THE WASHINGTON
POST
Eduardo Galeano, influential Uruguayan
author, dies at 741
By Adam Bernstein
April 13, 2015
Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan author whose
anti-capitalist polemic “The Open Veins of Latin
America” served for decades as a lodestar for
leftist dissenters worldwide and who last year
startled his admirers when he impugned the
book’s writing and scholarly value, died April 13
in Montevideo, the capital. He was 74.
The cause was lung cancer, the Uruguayan
publication Brecha reported.
Mr. Galeano had been a prominent journalist in
Uruguay since his teens, when he began
submitting cartoons to a socialist newspaper,
and continued to write prolifically (and read
voraciously) until recent years.
In his 20s and 30s, he edited or founded
influential political and cultural journals and
twice went into exile to escape military
dictatorships, first in Uruguay and then in
Argentina, where he was once denounced as a
“corrupter of youth.”
A hallmark of his work was the powerful and
elegant epigram on the struggle for human
dignity, a vision he laid out as a battle between
those who conquer and those who resist.
“Power is like a violin,” he once noted. “It is
held by the left hand and played by the right.”
1
Retrieved and adapted from: The Washington
Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/?nid=top_pb
_wplogo
(16/4/15)
Eduardo Galeano speaks in 2009 during the
closing march to support the referendum to
abolish an amnesty law for those involved in
crimes against human rights during Uruguay's
last dictatorship. (Pablo Porciuncula/AFP/Getty
Images)
His left-wing politics and literary craftsmanship
put him in a league with the Colombian-born
Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez , though
his fame never reached the same level in the
United States. Mr. Galeano was a novelist, a
short-story writer, a memoirist and the author
of “Soccer in Sun and Shadow.”
The work that established him as a force in
radical politics and history far beyond Uruguay
was “The Open Veins of Latin America: Five
Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent,” first
published in Spanish in 1971.
The manifesto, promoted as a work of political
economy, was a boundary-defying blend of
Marxist screed, searing social history,
autobiography and travelogue. It used
impassioned language, stirring poems and even
cartoons to detail the legacy of European
colonizers and Western corporations that
sought to loot Central and South America for
human and natural resources.
The efforts by long-ago generations of
outsiders to exploit the region led, he wrote, to
a “contemporary structure of plunder” that
continued to cause widespread
impoverishment, inequality and
underdevelopment.
“The human murder by poverty in Latin
America is secret,” Mr. Galeano wrote. “Every
year, without making a sound, three Hiroshima
bombs explode over communities that have
become accustomed to suffering with clenched
teeth.”
“Open Veins” was widely translated, sold
hundreds of thousands of copies throughout
what was then called the Third World and
became a staple of many American college
classrooms. Its biggest impact was in Latin
America, which was then and would remain
awash in military regimes and right-wing
dictatorships for years to come.
Author Isabelle Allende, who said her copy of
Mr. Galeano’s book was one of the few items
with which she fled Chile in 1973 after the
military leader Augusto Pinochet came to
power, once called “Open Veins” “a mixture of
meticulous detail, political conviction, poetic
flair, and good storytelling.”
(…)“Open Veins” had a sales spike in the United
States when Venezuelan President Hugo
Chavez, who once described the book as “a
monument in our Latin American history,”
handed a copy in 2009 to President Obama
when they met at the Summit of the Americas
in Trinidad and Tobago.
The book was not universally embraced among
the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking
intelligentsia, especially as many former Third
World nations such as Brazil began to
experience an economic rise.
Many found Mr. Galeano’s work irredeemably
self-pitying and said it ignored many problems
born from home-grown ills, such as destructive
populist leaders on the left and nationalistic
ideologues on the right.
Along with Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che”
Guevara, Mr. Galeano was among those who
came in for a drubbing in the bestselling
volume “Guide to the Perfect Latin American
Idiot,” a 1999 collaboration by Colombian
writer Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, the exiled
Cuban author Carlos Alberto Montaner and the
Peruvian journalist and author Álvaro Vargas
Llosa (son of Mario).
The writers, who favored free-market policies,
claimed they had once been “idiots” seduced
by the left in their younger years. “In reality,
except for cultural factors, nothing prevented
Mexico from doing what Japan did when it
almost totally displaced the United States’
production of television sets,” they wrote.
Last year, at a book fair in Brazil that feted
“Open Veins,” Mr. Galeano made the startling
announcement that he was distancing himself
from his best-known work. “Open Veins’ tried
to be a book of political economy, but I didn’t
yet have the necessary training or preparation,”
he was quoted as saying. He also noted “grave
errors” of leftist regimes, which seemed like an
implicit rebuke of the Castro brothers in Cuba
and the late Chavez in Venezuela.
Moreover, he added, his own rhetoric seemed
stale and leaden, a product of an era of
dictatorships and 1960s-style revolution.
“Reality has changed a lot, and I have changed
a lot,” he said at the book fair. “Reality is much
more complex precisely because the human
condition is diverse. Some political sectors
close to me thought such diversity was a
heresy. Even today, there are some survivors of
this type who think that all diversity is a threat.
Fortunately, it is not.”
Eduardo German Hughes Galeano was born
Sept. 3, 1940, into a middle-class Catholic
family in Montevideo with European lineage. At
20, he became editor in chief of the journal
Marcha, one of the country’s most influential
political and cultural weeklies.
He was forced to leave Uruguay in 1973 — at
the start of a 12-year military dictatorship —
and founded the publication Crisis while in
Argentina.
That journal, he once told the Toronto Globe
and Mail, “was cultural, but not in a narrow
sense, dealing only with books and theater and
film. . . . Not only were we offering the best of
Latin American literary production, but we
were looking for the unknown voices, from the
country, from the walls. All the voices not
sanctified by those in power.”
After a military coup in Argentina in 1976, Mr.
Galeano left for post-Franco Spain to escape
persistent threats against his life. He had glibly
told one caller, “The schedule for calling in
threats, sir, is from six to eight.”
The phenomenal success of “The Open Veins of
Latin America” led Mr. Galeano to expand it
into three further volumes in a series called
“Memory of Fire ” that were published
throughout the 1980s. The trilogy earned him
an American Book Award in 1989. He returned writing has no meaning. Nor can I ever
to Montevideo in 1985. understand those who turn words into a target
for fury or an object of fetishism. Words are a
His 1978 memoir, “Days and Nights of Love and
weapon: The responsibility for the crime never
War ,” was an acerbic and surreal portrait of
lies with the knife. Slowly gaining strength and
life under the dictatorships in Uruguay and
form, there is in Latin America a literature that
Argentina. Amid the “dirty war” in Argentina, in
does not set out to bury our own dead but to
which thousands of real and perceived
perpetuate them; that refuses to clear up the
government enemies were killed or
ashes and tries, on the contrary, to light the
“disappeared,” he noted how prominent
fire. Perhaps my own words may help a little to
writers went missing without a word while
preserve for people to come, as the poet put it,
state-controlled newspapers reported “the
‘the true name of each thing.’ ”
complete list of earthquake victims in Udine,
Italy.”
His marriages to Silvia Brando and Graciela
Berro ended in divorce. In 1976, he wed Helena
Villagra. A complete list of survivors could not
be immediately confirmed.
Mr. Galeano’s other notable books — including
“The Book of Embraces ” (1989), “Voices of
Time: A Life in Stories ” (2004) and “Mirrors:
Stories of Almost Everyone ” (2008) — were
often impressionistic vignettes of art, politics
and people. And, like most of his work, they
hewed to his belief in the power of language to
provoke social and political change.
“Perhaps I write because I know that the
people and the things I care about are going to
die and I want to preserve them alive,” Mr.
Galeano once told the reference guide
Contemporary Authors.
“I believe in my craft; I believe in my
instrument. I can never understand how writers
could write while cheerfully declaring that

Adam Bernstein has spent his career putting the

"post" in Washington Post, first as an obituary
writer and then as editor. The American Society of
Newspaper Editors recognized Bernstein’s ability
to exhume “the small details and anecdotes that
get at the essence of the person” and to write
stories that are “complex yet stylish.”