Zanna's Reviews > Open Veins of Latin America

This is an agonizingly lucid account of the of colonisation and depredation of a continent. Beginning with the continuing genocide of the native population, seguing into the advent of slavery and its replacement with hunger wages for the same back-breaking (or in the case of the mines, lung-destroying) “work” as the slaves were forced to carry out, and concluding with the neocolonial extraction of Latin American resources by the USA and Europe; whatever Latin America makes, he argues, its main export is cheap labour. Corporate vampires and their helpers (the US government, local dictators, the IMF and World Bank) are thoroughly indicted. Galeano also takes care to mention the many uprisings and resistance fighters and the violence they were met with, and also success stories like Cuba. Essential reading.

There are always politicians and technocrats ready to show that the invasion of “industrialising” foreign capital benefits the area invaded. In this version , the new-model imperialism comes on a geuinely civilizing mission, is a blessing to the dominated countries, and the true-love declarations by the dominant power of the moment are its real intentions. Guilty consciences are ths relieved of the need for alibis, for no one is guilty:, today’s imperialism radiates techology and progress, and even the use of this old, unpleasant word to define it is in bad taste. But when imperialism begins exalting its own virtues we should take a look in our pockets. We find that the new model does not make its colonies more prosperous, although it enriches their poles of development; it does not ease social and regional tensions, but aggravates them; it spreads poverty even more widely and concentrates wealth even more narrowly; it pays wages twenty times lower than in Detroit and charges prices three times higher than in New York; it takes over the internal market and the mainsprings of the productive apparatus; it assumes proprietary rights to chart the course and fix the frontiers of progress; it controls national credit and orients external trade at its whim; it denationalises not only industry but the profits earned by industry; it fosters the waste of resources by diverting a large part of the economic surplus abroad; it does not bring in capital for investment but takes it out.