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A review by dejnozkova
Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by Eduardo Galeano
challenging
dark
informative
tense
medium-paced
5.0
Took me a while to get through this one because it’s kinda dense if you don’t have a background in economics. HOWEVER, Galeano’s talent for journalistic writing does make it a bit easier for the average person to follow the complexities of Latin America’s economic history, so honestly anyone CAN grasp the material if they give themselves the time.
It’s easy for a lot of us to say “well the global south is fucked because of the west” and yes quite a bit of that is true. But this book tells you precisely how Latin America has become to be the way that it is, detailing not only the imperialist and colonialist history we might all be familiar with, but also divulging the corruption of Latin American aristocracy and government, and the carefully strategized takeovers of Latin American industry by foreign capitalists. It’s easy to paint over every issue with a paintbrush statement, but Open Veins exposes how ridiculously insidious, pervasive, and INTENTIONAL economic exploitation really is; that power imbalance, poverty, monopolies, corruption, etc are not mere accidents or side-effects, but occur by design of players the average person is unaware of.
This book does truly carry over into today, as Galeano’s descriptions and predictions for the political and economic state of the region can continue to be observed even now. This book focuses on Latin America but it contributes to a global conversation regarding socioeconomic inequalities born from capitalism, and the fate of “underdeveloped”/“developing” countries as a whole.
It’s easy for a lot of us to say “well the global south is fucked because of the west” and yes quite a bit of that is true. But this book tells you precisely how Latin America has become to be the way that it is, detailing not only the imperialist and colonialist history we might all be familiar with, but also divulging the corruption of Latin American aristocracy and government, and the carefully strategized takeovers of Latin American industry by foreign capitalists. It’s easy to paint over every issue with a paintbrush statement, but Open Veins exposes how ridiculously insidious, pervasive, and INTENTIONAL economic exploitation really is; that power imbalance, poverty, monopolies, corruption, etc are not mere accidents or side-effects, but occur by design of players the average person is unaware of.
This book does truly carry over into today, as Galeano’s descriptions and predictions for the political and economic state of the region can continue to be observed even now. This book focuses on Latin America but it contributes to a global conversation regarding socioeconomic inequalities born from capitalism, and the fate of “underdeveloped”/“developing” countries as a whole.