about any other part of the world, so if you’re not deep in this stuff, you’ll want Wikipedia open. I’m pretty familiar with this stuff but it was exciting to read more about, say, William Walker, the famous filibuster, or this Taft quote Galeano digs up predicting anAmerican flag on the North Pole, the South Pole and the Panama canal. It’s instructive to see all this stuff laid out in one place. He does a good job following threads over the centuries, one that, as a reader and someone who pays attention to the news, you can update in real-time as you read. This book was published in ‘70 (my edition includes a 7-years-later final chapter) so there’s the most recent 50 years of Latin American history to take into account. For example, lots of ink is spilled over the plight of Bolivia. Galeano traces Europeans’ obsession with Bolivian silver which morphed into an obsession with tin and what these obsessions did to Bolivia. How European countries sent mineral attaches to the embassies of Latin America to focus on exploitative extraction. Interesting history, but just this year, Bolivia experienced an attempted right-wing coup, facilitated in part by the OAS, which seems to have been motivated, at least in part, by a desire for Bolivia’s lithium. The same old song, a song that this book traces back to the 1500s. Likewise, the political movements in Brazil and Venezuela, as well as the “War on Drugs” which doesn’t really get going until after this is published are all issues that you can pretty clearly see the roots of. Likewise, the contemporary structure of plunder, to use an A+ phrase of Galeano, is neo-liberal in design and outlook, and neoliberalism was just a twinkle in UofChicago’s eye when the book was written but it’s instructive to see what conditions it emerges into. This would be a great book to give a high schooler who’s just starting to think about the world and who it works. Apparently Chavez gave Obama a copy (amazing troll) and Allende, who writes the intro, fled Chile with only a copy of this book so it has quite a pedigree. Galeano complains that the prose is boring and that he’d make it more engaging if he were to rewrite it. I find this strange, the book is full of phrases like, “the neon-lit center is as resplendent as ever with the squandermania of a multimillionaire class.” which already places it in the top 5th percentile of engaging and artful writing in non-fiction history but maybe Spanish language histories are more inventive with their prose? English has a long tradition of dry-as-fuck history-prose so he’s got nothing to complain about. Either way, the book and the history are troubling and upsetting. All US Americans should be required to read it. Now I’ve got to find a Brazil specific history. 1519 open veins.