“When writing Open Lives of Latin America,” Galeano said a fewer years after writing the book, I tried to realize why we are so uphill. Was it God or the stars? This book is the consequence of a long and lively experience. I've traveled a long way, talked to quite a few people. And I read a lot. Books full of passion and terrible books. Open veins... were expected to combine what others were separating. The past of the upheaval of Europe and the United States is besides a past of the humiliation of Latin America" (from Mat. Publisher).
Wydawnictwo Fily thanks for sharing a passage for publication. We encourage you to read the full book.
Introduction
One 100 and 20 million children in the eye of the cyclone
International division of labour is that any countries specialize in winning and others in losing. Our corner of the world, present called Latin America, played a pioneering function in this respect: he specialized in losing already in those ancient times erstwhile Renaissance Europeans threw themselves across the sea to sink the fangs in our region's throat. Over the centuries, Latin America has been fulfilling its task with expanding practice. It ceased to be this wonderful kingdom, in which reality was beating fairy tales on the head, and imagination proved mediocre in relation to trophies of the conquist, gold deposits and silver mountains. Nevertheless, he inactive has a servile position. It remains on another people's services as a origin and reserve of oil and iron, copper and meat, fruit and coffee, food and natural materials intended for rich countries that gain from their consumption much more than it gains from their production. Taxes collected by buyers turn out to be much higher than prices received by sellers – ultimately, as Covey T. Oliver, then coordinator of the Alliance for Progress, stated in July 1968, “talking about fair prices is simply a medieval concept today: we live in an age of free trade...”.
The more freedom is granted to so - called interests, the more prisons request to be built for those who suffer.
Our systems, planted by inquisitors and executioners, operate not only for the usage of the dominant external market; besides within the dominated interior markets they supply any abundant profit, from loans and abroad investments. "He hears of concessions granted by Latin America to abroad capital, but nothing about concessions granted by the United States to capital from another countries. due to the fact that we just don't grant concessions," warned president Woodrow Wilson in 1913. And he had no doubt: “The country in question, he said, is in possession and under the influence of the capital that was invested in it.” Right. We even lost the right to be called Americans, although Haitians and Cubans appeared in past as fresh peoples of the century before pilgrims from the Mayflower ship settled on the coast around today's Plymouth.
America is now exclusively the United States for the world: we live at most in a sub-America, a second-class America, a land of obscure identity.
This is Latin America, the region that's bleeding out. From Columbus's arrival to this day, everything here has undergone an alchemical transformation into European or, in our nearer times, North American capital, then accumulated in distant centres of power. Everything: the earth, its fruit and its mineral resources, the inhabitants, their strength to work and their purchasing power – as natural resources, as human resources. The production methods and class structure appropriate to each place in our region have been gradually determined, from the outside, by bringing it into universal modes of capitalism. Everyone is assigned a circumstantial function, always for the benefit of the improvement of 1 or another abroad metropolis. An endless chain of complex dependencies has been created, which, within Latin America itself, means the oppression of tiny states by larger and, by country, the exploitation of interior sources of resources and labour by large cities and ports (sixteen of the 20 most populous Latin American cities present existed 4 centuries ago).
For those who see past as a kind of competition, the backwardness and poorness of Latin America are simply the consequence of its failure: we lost, individual else won. However, it just so happens that those who won have won due to our loss: the past of Latin America's backwardness, as has already been said, is inextricably intertwined with the past of the improvement of planet capitalism. Our defeat has always been inscribed in another's victory; our wealth has always generated our poverty, contributing to the prosperity of others: the large empires and their local rulers. Thanks to colonial and neocolonial alchemy, gold turns for us into scrap metal, and food becomes poison. Potosí, Zacatecas, or Ouro Preto fell from the peaks bathed in the glare of precious metals consecutive into the depths of the ravines stripped of their treasures; the fall became the destination of the Chilean saltseed pampa and the Amazonian rubber depths; the inhabitants of sugar regions of north-eastern Brazil, Argentine cebracous forests or oil-based towns on Lake Maracaibo have painful reasons to believe in the impermanence of the riches offered by nature and seized by imperialism. The rain that irrigates the centers of imperialist power sank the vast slums of the system. Similarly, symmetrically, the welfare of our dominant classes – the dominant ones inside, dominated from the outside – is the curse of our masses, condemned to the life of train animals.
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The gap deepens and widens. About the mediate of the 19th century, the standard of surviving in rich countries of the planet was about 50 percent higher than the standard of surviving in mediocre countries.
Development develops inequality: in April 1969, in his speech at the Organization of American States, Richard Nixon stated that in the late 20th century GDP per capita In the United States it will be 15 times higher than in Latin America. The strength of the imperialist strategy as a full is based on the inequality between the parts forming the full and the inequalities taking on increasingly alarming sizes. As a consequence of their dynamic growth, oppressive countries, which are becoming increasingly rich in absolute numbers, are gaining even more in comparative terms. In its main centres capitalism can afford to make its own myths of abundance and even believe in them, only that no 1 is getting utilized to myths, which mediocre countries, belonging to the vast region of capitalism, know very well. peripheral.
The average income of a U.S. citizen is 7 times higher than the average income of a Latin American citizen and increases 10 times faster.
The average figures lie – due to the bottomless pits that open south of Rio Grande between the masses of mediocre people and comparatively fewer rich people of the region. According to the United Nations, six million people from the top of the Latin American social ladder have the same income as 1 100 and forty million people from its bottom. Sixty million villagers satisfy themselves with twenty-five cents a day. On the another end of this scale, the suteners of common misfortune have the nerve to keep $5 billion in private accounts in Switzerland or in the United States. And for empty ostentatiousness – this is only insulting and challenging – and for unproductive investments, which represent half of the investment in general, wastes the capital that Latin America could devote to creating and diversifying production and jobs. Our dominant classes, since always incorporated into the constellation of imperialist power, do not have the slightest desire to check whether patriotism would sometimes prove more profitable than betrayal or whether begging is actually the only possible thought for conducting abroad policy. They pledge sovereignty due to the fact that “there is no choice”: the excuses of the oligarchic elite deliberately identify the inability of a certain social class with the alleged inability of full nations to develop.
Josué de Castro confessed: "I, the winner of the global peace prize, think there is no another way than force for Latin America." 1 100 and 20 million children are thrown in the eye of this cyclone. The population of Latin America grows like no other; in half a century it has undergone more than tripled. A child, from illness or hunger, dies here all minute, but in 2000 there will be six 100 and 50 million Latin Americans, half of them under the age of fifteen: A real time bomb. Today, in late 1970, 50 of the 2 100 and eighty million Latin Americans are unemployed or employed besides small, nearly 1 100 million are illiterate; half of them live crowded, under conditions harmful to health. The 3 largest markets in Latin America – Argentina, Brazil and Mexico – combined do not match the consumer capacity of the markets in France or Western Germany, although the population of our big 3 is importantly higher than the population of any European country. Latin America present produces little food compared to population levels than before planet War II and exports per capita, taking into account fixed prices, has decreased 3 times since the eve of the 1929 crisis.
This full strategy is completely rational from the point of view of its abroad rulers, as well as our elites, due to the fact that these, surviving on commission, sold to the devil a soul at a price that Faust would find embarrassing. However, it is completely irrational from the position of everyone else, as the more it develops, the more the contradictions, tensions, and imbalance are exacerbated. Even industrialisation, which is independent and late, conveniently co-exist with the tradition of latyfunds and structural inequality, exacerbates the problem of unemployment alternatively than helping to solve it; in a region where abandoned hands, and so many, constantly arrive, poorness continues to spread and wealth accumulates. The privileged poles of improvement – Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, the city of Mexico – support the creation of fresh factories, but the hands to work in them request little and less.
This strategy does not include 1 tiny problem: that it will request less people. And people breed.
They have sex joyfully and unprotectedly. More and more Latin Americans stay somewhere on the side of the road of progress, without working both in the countryside, where the latyfundia reign with its immeasurable defeats, and in the city where the machines reign. The strategy spits people out. North American missionaries massively sterilize women, hand out pills, diaphragms, spirals, condoms, and matrimony calendars, and Latin American children proceed to be born stubbornly, demanding their natural right to a place under the sun on these fertile lands that could deliver to everyone what they almost refuse.
In early November 1968, Richard Nixon publically stated that although the Alliance for advancement celebrated its seventh birthday, Latin America was compounded with food problems. In April of the same year George W. Ball wrote in Life magazine: “At least in the coming decades discontent with the poorest nations of the planet will not endanger its existence.
Although it's most likely a shame, the planet has existed in 2 thirds of generations poor, in 1 3rd rich.
Although it is most likely not fair, mediocre countries can do very small here." It was Ball who presided over the U.S. delegation at the United Nations Conference on Trade and improvement shortly after its creation in Geneva in 1964: he then voted against 9 of the 12 general principles adopted to improve the trade disadvantage of underdeveloped countries.
Poverty in Latin America kills mass, but without publicity; over the heads of our nations, accustomed to suffering with clenched teeth, all year 3 Hiroshima bombs blow quietly.
This systemic violence, which is not visible but real, is increasing; its crimes are recorded not in the criminal chronicles, but in the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization statistics. Ball emphasizes that impunity is inactive possible due to the fact that the mediocre are incapable to start a planet war, but the empire is concerned: incapable to multiply bread, doing what it can to reduce the number of strangers.
“Fight poverty, kill beggar!” scribbled an anonymous master of black humor on a wall in La Paz.
What else does Malthus' heirs plan on killing all future beggars before you're even born? Robert McNamara, head of the planet Bank, formerly president of Ford and Secretary of defence of the United States, maintains that the demographic detonation is the most serious obstacle to advancement in Latin America, and announces that the planet Bank will give precedence to lending to those countries that will implement birth control programmes. This strong head laments that the brains of mediocre people think twenty-five percent little than the brains of others, and the technocrats of the planet Bank (who have already been born) fire up computers with data to give a cliche on what is actually best not to be born: “If a developing country, with mediate income per capita Within a 100 and 50 to 2 100 dollars a year, it will reduce births by 50 percent in twenty-five years, after 30 years its income per capita will be at least forty percent higher than it would have been without specified intervention, and sixty years higher twice," provides 1 of the papers smeared by that institution. Lyndon Johnson noted that "five dollars invested in reducing population growth brings more real benefits than a 100 dollars invested in economical growth". Dwight Eisenhower predicted that if the people of our planet proceed to arrive at the same rate, not only will the threat of revolution increase, but in addition, there will be “a simplification in the standard of surviving of all nations, including oursIt’s okay. ”
The United States has no problem with demographic explosion, but more than any another country cares about spreading and imposing birth control. Not only the government; besides the Rockefeller or Ford foundations conflict with the nightmare imagination of millions of children coming as a locust plague from beyond the 3rd planet horizons. Plato and Aristotle dealt with these issues before Malthus and McNamara, but in our time this full global offensive has a very circumstantial function: the aim is to justify the very unequal distribution of income between states and social classes,
convince the mediocre that their poorness is due to their own uncontrolled fertility, and halt the wave of anger of the rebel masses.
In Southeast Asia, intrauterine inserts and bombs and device guns complement themselves in the godly work of limiting the population growth of Vietnam. In Latin America it is hygiene and more effective to fight possible partisans in the wombs of mothers than then in forests or streets. Various North American missionaries sterilize thousands of women in the Amazon, although this is the area of the Earth populated least of those who are habitable. In most countries of Latin American people are not adequate than besides many. Brazil has thirty-eight times less inhabitants per square kilometer than Belgium; Paraguay – forty-nine times little than England; Peru – thirty-two times little than Japan. Haiti and El Salvador, the largest human swarms of Latin America, have a population density lower than Italy. So the arguments cited by technocrats offend intelligence; their actual motivations are outraged. Eventually, not little than half of the territories of Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay and Venezuela stay uninhabited. No Latin American population is increasing slower than the Uruguayan population, this land of the elderly, and yet in fresh years no another nation has suffered so much as a consequence of the crisis which in fact seems to drag us into the lowest circles of hell.
The country is empty, though its fertile meadows could feed an infinitely larger population than the 1 that present endures so much misery.
More than a century ago, a Guatemalan politician predicted: “It would be unusual if the same United States, which is the origin of our pains, gave us an effective cure for them.” After the death and ceremony of the Alliance for the advancement of the Empire, alternatively panicked than generous, suggests solving Latin America's problems by preventing the elimination of Latin Americans. In Washington, D.C., they already have reason to fishy that mediocre nations do not They don't like To be poor. But 1 cannot want a goal by rejecting the means that lead to it: those who deny the anticipation of the liberation of Latin America besides deny our only chance of rebirth and at the same time absolve the present system. And young people grow stronger, rise their heads, perceive to what the voice of this strategy has to offer them.
Meanwhile, the strategy speaks absurd language: it proposes to limit the population of these and so empty areas;
considers that there are no capital in countries that abound in capital – only that they are constantly wasted capital; help calls for deformed orthopedic loans and the outflow of wealth associated with abroad investments; calls on the Latin-founders to implement agricultural reform, and oligarchs to implement social justice. The class conflict exists – reportedly – only due to the abroad agents who origin it; while the division into social classes is absolutely natural and the oppression of any by the another belongs simply to the Western way of life. American Crime Marines they aim to reconstruct order and social peace, and Washington-based dictatorships build in prison the regulation of law and ban strikes and annihilate trade unions to defend freedom of work.
Is the only thing we can do is put our hands on?
Poverty is not recorded in the stars; backwardness is not the consequence of God's impenetrable purpose.
We enter the era of revolution, the era of redemption. The dominant classes are anxiously looking around, scaring everyone with hell. In a sense, the right is right erstwhile it identifies itself with tranquility and order: it is simply a order based on the regular humiliation of the majority, but nevertheless order; it is peace to think that injustice will stay injustice and hunger. If the future takes the form of a box-surprising, conservative, rather rightly, shouts, "Traitor!" And the ideologists of helplessness, the slaves who see themselves through the eyes of their masters, do not hesitate to rise their lamentation. The bronze eagle, erstwhile crowning a monument to the victims of the Maine battleship, removed after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, lies now abandoned, with broken wings, in the shadow of any gate in old Havana. Like Cuba, another countries have besides entered, each in their own way, the way of change: due to the fact that the present state of affairs is simply a criminal state of affairs.
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Join us!The spirits of all revolutions stifled or betrayed over centuries of cruel Latin American past are now revived in these fresh experiences, and present times are viewed in the liable form of their erstwhile contradictions.
History is simply a prophet with a look back: due to what was, and contrary to what was, it foretells what will be.
Therefore, in this book, which wants to tell the communicative of the colonial robbery and at the same time present the modern mechanisms of looting, the caravel conquistadors appear side by side with technocrats in jumbo jets. Hernán Cortés and Marines appear next to each other, colonial officials of the Kingdom of Spain and the Court of the global Monetary Fund, profits from slave traders and gross from General Motors. As well as the erstwhile defeated heroes and contemporary us, the old and newer wickedness and hopes and sacrifices that were not in vain. Examining the customs of natives of the Bogotá highlands, Alexander von Humboldt determined that the Indians utilized the word to describe the victims of their rituals quihica. It meant "door": the death of each chosen 1 opened a fresh cycle of 1 100 and eighty-five moons.
