While these works and their authors were distinctive, they shared a common underlying theme: a yearning for the continent to be free of an international system of domination, be it cultural (in the case of Rodó) or economic (in the case of Galeano). There are plenty of examples of this but two of the best come from Uruguay: the landmark 1900 essay Ariel by José Enrique Rodó-an eloquent denunciation of nordomania (the attraction to US materialism), just as the locus of empire began to shift from London to Washington-and Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America. This fact in itself can be explained in terms of class dynamics, but what is fascinating to the historical observer is how the content of intellectual output itself so often speaks directly to those underlying forces in any given period.Įduardo Gaelano making a recording for his SoundCloud account In Latin America this simple truth has arguably been exaggerated by the limited size of the writerly caste, a reflection of tiny elites sitting atop hierarchical societies comprising large numbers of the great unwashed. It goes without saying that the most influential writers have often been those who have most eloquently captured the zeitgeist of societies undergoing rapid change. One of our readers has written a review of the book which we are pleased to publish here. By 1666 there were 80,000 slaves in the Bahamas working on 800 sugar plantations. During this period the Indians of the Americas were reduced in population from 70 million to 3.5 million. For example the first 170 years saw the shipping to Spain of 185,000 kilograms of gold and 16 million kilograms of silver. Galeano gives figures to show the pillage that took place. It is a masterful work analysing in detail the exploitation of the continent that started with the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Bahamas in 1492. Open Veins of Latin America – five centuries of the pillage of a continent by Eduardo Galeano was published just over 50 years ago.

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