Since its publication in 1971, Open Veins of Latin America has been translated into more than a dozen languages and has sold more than a million copies. Written by Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano, the book chronicles five centuries of exploitation in Latin America—first by European empires, and later the United States. In it, Galeano argues that this “structure of plunder” led to the region’s enduring poverty and underdevelopment.
Now, according to a recent New York Times article, Galeano has disavowed the book. But has he?
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I first read this book in high school when I discovered it in the public library forty years ago. I read it as background for a paper I was doing about the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s democratically elected government in Chile, the previous year. I found it fascinating and I saw the pattern of how the US used and exploited Latin America had continued with the US-backed coup. It had a profound effect on me. Later, I read Memory of Fire, and I heard Galeano read. His later stories tell the same history in a much more poetic way. His voice is stronger and his prose more eloquent and powerful, more mature and in some respects more lasting. I think he is saying this himself, not renouncing the work, but the awkwardness of his language.
He writes better as an eloquent storyteller, not as a turgid political economist. Could he have written the masterful Memories trilogy or any of his later works, without the grounding of Open Veins? I think it better to see the continuum of his entire work. And to realize that a writer is often his (or her) own harshest critic.