![]() “A continent blessed with bountiful natural resources has been systematically stripped of its gold, silver, tin, copper, oil, nitrates, manganese and rubber, while its people remain among the poorest on earth, with high levels of infant mortality, illiteracy and child prostitution” (2009). In a review of the book, Mongredien suggests that it offers an ‘impassioned and lucid’ account of how: Galeano gives an unsparing account of ‘how the Spaniards and Portuguese in America combined propagation of the Christian faith with usurpation and plunder of native wealth’ (1997: 14). The book has always retained its reputation for meticulous research and a luminous writing style which the novelist Isabel Allende suggests is ‘poetic in its description of solidarity and human capacity for survival’ (Allende, 1997: xii). When it was first published in 1971, Open Veins was banned by military governments in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, and Galeano was imprisoned and forced into exile. 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). ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |