LA TIMES ON THE BOOK CHAVEZ CHUMPED OBAMA WITH

'Open Veins' and enduring ills in Latin America

In the '70s, Galeano's essay was a call to arms. Latin
America is different now - or is it?

Los Angeles Times
April 26, 2009
Marjorie Miller

The reading list for my college core course at UC Santa
Cruz in the early 1970s included a book by a young
Uruguayan author, Eduardo Galeano, called "Open Veins of
Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a
Continent." The book, which excoriated Europe and the
United States for their exploitation of the region, was
pretty standard fare at a school where Marxist philosopher
Herbert Marcuse was a visiting professor and Black Panther
Party co-founder Huey Newton was a fellow student.

I hadn't thought of the text for years. Then, at the Summit
of the Americas last weekend, Venezuelan President Hugo
Chavez gave a copy to President Obama, and I dug out my
musty edition to consider how much has changed since then
-- and how much has not.

The book was written during tumultuous times in Latin
America. In 1973, the year my English-language paperback
was printed, Chile's socialist President Salvador Allende
was ousted in a military coup and committed suicide in the
presidential palace. A coup in Uruguay sent the leftist
Galeano fleeing to Argentina, where he stayed until a coup
forced him to leave there too. Poverty fueled the politics
of outrage across the continent, the romanticism of Fidel
Castro's Cuba and a backlash of bloody repression. This
produced the radical poetry of Pablo Neruda, the music of
Victor Jara and a host of nonfiction books like Galeano's.

"Open Veins" posits that the economic and political
domination of Latin America -- first by Europeans and, much
later, by the U.S. -- created a region that "continues to
exist at the service of others' needs." The extraction of
gold, silver, oil and iron, and the cultivation of sugar,
bananas, coffee and rubber served developed countries that
"profit more from consuming them than Latin America does
from producing them."

Galeano wrote in the angry vocabulary of the day,
describing capitalist "oppressor countries" and the rich
"pimps of misery." He spoke of soil "ravaged" by the likes
of the United Fruit Co., of a "Hiroshima" of poverty that
appears as a "Holocaust" of statistics. At the time, he
wrote in the introduction, Latin America had 280 million
citizens, half of them living in slums and more than a
third of whom were illiterate. A child died of hunger and
disease every minute.

I was moved by books like "Open Veins." Although I did not
heed the revolutionary call to arms of the day, I did take
off for Latin America after graduation to study Spanish and
see firsthand the effects of under-development. In Oaxaca,
Mexico, I observed gradations of poverty that had been an
academic abstraction to me before: how people living in
cinder-block houses with concrete floors were better off
than those living in houses with dirt floors and without
windows; how people who ate beans, rice and tortillas three
times a day were healthier than those who ate just once or
twice a day, or who sometimes ate only salt and tortillas.

Politics looked different from Mexico too. A Mexican
newspaper article on right-wing death squads operating
under Guatemala's military regime suggested they were an
outgrowth of the CIA-backed coup in 1954 -- a coup Galeano
had written about in "Open Veins." History was very much
present, as it still is in Latin America.

Today, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the
economic failure of Cuba, "Open Veins" seems dated. The
military governments of South and Central America have been
replaced by independent, democratically elected leaders who
do not take their cues from United Fruit or the United
States.

In general, Latin Americans are healthier and better
educated than they were when Galeano wrote "Open Veins."
Infant mortality has declined dramatically; illiteracy was
down to 9.5% of the population in 2005 and is projected to
be 8.3% by next year, according to the U.N. Economic
Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean's
statistical yearbook. The middle class in Brazil outnumbers
the poor.

Yet almost 40 years after Galeano wrote "Open Veins," Latin
America is still beleaguered by a poverty and inequality
born of the colonialism he described. A smaller percentage
of the population is poor, but because of population growth
there are many more people living in poverty. The average
income of Latin Americans is higher in real terms than it
was decades ago, but the average income of North Americans
has grown even more, creating a wider gap. And the income
disparity within Latin America has also grown, with more
wealth concentrated in fewer hands.

The persistence of these economic and social challenges
might explain why a populist like Chavez would give a
reformer like Obama a copy of this book on the roots of
Latin American poverty. Galeano's rhetoric may be passe,
but the history is not.

Marjorie Miller is an editorial writer at The Times.