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A review by woolfen
Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by Eduardo Galeano
5.0
5 stars.
This book is dense - Galeano writes a novel but is nothing but efficient. 'Underdevelopment isn’t a stage of development, but its consequence.'
Deployment of statistics and sketches of horror fill every page - rationally and emotionally you swallow this account of Latin America and feel ill. I hate to be a caricature but my jaw dropped about 20 pages in - I was sat alone reading in bed. The horror of colonialism, and the extended and drawn out permutations it goes through are visceral: the account of Potosí really seared itself into my mind. The 'hollowing' of its hill in the name of silver, the spending of human life is a microcosm in this book - every resource, every account is like that - and it's true all over the world where colonialism has had its way: the DRC, SA, Ghana, Mali, etc.
"The task lies in the hands of the dispossessed, the humiliated, the accursed. The Latin American cause is above all a social cause: the rebirth of Latin America must start with the overthrow of its masters, country by country. We are entering times of rebellion and change. There are those who believe that destiny rests on the knees of the gods; but the truth is that it confronts the conscience of man with a burning challenge." p261
When we are shown that the structures of the world are so clearly evinced from exploitation - then we should look at the structures that facilitate it. "There is nothing more orderly than a graveyard [but] every act of destruction meets its response, sooner or later, in an act of creation."
This book is dense - Galeano writes a novel but is nothing but efficient. 'Underdevelopment isn’t a stage of development, but its consequence.'
Deployment of statistics and sketches of horror fill every page - rationally and emotionally you swallow this account of Latin America and feel ill. I hate to be a caricature but my jaw dropped about 20 pages in - I was sat alone reading in bed. The horror of colonialism, and the extended and drawn out permutations it goes through are visceral: the account of Potosí really seared itself into my mind. The 'hollowing' of its hill in the name of silver, the spending of human life is a microcosm in this book - every resource, every account is like that - and it's true all over the world where colonialism has had its way: the DRC, SA, Ghana, Mali, etc.
"The task lies in the hands of the dispossessed, the humiliated, the accursed. The Latin American cause is above all a social cause: the rebirth of Latin America must start with the overthrow of its masters, country by country. We are entering times of rebellion and change. There are those who believe that destiny rests on the knees of the gods; but the truth is that it confronts the conscience of man with a burning challenge." p261
When we are shown that the structures of the world are so clearly evinced from exploitation - then we should look at the structures that facilitate it. "There is nothing more orderly than a graveyard [but] every act of destruction meets its response, sooner or later, in an act of creation."