Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
Tracing five centuries of exploitation in Latin America, a classic in the field, now in its twenty fifth year
Since its U.S. debut a quarter-century ago, this brilliant text has set a new standard for historical scholarship of Latin America. It is also an outstanding political economy, a social and cultural narrative of the highest quality, and perhaps the finest description of primitive capital accumulation since Marx.
Rather than chronology, geography, or political successions, Eduardo Galeano has organized the various facets of Latin American history according to the patterns of five centuries of exploitation. Thus he is concerned with gold and silver, cacao and cotton, rubber and coffee, fruit, hides and wool, petroleum, iron, nickel, manganese, copper, aluminum ore, nitrates, and tin. These are the veins which he traces through the body of the entire continent, up to the Rio Grande and throughout the Caribbean, and all the way to their open ends where they empty into the coffers of wealth in the United States and Europe.
Weaving fact and imagery into a rich tapestry, Galeano fuses scientific analysis with the passions of a plundered and suffering people. An immense gathering of materials is framed with a vigorous style that never falters in its command of themes. All readers interested in great historical, economic, political, and social writing will find a singular analytical achievement, and an overwhelming narrative that makes history speak, unforgettably.
This classic is now further honored by Isabel Allende's inspiring introduction. Universally recognized as one of the most important writers of our time, Allende once again contributes her talents to literature, to political principles, and to enlightenment.
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Community Reviews
The book is organized into different facets of Latin American history according to what the author describes as patterns of exploitation over five centuries. So, the book deals with one topic across the range of centuries and moves to the next. Topics include: gold and silver, cacao and cotton, hides and wool and then moving on to various other minerals and resources. The book spans all of Latin America and the Caribbean and it considers the impacts of rulers, corporations and the regular people.
My Review:
I decided to read this book since it appeared near the top of most online lists when I searched for "Best Books on South American History". In fact, it was one of the few books on these "best" lists that spanned a range of countries.
If you want to know how far leftist Latin-American intellectuals in 1960s/70s saw the causes of the region's problems and what should be done about them, then you should appreciate this book.
The author lacks a rudimentary understanding of economics as other reviewers have pointed out and the author himself acknowledged this in 2014. Given the topic of the book, this shortcoming in the author is a major issue.
The parts of the book covering earlier centuries manages to provide some credible accounts. It recounts the grim tale of colonization and what it meant to those who lived there as well as the slaves who were imported. Even in those parts of the book, the author gives an idealized account of the natives and their prior life but like other topics, the author lacks nuance or seeing a subject from multiple perspectives.
When the book discusses more recent times, the author becomes more strident. The author places blame for all Latin American problems on capitalism, various external powers ranging from Spain/Britain/Holland/US/IMF and foreign corporations as well as local advocates of market economies and free trade. In fact, of the many hundreds of different actions by US/Western European governments and private corporations over the whole time period, every single act recounted in the book was both selfish on their part and showed ill-will towards Latin Americans. The author's solutions to Latin American problems are Marxism and protectionism and he apparently doesn't see primarily internal factors (e.g. corruption, consistent application of the rule of law) as worthy of consideration. Post-1959 Cuba under Castro is idolized. That so many Cubans from this supposedly idyllic island chose to leave for the US (often on flimsy rafts) warrants neither mention nor consideration from this author. In 2014 during an anniversary celebration event of the book's publication (see book's Wikipedia page), the author conceded that he lacked the knowledge to write a book on political economy at the time of this book's writing. One wonders if 2014 hindsight on the failure of various communist states and the subsequent post-1990 improvement of those states as they moved to market economies caused him to question his previous certainties about the superiority of protectionism and Marxism.
There has been much cruelty to natives in Latin American as well as imported slaves. There have also been many cases where outside powers exerted undue and unjust pressure on Latin American nations and these stories rightly deserve telling. However, with so much of the book's telling formulated to fit the author's particular view of the world, it's difficult to take much of its content as objective or indeed to treat the book as a worthy historical account of Latin America.
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