Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent 
by 

Eduardo Galeano, 

 

Cedric Belfrage (Translator), 

 

Isabel Allende (Goodreads Author) (Introduction)

 

They Flow With People Now

All the stately homes, the baroque palaces, the post roads, the standing military and naval forces, the banking institutions, and advanced educational establishments of Europe (and, arguably therefore, the Industrial Revolution) are built on the same foundations: sugar from the Caribbean, silver from Bolivia and Mexico, gold and diamonds from Nicaragua and Brazil. These in turn are the product of the enslavement of the native Indian populations of Central and South America, and, as the local inhabitants were exterminated, the importation of millions of Africans to maintain and expand production. The legacy of this boom in European fortunes is depleted and poisoned soil, enormous differences in economic status, profound lack of social cohesion, and a continued vulnerability to exploitation.

The Spanish-American War - with its annexation of Puerto Rico and occupation of Cuba - allowed a new mechanism and new actors in Latin American exploitation at the turn of the 20th century. Strategy shifted from the use of individual commercial buccaneers who were permitted by the sovereign to use any means necessary to keep the booty flowing, to corporate enterprise with the direct support of military and other government resources. So following on its success in the Caribbean, it tested the strategy again in Mexico. The United States twice sent troops to impede the Zapata-land reforms, arranged the assassination of the President, and occupied Vera Cruz in order to ease concerns of American investors in Mexican mines and railroads. 

This set a pattern for subsequent armed assertion of power in Colombia, Haiti, Honduras, Panama, Dominican Republic and Nicaragua. Subsequent proxy interventions and ‘regime changes’ through covert de-stabilisation became the preferred approach from the 1950’s on, in Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala, Guyana, Chile, and Argentina and Brazil. It is accurate to say that there are few countries in Latin America in which the US government has not sought to overthrow democratically elected regimes, replacing them with military juntas or right-wing dictators favourable to US investment.

Such actions have only nominally been about ideology (Capitalism vs. Communism) or the threat of foreign intervention in Latin America (the Soviet Union or China).* But the interests of United Fruit, National Sugar, and Kennecott Copper or AT&T, for example, were always apparent to those involved. The connection between intervention and business interests has been clear throughout the 20th century. Galeano quotes the 1935 testimony of General Smedley D. Butler, who headed many of the expeditions, and who at the time of his death was the most decorated serving Marine in history. Smedley testified: 

“I spent thirty-three years and four months in active service as a member of our country’s most agile military force—the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from a second lieutenant to major-general. And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.… Thus I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank to collect revenues in. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras ‘right’ for American fruit companies in 1903”

Corporations don’t build stately homes; they build skyscrapers and office campuses. And they build these no longer on sugar or coffee but on the materials essential in a high-tech society. Chile, Argentina and Bolivia sit on two thirds of the world’s lithium. Peru, Chile, Bolivia, and Mexico have half the world’s un-mined silver. A third of the world’s tin is still in the ground in Peru, Brazil, and Bolivia. Venezuela has something like a quarter of OPEC’S reserves and controls the world’s largest proven pool of oil. Bauxite, nickel, and iron have similar concentrations in Latin America. The United States will undoubtedly do what it can to preserve its dominance over these resources. Capital will continue to flow North while misery continues to flow South. Little mystery, therefore, about why much of the population wants to follow the capital.


* I can’t avoid including one or two of the numerous illustrations of the behaviour of the United States that are probably unfamiliar to its population: 

“… the United States occupied Haiti for twenty years [1915-1934] and, in that black country that had been the scene of the first victorious slave revolt, introduced racial segregation and forced labor, killed 1,500 workers in one of its repressive operations (according to a U.S. Senate investigation in 1922), and when the local government refused to turn the Banco Nacional into a branch of New York’s National City Bank, suspended the salaries of the president and his ministers so that they might think again.”

“In a fine report on his visit [in 1910], [a socialist journalist,] John Kenneth Turner wrote that ‘the United States has virtually reduced Diaz [the Mexican president] to a political dependency, and by so doing has virtually transformed Mexico into a slave colony of the United States.’ U.S. capital made juicy profits directly or indirectly from its association with the dictatorship. ‘The Americanization of Mexico of which Wall Street boasts,’ wrote Turner, ‘is being accomplished and accomplished with a vengeance’.”

“In 1965 another sugar country, the Dominican Republic, was invaded, this time—according to their commander, General Bruce Palmer—by 40,000 U.S. Marines ready ‘to stay indefinitely in this country in view of the reigning confusion.’ The vertical drop in sugar prices had been a factor in setting off popular indignation; the people rose against the military dictatorship and U.S. troops arrived promptly to restore order… After the invasion, President Lyndon Johnson’s special envoy to the Dominican Republic was Ellsworth Bunker, the chairman of the National Sugar Refining Company”