Homage to Eduardo

Galeano
Agonies and Struggles of Latin America
Eduardo Galeano was not only a social scientist but one of the
greatest men of letters. In his writings he depicted the pillage and
pain of South America with rare passion and dignity. He rejected
jargon-ridden writing as writing in code, and instead wrote
about political economy in the style of a novel about love or
pirates.
BERNARD MBEKI
Here in Venezuela you have the right to
do what you like with your capital. This
right is dearer to me than all the political
rights in the world.1

ever have the agonies, pillage and

exploitation of a continent been
depicted with such rare passion,
poignancy, literary grace and dignity as
Eduardo Galeanos Open Veins of Latin
America.2 We are in the presence of one
of the worlds greatest men of letters. In
so describing him, Ive eschewed deliberately the constricted label of social scientist. Monthly Review deserves our highest encomiums for republishing this masterwork which and I do not believe it
is hyperbole remains imperishable. As
I said earlier in my review of Frederic
Clairmonts work on Economic Liberalism,3 there is no such thing as an objective evaluation of any work of art, of
political and ideological currents.
We measure in all ways the enduring
power of a works impact on our cerebral
nervous systems, through our subjective
lenses, the torments of our individual existence. And from the all-embracing social milieu from which we emanate, and
the skin, unlike a serpents, that we can
never shed. It was true then when I read
surreptitiously in my youth The Communist Manifesto, concealed in brown wrapping paper, that was criminal reading in
the South African Gulag and indeed in all
colonies.
Galeano, a son of the third world, a
native of Uruguay, in the tradition of the
great Mexican muralists, has painted a
portrait of his continent but that again
would be to diminish his achievement. For
what he has to say applies to all of us in
different segments of our universe.

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Certainly his voice is regionally specific

like his language but the message is
universal. As teachers and writers, particularly at a moment when neo-classical
verbiage has debased the language with
its trivialised, ignominious mumbo-jumbo
and mathematical inanities, Galeano steps
forth in a prose that is exuberant, elating
and translucent as the flowing waters of
a spring lake.
As teachers and publicists we can do no
better than to quote that inimitable sentence which is the lodestone of his being:
I know I can be accused of sacrilege in
writing about political economy in the
style of a novel about love or pirates. But
I confess I get a pain from reading valuable
works by certain sociologists, political
experts, economists, and historians who
write in code. Hermetic language isnt the
invariable and inevitable price of profundity. In some cases it can simply conceal
incapacity for communication raised to
the category of intellectual virtue. I suspect that boredom can thus often serve to
sanctify the established order, confirming
that knowledge is a privilege of the elite.
It is for this reason that Open Veins, as
his trilogy Memory of Fire, have been
anathematised by the class oligarchies of
the third world in their precipitous and
demented plunge into the inferno of neoliberalism. The book is divided into three
parts: mankinds poverty as a consequence
of the wealth of the land; development is
a voyage with more shipwrecks than navigators; and a bracing conclusion splashed
with humour, a vibrant part of his devastating armory. As he diffidently tells us,
the most favourable reviews came not
from any prestigious critic but from the
military dictatorships that praised the book
by banning it.
The millennium marks 500 years of Latin

Americas colonisation. During my recent

sojourn in Brazil I read the comment of
an American journalist4 describing the
proletarian-children that straggled into the
giant corporate sisal farms early in the
morning; their faces still pinched with
sleep as they prepared to begin their 10
hour workday. Their ages were 9 to 15.
Here was a murderous encapsulation of
the capital accumulation process that
remains timeless. The children of course
were people of colour: Negro, Indian and
mixed. Here is an extrapolation of one
more hideous fact that would easily fit into
his vast social tapestry.
The young proletarians began their day
by sharpening their long knives and machetes for the dangerous job: cutting, piling
and hauling the long, leathery leaves that
will be transformed into rugs, rope and
handbags to be sold in the US and elsewhere. The sisal farm is a transnational
firm. This wretchedly exploited labour
force has many with punctured eyeballs,
scarred legs and amputated arms. These
are the creators of wealth in one of the
potentially richest countries on earth.
Listen to the shrill testimony of Valdinei
dos Santos a child proletarian, 14, who has
slaved on sisal farms since he was 8 for
subsistence pickings. I saw a boy lose his
hand. He had it one minute. Then he didnt
have it the next. He was working the sisal
shredder. He was crying a lot, and he was
bleeding on his clothes, on the ground.
This utterance in its eloquent heart-rending simplicity is the theme of Galeano; it
is the subject matter of Latin Americas
Open Veins; the dispossessed natives and
others have come and gone; from the start
the victims had been reduced to Christianity. What we must never forget is that this
sisal farm is but a microcosm of 500 years
of human debasement. It depicts the
mechanisms of surplus value, of despoliation and of plunder. The bourgeois order,
be it in the mantle of embryonic accumulation of the mercantilist phase or normal accumulation discards the fiction of
human rights; it embraces only one right:
the right of private property and the profits
that flow from it, at home and abroad, to
be preserved in the interests of a possessing class, invariably of a different colour.
Adam Smith, prime ideological engineer of economic liberalism, at a crucial
turning point in the birth of industrial
capitalism, gave a graphic description of
the unfolding historical drama in An
Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the
Wealth of Nations (1776): The discovery

Economic and Political Weekly

September 30, 2000

of America, and that of the passage to the

East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope,
are the two greatest events recorded in the
history of mankind...to the natives, however, both of the East and West Indies, all
the commercial benefits which can have
resulted from those events have been sunk
and lost in the dreadful misfortunes which
they have occasioned...it is impossible that
the whole extent of their consequences can
have been seen...what benefits, or what
misfortunes to mankind may hereafter result
from those great events, no human wisdom
can foresee.
These dreadful misfortunes that he refers to but does not elaborate, are among
the greatest crimes against humanity. There
is the reality of the Middle Passage and
of the Triangular Trade in which tens of
thousands of Africans perished. But the
plantations flourished. From the 16th to
the 18th century prodigious wealth had
been created. Millions of Indians had been
wiped out in one of the worlds greatest
genocides in recorded history. Perhaps
no human wisdom could have foreseen
what would transpire in the 19th century.
This time it was the extermination of the
Indians unambiguously dictated by
Californias governor, Peter Burnett, in his
annual message of 1851: A war of extermination will continue to be waged
between the two races until the Indian race
becomes extinct.
Physical extermination was not by arms
alone. The discoverers carried with them
viruses and bacteria and those included
smallpox and tetanus, tuberculosis, syphilis and gonorrhea, trachoma and typhus,
leprosy and yellow fever, etc.
It is this historical conjuncture set in
motion during the mercantilist phase that
illuminated Marxs penetrating analysis in
Capital: The discovery of gold and silver
in America, the extirpation, enslavement
and entombment in mines of the Indians,
the onset of the conquest and pillage of
the East Indies, the turning of Africa into
a warren for the commercial hunting of the
black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of
the era of capitalist production. These
idyllic proceedings are the chief moment
of primitive accumulation.5
A by-product of this conquest was the
scourge of racism that it germinated. Negro
and Indian slavery was not a product of
racism, but rather racism was incubated by
slavery. Moreover, climate was as irrelevant as the dodo. Its origin was to be
found in the frenzied quest for gold and
other minerals and other major primary
Economic and Political Weekly

commodities notably king cotton, sugar

and tobacco. In the 18th century alone,
Brazils gold output surpassed the total
value of gold that Spain grabbed from its
slave colonies in two previous centuries.
The sheer size of the manpower absorbed were nothing short of staggering
in Brazil alone from conquest to abolition
more than 10 million slaves were transported from Africa. In France, the slaves
were called ebony wood; in Portuguese
Africa they were named the coins of the
Indies after they had been weighed,
measured and marketed. Proof sufficient
that they had become marketable commodities.
I had the greatest of good fortunes of
having a self-taught Cape coloured schoolmaster who travelled the world over as a
sailor. He had studied profoundly the
history and ethnography of the Americas
and spoke and read Spanish fluently. In
one of our history or geography lessons
he was asked why it was called Latin
America. The only thing Latin in America,
he said, was the church. He told us the
designation was false because blacks and
Indians had created the wealth first for the
Spaniards and Portuguese and then for
others. A fact that South Africans grasped
as soon as we sprung from our mothers
wombs. He treaded dangerous ground.
Blacks and Indians, he went on, had never
accepted their status as exploited subhuman beings with meek acquiescence.
We understood what he meant then but it
was only later that I came to grips with
the linkage of Africa to South and North
America and the Caribbean. It was on one
of my first missions to South America that
I first confronted the viciousness of race
in the Americas.
I might add a minor parenthesis. I learnt
decades later to my pleasant surprise (we
had no idea then) that this erudite sailor/
schoolmaster was a close friend of Joe
Slovo and one of the oldest clandestine
members of the Communist Party. One
who was tortured; and died, how quixotic
it now seems, in exile in South America.
The international division of labour that
was nailed on Latin America was no historical aberration. You believe, perhaps,
gentlemen, pungently noted Karl Marx in
1848, that the production of coffee and
sugar and cotton and tobacco is the natural
destiny of the West Indies. Let me remind
you that two centuries ago, however,
nature, which does not trouble herself
about trade and marketing, had planted
neither sugarcane nor coffee trees there.

September 30, 2000

Commodity production and slavery with

galloping genocide proceeded perfectly
meshed with the progression of mercantilist capitalism.
Indubitably, the quest for gold and the
precious metals were the galvanising logic
of mercantilist accumulation and rapacity.
It was Christopher Columbus on his second voyage (1493) that transported the
first sugarcane roots from the Canary
Islands, first planted in Santo Domingo
and then into every orifice of fertile American soil. Demand for sugar generated the
plantation that became the focal point for
the production, marketing and distribution
of a key commodity in less than four
decades. It signalled the birth of the world
market, internationalisation of all commodities and finance and its concomitant
slavocracy.
Santo Domingo the greatest jewel in my
crown, as Louis the XIV proclaimed, was
the microcosm of the historical forces that
were rippling through the Americas. It
accounted for around two-thirds of Frances
overseas trade; it was by far the largest
market for African slaves. As C L R James
pithily puts in his great work, The Black
Jacobins, 6 Santo Domingo was the
centrepiece of mercantilism; the worlds
most flourishing colony; the greatest pride
of the Bourbons since the British had
grabbed their Indian and North American
colonies. This imposing edifice reposed
on the foundation stone of the labour power
of half a million blacks.
The year 1789 was to be one of the most
crucial years of all times. Like all oppressing classes the slavocracy and their allies
in Paris had ignored the writing on the
wall. In August 1791, the most devastating
of slave liberation struggles in the Americas erupted. And yet these half naked
savages as Napoleon castigated them
fought the white planters and his military
legions for 12 long years. Nor should it
be obscured that the dictators wife, Pauline
Bonaparte was a Creole slave owner. The
liberators crushed the local slavocracy, as
well as a Spanish invasion, a British
expedition of over 60,000 and a French
force of similar numbers, dispatched by
Napoleon. One year before the slave
uprising a free Mulatto asked: Why should
the masters, and the church and the merchants live so well and we should live in
such misery, dying like flies? That is the
revolutionary question of all times to which
there always will be a revolutionary response. Toussaint lOuverture thundered
that message home. The white suprema-

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cists, who now ceased to be supreme, hated

the blackskins but blossomed on the profits of their labour. The Africans and the
Indians fuelled the engine of industrial
capitalism.
The US slave-dominated Congress when
it came to the black man bared its fangs;
it hammered an embargo on Haiti at the
bequest of France. It was class and race
solidarity in its pristine form. Never mind
the empty rhetoric of the declaration of
independence. The boundless hatred of
blacks was epitomised in the exterminatory verdict of general Leclerc in his letter
to his brother-in-law Napoleon after capturing Toussaint LOuverture in 1802
condemned to wither away in a cold
dungeon in eastern France with his wife:
Here is my opinion about this country:
all the blacks in the mountains, men and
women must be crushed, keeping only the
children under 12; half the blacks in the
plains must be exterminated, and not a
single mulatto with epaulets must be left
in the colony. But that was not the end.
In 1825, France recognised the birth of the
first black nation in history on condition
that it pays massive reparations. As Galeano
puts it, the first free American nation was
born in ruins and it remains one of the
poorest in the Americas.
The black liberation of Santo Domingo
redounded to the gain of slave Cuba
destined to be the worlds largest sugar
producer. Napoleons debacle was trailed
by the triumphant march of the British
industrial revolution. The rumblings of
independence from Spain were to blaze
new horizons to the Pax Britannica.
Mercantilism and its entire works were to
be damned in the name of free trade.
Britains foreign secretary, George Canning, a politician with massive investments
in the burgeoning iron and textile industries, and Indias tea plantations, grasped
the significance of the looming second El
Dorado.7
The plunder of India was now in full
swing; on the super profits of that plunder
was superimposed the free republics of
Latin America. Primitive accumulation had
now metamorphosed into the normal accumulation of the Promethean bourgeoisie. Unerringly, Canning grasped the nettle:
The deed is done, the nail is driven, Spanish
America is free; and if we do not mismanage our affairs sadly, she is English.
The neo-colonies were caught in the
familiar debt trap; their embryonic banking, credit, freight and insurance businesses
were increasingly subordinated to British

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commercial supremacy. As in India, the

industrial infanticide of much of the
emergent nations industrial sectors
stemmed from the imposition of economic
liberalism. British hegemony had been
sustained well into the end of the century.
It was Marx who, in his masterly French
essay The Poverty of Philosophy (1847),
exploded the myths of economic
liberalisation and free trade a pre-figuration of his masterwork, Das Capital.
All the destructive phenomena which
unlimited competition gives rise to within
one country are reproduced in more gigantic proportions on the world market. He
went on to clinch the argument: If the
free-traders cannot understand how one
nation can grow rich at the expense of
another, we need not wonder, since these
same gentlemen also refuse to understand
how within one country one class can
enrich itself at the expense of another.8
New predators were on the prowl no less
vicious in their exploitative propensities
than their British and Spanish predecessors. The Spanish American war of 1898
had opened the floodgates to American
imperialism, A succulent appetiser to the
main course. Several US Congressmen
were clamouring for the annexation of
Cuba. By the middle of the century, the
US was taking a third of all Cuban imports.
The Louisiana Planter at the end of the
century captured the rationale of imperialism: Little by little the whose island of
Cuba is passing into the hands of US
citizens, which is the simplest and safest
way to obtain annexation to the US. A
sizeable chunk of Cuba, Guantanamo, a
still festering sore on Cubas sovereignty,
was to be permanently grabbed.
The political and economic conquest of
Cuba was followed by the grim conquest
of central America, which in the decades
ahead would contribute directly and indirectly to the genocide of more than half
a million Indians. Theodore Roosevelt, the
grand rapist of Cuba, proceeded to the
dismemberment of other countries. This
Nobel Prize winner boasted of his amputation of Colombia and Panama as his
special creation: I took the Canal Zone
and let Congress debate.
In 1912, president Taft proclaimed the
Nazi doctrine of the superman although
the doctrine was already enshrined by the
founding fathers of the American republic.
The whole hemisphere will be ours in fact
as, by virtue of our superiority of race, it
is already ours morally. Hence military
intervention is imperative to secure for

our merchandise and our capitalists

opportunity for profitable investment (Italics mine). What is remarkable about that
morsel of arrogance is its contemporary
ring, and compared to the stupid
rationalisations of Clinton and others in
its genocidal brutality it at least has the
merits of straight talking.
Nowhere was the possibility of giving
our capitalists opportunity for profitable
investment more coherently framed than
in the conscience stricken autobiography
of general Smedley Butler of the US Marine
(1935). Whats glaring about it is that it
has remained ageless.
I spent thirty-three years and four months
in active service as a member of our
countrys most agile military force the
Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from a second lieutenant to
major general. And during that period I
spent most of my time being a high-class
muscle man for big business, for Wall
Street and the bankers. In short, I was a
racketeer for capitalism...Thus I helped
make Mexico and especially Tampico safe
for American oil interests in 1914. I helped
make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for
the National City Bank to collect revenues
in...I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912, I brought light to the
Dominican Republic for American sugar
interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras
right for American fruit companies in
1913. In China, in 1927, I helped see to
it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
During those years I had, as the boys in
the back room would say, a swell racket.
I was rewarded with honours, medals and
promotions. Looking back on it, I feel I
might have given Al Capone a few points.
The best he could do was to operate his
racket in three city districts. We Marines
operated on three continents.

Smedleys crimes were of course crimes

against humanity executed in the name of
the defence of US property rights and
national security but they were on a lesser
scale compared to the ensuing holocaust
from the 1940s to the 1980s, sedulously
downplayed or better still ignored, in the
corporate media. The Koran mentions the
banana among the trees of paradise,
recalls Galeano, but they were capitalisms
creation or in contemporary jargon they
had become integrated into the world
market. Having the gall to label these
countries banana republics, the very
words being descriptive of the fascist
contempt for its peoples, indicates that
it is a tree of hell.

Economic and Political Weekly

September 30, 2000

The oppressed Indians and Mestizos of

Guatemala rose up; in much the same way
as Augusto Cesar Sandino and his peasant
force did in the early 1930s in Nicaragua;
his assassination was sponsored by the
Washington power brokers in conjunction
with the US transnational plantation
owners. The hit man was West Point
educated Anastasio Somoza, subsequently branded the butcher of
Nicaragua. His West Point son, one of the
biggest cocoa and coffee plantation
owners in the Americas, proved an ignominious successor and an even more
successful killer.
By the mid-1940s the whole of central
America was on the boil. The United Fruit
Company, (possessor of more than 1,00,000
hectares of land) the octopus extended
its imperial landholdings from ocean to
ocean. The striving to modify that grotesque imbalance by a modest land reform
was deemed a gross violation of property
rights. More to the point the yellow press
of William Hearst discovered that communism was beating at our gates. Arbenz
must go. Nine years after the genocide in
1954 general Eisenhower flatly declared:
We had to get rid of a communist
government which had taken over. The
key words are get rid of. It summarises
the motive force of imperialism. A democratically elected government was obliterated using one of its native killers: general
Castilllo Arms.
By a strange concatenation of events
1954 was also the year of Dienbienphu;
it marked the onset of Algerias liberation;
and the first rumblings of the Cuban revolution that proved a nemesis to imperialism. Indeed the Cuban revolution as we
now perceive after more than four decades
is one of the proudest feats of social
emancipation of all times and which,
victoriously, continues to battle for the
freedom and sovereignty of Latin America
and beyond.
Like an individual life, a book is an
organic creation that must come to an end,
and hence cannot be updated permanently.
It is this that Marx and Engels had in mind
when they stated, with no vanity intended,
that it should remain as it was written in
1848. Today, that imperishable document
is a permanent clarion to revolution the
world over, the source of unblemished
inspiration. Galeanos book is closed but
it shall never leave our spirit.
Latin American capitalism is in the throes
of one of its most momentous upheavals.
It is dominated by the ruling ideology of
Economic and Political Weekly

transnational capital incarnated in the

worlds top 200 corporations. As an African I have never been inured to poverty.
What I saw in Latin America in my recent
visit was the genocide through poverty,
with the singular and noble exception
of Cuba. There are few native Latin
American banks that have not been gobbled
up by the triad powers: US, Europe and
Japan.
The structural adjustment policies of neoliberalism have turned the region into a
cesspool. Take the case of debt. Third
world debt stands at over $ 2.5 trillion and
that of Latin America at around one trillion. The debt of course has already been
paid off if we examine the manner in which
it is contracted, the brutal manipulations
of the financial markets, the arbitrary
upsurge, adverse terms of trade and tumbling commodity prices. What the magnitude of the debt numbers reveals is that
the principal and interest on the debt will
never be reimbursed.
It suffices to indicate the velocity at
which commodity prices have plummeted.
Relative prices of major Latin American
commodities as cocoa sugar, coffee, banana and many others are around a fifth
of what there were in 1960. One does not
need a barrage of statistical data, although
it is useful to have it, to tell us that the
rich and the super rich are becoming increasingly richer while the poor are becoming immensely more numerous and
alarmingly poorer. To say this is to repeat
the most cruel of banalities. Just walk the
streets of the major cities, night and day,
and youll get the answer.
Within a short compass I cannot plunge
into the weighty political changes that have
transpired in the region since the last edition
of Galeanos work. Certainly on the economic front one is staggered by the scale
of the omnipresent scale of pauperisation,
the massive, rising levels of unemployment of which the rise in the informal
sector is but one salient example; the
mounting class and income polarisation
and rampant corruption; and racism against
the Indian. Almost half the population
according to UN data is floundering below
official poverty levels; 35-40 per cent of
the population are illiterate; in conformity
with the World Banks catechism of disaster, spending on education, health and
social programmes are being slashed;
privatisation of the public patrimony at
knock-down prices has been pushed
through wiping out the fruits of decades
of social accumulation; the transnational

September 30, 2000

corporations have extended their lethal

reach into every niche; scientific research
has touched its lowest ebb accompanied
by the familiar brain drain; the cultural
domination of the big corporate media is
swiftly demolishing the cultural heritage;
the alarming and uncontrollable spread of
sexually transmitted diseases and child
prostitution; inseparable from this are the
millions of children on the streets; and
need I say that there is no social or medical
insurance to speak of. And of course there
is the entire apparatus of class repression
and the death squads.
No doubt this lamentable list can be
prolonged and I do not want to give the
impression that all is bleak, for this is not
so. What matters and here we join the
thought of Galeano are the revolutionary
changes that are thundering through this
region. The peasant uprisings in Brazil and
Ecuador and the forces of Commandante
Marcos in Mexico are beacons of the
direction of change. What this demonstrates is that the world economic order
constructed by imperialism is not only
riven with contradictions, but it is wholly
unsustainable, as the regions elite would
admit privately with misgivings and at
times publicly. This is tantamount to saying that Latin America has become one of
the crucial focal points in the battle against
imperialism. On that score it is well to
recall the vitalising perception of Marx
that it is merely history that will pull us
out of the bigger and bigger hell hole that
international capital is digging for us all:
History does nothing; it possesses no
immense wealth; it fights no battles. It is
rather man, real living man who does
everything; it is he who possesses and
fights. EPW

Notes
1 Time, September 18, 1952. This was the verdict
of a top American petroleum executive at the
time of the oil bonanza.
2 Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries
of the Pillage of a Continent (1978), New York,
1999.
3 Exposing the Corporate Gulag, Economic and
Political Weekly, May 18, 1996.
4 Washington Post Service, March 17, 2000.
5 Capital, 1867, Chapter 3.
6 The Black Jacobins: Toussaint LOuverture
and the Santo Domingo Revolution, New York,
1938.
7 Quoted in The Cambridge History of British
Foreign Policy, Cambridge, Vol 2, 1923.
8 La misere de la philosophie, Paris, 1847. This
was the crushing riposte to Proudhons, La
philosophie de la misere. This essay was the
foundation stone of historical materialism.

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