Eduardo Galeano (1940 - 2015)

Tue Sep 03, 1940

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Eduardo Galeano, born on this day in 1940, was a Uruguayan journalist and author known for, among other texts, his work “Open Veins of Latin America”, which the editors of Monthly Review Press called “perhaps the finest description of the primary accumulation of capital since Marx”.

Galeano began his career as a political cartoonist and journalist - at fourteen, he was contributing political cartoons to the socialist newspaper “El Sol”. At 20, he was the managing director of “Marcha”, a storied weekly in Uruguay.

Some of his high profile work as a journalist includes an interview with Juan Perón, a laudatory profile of Che Guevara, and a portrait of Pu Yi, the last emperor of China, who had just completed his Maoist re-education in a nondescript building on the outskirts of Beijing.

Galeano is perhaps best known for his book “Open Veins of Latin America”, which details how, through five centuries of plunder by European conquistadors and American corporations, the region’s abundant natural resources had been extracted to enrich a few local elites and many foreign interests.

The editors of Monthly Review Press, which published the U.S. edition, described the book as “perhaps the finest description of the primary accumulation of capital since Marx.” President Hugo Chávez gave a Spanish-language copy of Open Veins to President Barack Obama on his first diplomatic visit to the region.

“The human murder by poverty in Latin America is secret: every year, without making a sound, three Hiroshima bombs explode over communities that have become accustomed to suffering with clenched teeth.”

- Eduardo Galeano