Author: Eduardo Galeano
Translator(s)/ Editors(s): Cedric Belfrage/ Isabel Allende
Publisher: Three Essays
Year: 2008
Language: English
Pages: 317
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8188789666
Description
Rejecting straightforward chronology, Eduardo Galeano traces Latin America’s exploitation and impoverishment through the history of its principal commodities. Over five centuries, he explores the minerals and crops which have made a rich region poor, while building the fortunes of US and European transnationals. From the gold and silver sought by the Spanish conquistadores to the oil and copper extracted by present day foreign corporations, Galeano presents a disturbing and fascinating picture of economic injustice.
Blending historical fact with poetic imagery, Open Veins of Latin America is both an impassioned critique of transnational exploitation and a tribute to the passions of a plundered and suffering people. Isabel Allende’s inspiring Foreword to this classic text testifies to Eduardo Galeano’s status as one of Latin America’s foremost writers.
COMMENTS
"A superbly written, excellently translated, and powerfully persuasive exposé which all students of Latin American and U.S. history must read."
--CHOICE, American Library Association
Eduardo Galeano’s analysis of the effects and causes of capitalist underdevelopment in Latin America presents a clear, passionate account of almost 500 years of Latin American history. Galeano shows how foreign companies reaped huge profits through their operations in Latin America. He explains the politics of the Latin American bourgeoisies and their subservience to foreign powers, and how they interacted to create increasingly unequal capitalist societies in Latin America. Open Veins continues to speak to generations of people who want to understand capitalism and exploitation in Latin America, and in the rest of the world.
- ELIZABETH DORE, University of Southampton, author of Myths of Modernity: Peonage and Patriarchy in Nicaragua
Erudite, Angry, Sweeping in its scope, Open Veins of Latin America is a Powerful Survey of a Continent’s Under-Development and the Role of Foreign Capital and National Politics in that Process.
He has more first-hand knowledge of Latin America than anybody else I can think of, and uses it to tell the world of the dreams and disillusions, the hopes and the failures of its people Galeano denounces exploitation with uncompromising ferocity, yet this book is almost poetic in its description of solidarity and human capacity for survival in the midst of the worst kind of despoliation. This almost superhuman talent for storytelling is what makes Open Veins of Latin America so easy to read. The book flows with the grace of a tale; it is impossible to put it down.
- ISBEL ALLENDE, from the Foreword
Contents
Foreword by Isabel Allende
From In Defense of the Word
Acknowledgement
Introduction: 120 Million Children in the Eye of the Hurricane
PART I: MANKIND’S POVERTY AS A CONSEQUENCE OF THE WEALTH OF THE LAND
1. Lust for Gold, Lust for Silver
2. King Sugar and other Agricultural Monarchs
3. The Invisible Sources of Power
PART II: DEVELOPMENT IS A VOYAGE WITH MORE SHIPWRECKA THAN NAVIGATORS
4.Tales of Premature Death
5. The Contemporary Structure of Plunder
PART III: SEVEN YEARS AFTER
References
Index