Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America -- Thom Hartmann's Independent Thinker Review

THOM HARTMANN'S INDEPENDENT THINKER REVIEW OF THE MONTH

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Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. (This is the book that Hugo Chavez gave to President Barack Obama at the Summit of the Americas and that Obama said that he would read.)

When Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez famously gave US President Barack Obama a book as a gift, that book – Open Veins of Latin America – became an instant and overnight international bestseller. Having now read it, I must give a strong commendation to Chavez for finding the perfect book to let an American (as in “a US citizen”) understand how most of the peoples in the rest of the Americas view us, and why.

Not only should Obama read this book – as soon as possible (because not only is Latin America viewing us this way, but now Iraqis are, too, and disgruntled Saudis, etc., etc.) – but it should become a basic text in every high school civics class in the United States.

The subtitle of the book is “Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent,” and it delivers on that with eloquence and detail. And it’s not exclusively (or, frankly, even largely) a story of pillage by the USA.

The story of Paraguay is particularly poignant; in the mid-19th century it had become economically and politically independent and largely democratic. This was something the British oligarchs couldn’t tolerate, so they worked with their associates in Brazil and Argentina (largely) to gin up a war that would destroy this nascent experiment in egalitarianism and small-"d" democracy. Paraguay has never recovered from that war, and true access to its resources have largely been in the hands of multinational corporations and other powers ever since.

In the opening paragraph of this review, I qualified referring to citizens of the USA as “Americans.” As Galeano writes in the introduction to his book, after explaining how US President Woodrow Wilson had pointed out the overlord/underlord (my words, not his) relationship between the US and Latin America:

“[Woodrow Wilson] was confident: ‘States that are obliged…to grant concessions are in this condition, that foreign interests are apt to dominate their domestic affairs…’ he said, and he was right. Along the way we have lost the right to call ourselves Americans, although the Haitians and the Cubans appeared in history as new people a century before the Mayflower pilgrims settled on the Plymouth coast. For the world today, America is just the United States; the region we inhabit is a sub-America, a second-class America of nebulous identity.”

As Isabel Allende notes in the foreword to Open Veins, Eduardo Galeano is uniquely gifted as a storyteller. She tells the story of being stranded in Cuba with him for a few days, cut off from communication with the rest of the world, and being entertained and entranced for hours on end by his storytelling abilities, his incredible recall, his unique use of language. “There is a mysterious power in Galeano’s story-telling,” she writes. “He uses his craft to invade the privacy of the reader’s mind, to persuade him or her to read and to continue reading to the very end to surrender to the charm of his writing and the power of his idealism.”

Open Veins begins with Columbus and ends in the late 1970s. And although it’s a breathtaking and relentless march through the horrors of colonialism, fascism, and unbridled raw capitalism, it ends on an optimistic note (which we are seeing flower today as country after country in South and Central America elect progressive/left governments). Galeano, being a much better writer than me, captures this cautionary and hopeful note best in the final two pages of his book:

“In our countries the terror industry pays dearly, like any other, for foreign ‘know-how.’ U.S. repression technology, tested at the four corners of the earth, is bought and applied. But it would be unjust not to credit Latin America’s ruling classes with a certain creative capacity in this field.

“Independent economic development was beyond the capacity of our bourgeoisies, and their attempts to create a national industry had a short low flight, like a hen’s. Throughout our historical process the masters of power have likewise demonstrated their lack of political imagination and their cultural sterility. On the other hand they did know how to set up a giant fear machine and have made their own contributions to the technique of exterminating persons and ideas. In this sense the recent experience of the Rio de la Plata countries is revealing.

“’The task of disinfection will take us a long time,’ the Argentine brass warned when they took the stage. The armed forces were successively summoned by Uruguay’s and Argentina’s ruling classes to crush the forces of change, tear them up ty the roots, perpetuate the internal orders of privilege, and generate economic and political conditions that would seduce foreign capital: scorched earth, tranquility and order, workers cheap and meek. There is nothing more orderly than a cemetery. The population immediately became the internal enemy. Any sign of life, of protest, or even mere doubt, is a dangerous challenge from the standpoint of military doctrine and national security. So complicated mechanisms of prevention and punishment have been developed.

“A deep rationality lurks behind appearances. To operate effectively the repression must appear arbitrary. Apart from breathing, any human activity can constitute a crime. In Uruguay torture is applied as a routine system of interrogation: anyone may be its victim, not only those suspected or guilty of acts of opposition. In this way panic fear of torture is spread through the whole population, like a paralyzing gas that invades every home and implants itself in every citizen’s soul.

“In Chile the hunt for human prey left a balance of 30,000 dead, but in Argentina they don’t shoot: they kidnap. The victims ‘disappear.’ The invisible armies of the night carry out the task. There are no corpses and no one is responsible. In this way the bloodbath has the more immunity for not being ‘official,’ and thus collective anxiety is more potently spread around. No one renders accounts, no one offers explanations. Each crime builds horrible uncertainty in persons close to the victim and is also a warning for everyone else. State terrorism aims to paralyze the population with fear.

“To get a job and keep it in Uruguay, one needs to stay in the good graces of the military. In a country where it’s so tough to find work outside of the barracks and police stations, this not only serves to drive into exile a good part of the 300,000 citizens listed as leftists. It is also useful as a threat hanging over those who stay. Montevideo newspapers often feature public penitences and declarations by citizens who beat their breasts just in case: ‘I have never been, I am not, I never will be…’

“In Argentina it is no longer necessary to ban any book by decree. The new Penal Code penalizes, as always, the writer and publisher of a book considered subversive. But it also penalizes the printer (so that no one will dare to print a text that is merely doubtful) and the distributor and the bookstore (so that no one will dare sell it); and as if this weren’t enough, it also penalizes the reader, to that no one will dare read it, much less keep it. Thus the consumer of a book gets the same treatment the law applies to consumers of drugs. In this program for a society of deaf mutes, each citizen has to become his own Torquemada.

“In Uruguay it is a crime not to inform on your neighbor. Students entering the university swear in writing that they will denounce anyone who indulges on campus in ‘any activity outside the functions of study.’ The student assumes co-responsibility for whatever occurs in his presence. In this program for a society of sleepwalkers, all citizens must be their own and others’ policemen. However, the system – with good reason – is mistrustful. There are 100,000 police and soldiers in Uruguay, but there are also 100,000 informers. Spies work the streets, cafes and buses, factories and high schools, offices and the university. Anyone voicing a complaint about life being so expensive and so hard ends up in jail: he or she has committed a ‘ceime against the moral force of the Armed Forces,’ for which the price is three to six years behind bars.

“In the January 1978 referendum, one voted ‘Yes’ for the Pinochet dictatorship by marking a cross beneath the Chilean flag. To vote ‘No,’ one put the cross beneath a black rectangle.

“The system would like to be confused with the country. The system is the country, says the official propaganda that bombards the citizenry day and night. The enemy of the system is a traitor to the fatherland. Capacity for indignation against injustice and a desire for change are proofs of desertion. In many Latin American countries, citizens who aren’t exiled beyond the frontiers live as exiles on their own soil.

“But even while Pinochet celebrated his victory, strikes which the dictatorship called ‘collective labor absenteeism’ were breaking out all over Chile, despite the terror. The great majority of kidnapped and disappeared people in Argentina are workers who performed some union activity. The limitless popular imagination keeps hatching new forms of struggle – the ‘Sad Faces Workday,’ the ‘Angry Faces Workday’ – and solidarity finds new channels for the escape from fear. Numerous unanimous strikes occurred in Argentina through 1977, when fear of losing one’s life was as real as the risk of losing one’s job. A stroke of the pen can’t destroy the power of response of an organized working class with a long fighting tradition. In May of the same year, when the Uruguayan dictatorship was balancing up its program of emptying minds and performing collective castration, it was forced to recognize that ’37 percent of the country’s citizens are still interested in politics.’

“In these lands we are not experiencing the primitive infancy of capitalism but its vicious senility. Underdevelopment isn’t a stage of development, but its consequence. Latin America’s underdevelopment arises from external development, and continues to feed it. A system made impotent by its function of international servitude, and moribund since birth, has feet of clay. It pretends to be destiny and would like to be through eternal. All memory is subversive, because it is different, and likewise any program for the future. The zombie is made to eat without salt: salt is dangerous, it could awaken him. The system has its paradigm in the immutable society of ants. For that reason it accords ill with the history of humankind, because that is always changing. And because in the history of humankind every act of destruction meets its response, sooner or later, in an act of creation.”

In Galeano’s book we find outlined a possible – and horrible – future for the United States, given how many of our basic rights and freedoms were subverted (and have not yet legally been restored) by the Bush Regime. From Posse Comitatus (the right of the people to never worry about the military pointing a gun at them on their own soil) to habeas corpus (the right to face your accusers and have a trial and to be freed if not found guilty) to a government of, by, and for the People (as opposed to being a wholly owned subsidiary of banks and transnationals, with governmental functions performed by those corporations), the groundwork was laid during the Bush years for America to become Chile and Argentina in the 1970s.

While it’s critical for every American (there’s that word again) to know the history of our continent – brilliantly laid out with a storytelling eloquence that makes this a page-turner worthy of our best novelists – this last note, not mentioned but implicit in Galeano’s book, is perhaps the most important reason why you should buy a dozen or more copies of Open Veins and give one to each of your closest friends.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times bestselling Project Censored Award winning author and host of a nationally syndicated progressive radio talk show. You can learn more about Thom Hartmann at his website and find out what stations broadcast his program. You can also listen to Thom over the Internet.

THOM HARTMANN'S INDEPENDENT THINKER REVIEW OF THE MONTH

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