From 1545 to 1558, Spanish mineral exports from the Americas came chiefly from the silver mines in Potosi (Bolivia) which ‘not only stimulated Europe’s economic development one may say that they made it possible’.

Some died by their own hand in anticipation of the fate that awaited them in Haiti, ‘many natives… killed their children and committed mass suicide’. Entire indigenous populations were exterminated through indentured slavery in gold and silver mines or from their lack of resistance to the bacteria and viruses carried by their conquerors. It is instead the product of imperial design and Galeano reveals in the first part of Open Veins the full horror of what followed when ‘Renaissance Europeans ventured across the ocean and buried their teeth in the throats of Indian civilizations’ under the cloak of propagating Christianity. ‘Poverty is not written in the stars’, writes Galeano, ‘underdevelopment is not one of God’s mysterious designs’. This blog reflects on Galeano’s text as it reaches its fiftieth anniversary and considers what it tells us about the importance of history to the contemporary discourse on development. In the second half of the 20 th century, United States’ (US) expansionism led to economic re-colonisation through debt, neoliberalism, rigged trade rules, corporate impunity and tied aid. Galeano gives an unsparing account of the five hundred years of ‘pillage’ that followed Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas in 1492 which included indentured slavery, extractivism, colonialism and indigenous genocide. Open Veins has always retained its reputation for meticulous research and a luminous writing style which Allende suggests is ‘poetic in its description of solidarity and human capacity for survival’. Galeano was imprisoned by the military regime in Uruguay and forced into exile for eleven years but remained active as a journalist and articulate voice of the Left.

In her Foreword to Open Veins, the novelist Isabelle Allende said that Galeano ‘denounced exploitation with uncompromising ferocity’ and following the book’s publication, it was banned by military governments in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay.

Fifty years ago, the Uruguayan journalist and author Eduardo Galeano published his classic study of the European – and later United States’ (US) - colonisation and rapacious plunder of Latin America titled Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (1997).

Open veins of america