Eduardo Galeano: The Open Veins of Latin America in the 70s, in an atmosphere of Cold War that is reaching its peak.
In 2009, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez met US President Barack Obama. The meeting may be awkward, given the long-standing hostility between leaders of both countries. On that occasion, Chávez presented Obama with a long-standing book, but it continued to be reprinted, which probably would never have been on the shelves of the rulers of the superpowers.
The book is The Open Veins of Latin America.
The prize should be a hard kick on President Obama's backside, to remind him again of what the CIA and CIA have done for decades in their backyard, a series of dirty wars, infiltration, bribery and political provocations.
A few months after his meeting with Chávez, Barack Obama received another prize, the Nobel Peace Prize.
It seems that the two gifts are nothing to the US foreign policy line under Obama whose power will soon end next year. In the last ten years, US military intervention has diminished in Latin America, but has shifted to other parts of Asia-Africa, to the Middle East, by sending the most brutal killer monster, unmanned aircraft.
The book Chávez presents to Obama is the work of Eduardo Galeano, a prominent Uruguayan journalist and writer, who died on Monday (13/04) at the age of 74. The death was not only lamented throughout Latin America, on football fields, but sorrow seeped into Palestine. In its official statement, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) expressed deep sorrow and they have not forgotten the support Galeano has provided.
Galeano wrote The Open Veins of Latin America in the 70s, in an atmosphere of Cold War that is reaching its peak. The Open Veins of Latin America is a long essay describing painfully and graspingly, step-by-step, five centuries of Western plunder over the American continent, which has begun since the arrival of Spanish conquerors to the land in the 15th century.
Reassuringly, Galeano exposed how the now-modern and advanced states stand on the blood, death, crying, and poverty of poor and developing countries. Gold and slaves from Africa to build castles, roads, bridges, and banking systems and stock exchanges in the UK and the Netherlands. Brazilian silver and gold are the capital of the Portuguese war. Sugar, potatoes, chocolates, bananas, and rubber grown by Cuban poor farmers, Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia to build the United States empire, which then avenge all that suffering by sending war machines to quell Guatemalan, Nicaraguan and El Salvador revolutionaries destroying democracy in Chile by welcoming the puddles of blood shed by the right-wing military coup of General Augusto Pinochet.
In The Open Veins of Latin America, it appears that Galeano is well aware of the importance of himself as a writer. "As part of an elite group," he said. "The author must dare to write past the size, especially in a confined society. For free writing is ultimately a place of complaint and hope. "This view and attitude made him give his own size to Jorge Luis Borges, a literary giant from Argentina, who ridiculed him," Telling the History of Universal Disgrace, "but" against the national disgrace surrounding him, he did not even ask. "
The Open Veins of Latin America has become a classic in anti-imperialism literature and still remains important for those who want to understand how the evil practices of imperialism work. Recently, WikiLieks leaked a correspondence entitled "Reading Latam" among employees of Stadford (a private intelligence office providing services to giant corporations such as Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grunman, Raytheon, and even the Department of Homeland Security) who discussed the books the most influential in Latin America. Galeano's books are included in the list.
Eduardo Galeano was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, a small country on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. He started his career as a journalist in Marcha political magazine. When the right wing military took power in Uruguay in 1973, Eduardo was imprisoned and his books were banned. Then, he exiled himself to Argentina. Imitating the success of his right-wing counterparts in Uruguay and Chile, General Jorge Rafael Videla committed a bloody coup in Argentina in 1976 and caused Galeano to return to exile. This time, to Spain.
Galeano loves soccer very much, and for that love he presents a book, Soccer in Sun and Shadow. For his love, he supports the protests of the Brazilian people rejecting the 2014 World Cup. "World Cup," Galeano said, "It's a party for playing legs and watching eyes, more than just a big business run by big gentlemen from Switzerland . "
Galeano has written dozens of books, with various themes, covering economic, historical, and literary politics. Memory of Fire is one of Eduardo Galeano's best literary works and has placed him as one of the most influential world writers of our time, parallel to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Carlos Fuentes.
Like other Galeano literary works, it is not easy to define Memory of Fire. Humbly in the introduction to Memory of Fire, he says, "Maybe this is a novel or essay or epic poem or statement or chronicle ..." Memory of Fire consisting of three volumes (Genesis, Face and Mask; Century of The Wind) , about the story of the Latin American journey from the pre-Columbian era to the story of the Chocolate War between Venezuela and Bolivia in the 20th century.
In the early part, Genesis, Galeano tells the cosmology of Indians, native to the Americas, including Creation, Time, the Sun and Stars, Galaxies, Forests, Colors, and Languages. When all that is still going on as it is and has not been tarnished. Then, at one point it was all gone. Disappeared and replaced when the Spanish caravel reached the continent carrying the Christian calendar, Christ, Latin, plague, arabic horse, gunpowder, and armor.
However, these calamities have been predicted. The Lord had sent a message to a Yucátan priest-jaguar, who had said, "sitting on the roof, in a language no one knows" about their arrival that causes "the world to be diminished, will be small and humiliated".
Between 1700-1900, two centuries were surrounded by darkness, at least for Indian civilization. Anything about the Indians has been completely covered up on a new order that spreads rapidly like a ground pumpkin. Anything about Indians has become a tale and inseparable. Anything about Indians in Faces and Mask, written almost without time and place, completes a tomb for emptiness.
On the other hand, new sizes, definitions, languages and laws were created as a necessary condition for sustaining the establishment of Latin American colonial society as well as a clear boundary of separation with those outside the fortress, such as the Indians, black slaves, mullato, maroon, Jesuit priests, lepers, prostitutes, heretics, and pirates.
The Century of the Wind is about the 20th century, a century ripped by two world wars, the opening of the Panama Canal that has summarized intercontinental boat trips and great blessings of savings on the cost of distributing raw materials from colonial countries that can only be grateful for obsessions greed, the collapse of the last altar of the Incas-Indians, the tragedy of the Banana Massacre of its own labor by the United Fruit Company in Colombia, the birth of Silverback Gabriel Garcia Marquez's inspired novel of the novel, ridiculous but endless stories of conspiracy The CIA, as in Guatemala and Chile.
In the hands of Eduardo Galeano, the stories above, both quoted from history, folklore, political and mythical gossip, are equally fascinating and impressive. What is shaking is in how he narrates it and displays a new point of view. While his techniques and skills may even help to free those who are faced with a terrible imagination.
For Galeano, telling stories of wasted and abandoned would not just be enough within the scope of Latin America. Completing Memory of Fire, in 2010 published his book Mirror: Stories of Almost Everyone. In the Mirror, Eduardo explores the history of the journey of mankind, from the desert silence of Africa to the mouths of rivers in Asia where buried several great civilizations.
This time, he's so obsessed with authenticity, looking for a starting point for anything. The imbalances of world trade rules controlled by the World Trade Organization are not new, just a dirty method imitated by modern economic empires from ancient times. According to Galeano, Zeus has sent Hermes into the human world to "secure free trade".
Galeano's ability to reverse every point of view of the narratives that have been shaped by the power of mainstream knowledge is equally astonishing with his library's richness. He, for example, says that modern art does not start from the heart of European culture, like Paris and Milan. However, it is the work of the Yaruba tribe in West Africa and there have been several centuries before modern art was invented. Colonialism then looted the statues and brought them to the Western World. As a result, it is not just provoking a controversy rooted in racism, whether Africans are able to carve a statue's head as beautiful as it is, but also imitation.
Indonesia should not be discouraged. In the Mirror -as the statues of West Africa and Congo that have disrupted the course of modern art history as well as the artist Paul Gauguin-Indonesia also contributed to a dictator whose cruelness is almost forgotten in his own country: Suharto! Gracias, Eduardo Galeano!