


This book, written more than thirty years ago, contains profound lessons for contemporary India. Galeano’s vision is unswerving, surgical and yet immensely generous and humane. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It allows us to learn history, and we have to build on this history.Ī superbly written, excellently translated, and powerfully persuasive expose which all students of Latin American and U.S. This book is a monument in our Latin American history. His tenderness is devastating, his truthfulness, furious.

Thanks to him our crimes will be remembered. To publish Eduardo Galeano is to publish the enemy: the enemy of lies, indifference, above all of forgetfulness. Readers in all manner of great historical, economic, political, and social writing have found in Open Veins of Latin America a singularly rigorous analytical achievement which never lost vigor, an overwhelming narrative that makes history speak, unforgettably. Weaving fact and imagery into a rich tapestry, Galeano never faltered as he fused scientific analysis of an immense vault of historical material, with the impassioned perspective of plundered peoples. These are the veins which he traced 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 to this day they empty continuously into the coffers of wealth in the United States and Europe. Thus he was 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. Rather than charting the continent according to more traditional geographic or chronological delineations, Eduardo Galeano told the story of Latin America by uncovering the patterns of five centuries of exploitation.

debut fifty years ago, this brilliant classic set the standard for historical scholarship on Latin America. 50th Anniversary edition! Honored by an inspiring introduction by one of the most important writers of our time, Isabel Allende
