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

by Eduardo Galeano

  *In October 1970 the Bishop of Pará denounced to the president of Brazil the brutal exploitation of Northeastern workers by contractors for the trans-Amazonia highway. The government calls it “the work of the century.”

  CACAO PLANTERS LIT THEIR CIGARETTES WITH 500,000-REIS BILLS

  For a long time Venezuela was identified with cacao, a native South American plant. Venezuelans, as Domingo Rangel says, have been made to sell cacao and distribute foreign trinkets in their own lands.23 The cacao oligarchs made up a “Holy Trinity of backwardness,” along with moneylenders and traders. Cacao coexisted with indigo, sugar, tobacco, and a few mines, and cattle-raising on the plains, but the people correctly baptized as “Gran Cacao” the slave-owning oligarchy in Caracas, which supplied cacao to Mexico’s mining oligarchy and to the Spanish metropolis, thus using black labor to enrich itself. A coffee era began in Venezuela in 1873; coffee, like cacao, needs sloping lands or warm valleys. Despite this competition, cacao continued to expand, invading the humid lands of Carúpano. Venezuela remained an agricultural country condemned to the cyclical rise and fall of coffee and cacao prices; the two products created the capital that enabled landlords, merchants, and moneylenders to live as wasteful parasites.

  Then, in 1922, the country suddenly became a fountain of oil, and oil has reigned without interruption ever since. The black gold finally gushed forth, justifying, four centuries late, the fantasies of the Spanish conquistadors: searching in vain for the king who bathed in gold, they had become mad enough to confuse a little Maracaibo village with Venice and the fetid coast of Pariá with earthly paradise.

  The last decades of the nineteenth century marked the rise of European and U.S. gluttony for chocolate. The industry’s progress lent great impetus to Brazilian cacao and to production in the old Venezuelan and Ecuadorean plantations. Cacao made its entrance onto the Brazilian economic stage at the same time as rubber, and like rubber it gave work to Northeastern peasants. São Salvador, now Bahia, on Todos os Santos bay, once capital of Brazil and of sugar and one of Latin America’s most important cities, revived as the cacao capital. In our time latifundios south of Bahia—from the Recôncavo region to the state of Espirito Santo, between the littoral lowlands and the mountain chain along the coast—still supply raw material for a good part of the world’s chocolate consumption. Like sugarcane, cacao means monoculture, the burning of forests, the dictatorship of international prices, and perpetual penury for the workers. The plantation owners, who live on the Rio de Janeiro beaches and are more businessmen than farmers, do not permit a single inch of land to be devoted to other crops. Their managers normally pay wages in kind—jerked beef, flour, beans; when paid in cash, the peasant receives the equivalent of a liter of beer for a whole day’s work, and must work a day and a half to buy a can of powdered milk.

  For some time Brazil was favored in the international market, but from the outset Africa offered serious competition. By the 1920s the Gold Coast (now Ghana) had won the top position as a world cacao supplier: the British had developed cacao plantations in their colony on a large scale with modern methods. Brazil fell back to second place, and years later to third. But there was more than one period when no one would have believed that the fertile lands of southern Bahia were destined for mediocrity. Unused throughout the colonial period, the soil yielded prodigally: peons split the pods with their knives, collected the beans, and loaded them into donkey-drawn carts to be taken to the grinders; it became necessary to fell ever more forests, to open up new clearings and conquer new territory with machete and gun. The peons knew nothing of prices or markets. They did not even know who ruled Brazil—up until not long ago one could still meet hacienda workers who were convinced that King Pedro II was still on the throne. The cacao masters rubbed their hands together: they knew, or thought they knew. Chocolate consumption grew, and with it prices and profits. The port of Ilhéus, from which almost all the cacao was shipped, became known as “Queen of the South,” and although it is languishing today, the small but massive palaces which the hacendados furnished with the greatest luxury and the worst taste may still be seen there. Jorge Amado wrote several novels about it. He recreates one of the high-price periods thus: “Ilhéus and the cacao zone swam in gold, bathed in champagne, slept with French ladies from Rio de Janeiro. At the Trianon, the city’s most chic cabaret, Colonel Maneca Dantas lit cigarettes with 500,000-reis bills, repeating the gesture of all the country’s rich fazendeiros during the previous rises in coffee, rubber, cotton, and sugar prices.”* With the rise in price, production increased; then prices fell. Conditions became more and more unstable and land kept changing hands. The era of “beggar millionaires” began, as plantation pioneers yielded to exporters, who took over the lands for payment of debts.

  * In Brazil the title of “colonel” is conferred with the greatest ease on old-established latifundistas and, by extension, on all important persons. The quoted passage comes from Jorge Amado’s novel São Jorge dos Ilhéus (1946). From another novel, Cacao (1935): “Not even the children touched the cacao fruit. They were afraid of those yellow berries, so sweet on the inside, which enslaved them to this life of breadfruit and dried meat.” For, after all, “cacao was the great senhor feared even by the colonel.” In still another novel, Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon (1959), a character speaks of Ilhéus in 1925, pointing a categorical finger: “In the north of the country there exists no more rapidly progressing city.” Ilhéus today is not even the shadow of what it was.

  In barely three years, from 1959 to 1961—to give but one example— the international price of the Brazilian cacao bean fell by one third. Since then the tendency to rise has opened the door of hope a crack, but the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) predicts a short life for the upward curve.† To keep their chocolate cheap, the big cacao consumers—the United States, Britain, West Germany, Holland, France—stimulate competition between African cacao and cacao from Brazil and Ecuador. Controlling prices as they do, these nations bring on periods of depression which put cacao workers back on the road. The unemployed look for trees to sleep under and green bananas to fool their stomachs: one product they certainly don’t eat is the fine chocolate that Brazil actually imports from France and Switzerland. Chocolate costs more and more; cacao less and less. Between 1950 and 1960 Ecuador’s cacao sales rose more than 30 percent in volume but only 15 percent in value. The remaining 15 percent was a gift from Ecuador to those rich countries which, in the same period, sent it their industrial products at escalating prices. Ecuador’s economy depends on the sale of bananas, coffee, and cacao, three food products highly subject to price fluctuations. According to official data, seven of every ten Ecuadoreans suffer from basic malnutrition, and the country has one of the highest death rates in the world.

  † Referring to the improvements in cacao and coffee prices, ECLA says they are relatively transitory and result largely from occasional harvest setbacks.24

  CHEAP HANDS FOR COTTON

  Brazil is the fourth largest cotton-producing country, Mexico the fifth. More than one-fifth of all cotton consumed by the world’s textile industries comes from Latin America. At the end of the eighteenth century, cotton had become the most important industrial raw material in Europe; England multiplied its purchases of the fiber by five in thirty years. The spinning frame invented by Arkwright—at the same time that Watt was patenting his steam engine—and Cartwright’s later development of the mechanical loom gave textile manufacturing a decisive push and provided the cotton plant with eager overseas markets. The cotton euphoria brusquely awakened the port of São Luiz do Maranhão from a long tropical siesta previously interrupted only by the arrival of a couple of ships a year. Now black slaves streamed onto the north Brazilian plantations and some 200 ships a year, carrying a million pounds of raw cotton, sailed from São Luiz. The economic crisis in mining at the beginning of the nineteenth century gave cotton an abundance of slave labor; with the exhaustion of the gold and diamond supply
in the south, Brazil seemed to revive in the north. The port flourished, producing enough poets to become known as the Athens of Brazil, but since no one in the Maranhão region bothered to raise food, hunger entered along with prosperity. Sometimes there was only rice to eat. The story ended as it had begun: suddenly. Large-scale cotton production on southern United States plantations, which had better soil and machines for cleaning and baling, lowered prices by two-thirds and Brazil dropped out of the race. Prosperity returned when the Civil War interrupted U.S. supplies, but did not last long. Between 1934 and 1939, Brazilian cotton production grew impressively, from 125,000 to more than 320,000 tons; then the United States flooded the world market with its surpluses and prices slumped again.

  The United States’ agricultural surpluses are, as we know, the result of fat subsidies to its producers; it spills the surpluses out across the world at dumping prices as part of its foreign aid program. Cotton was Paraguay’s chief export until the ruinous competition of U.S. cotton displaced it in the market, and Paraguayan production has fallen by 50 percent since 1952. (In the same way Uruguay lost the Canadian market for its rice, and the wheat of Argentina, once the world’s granary, virtually vanished from international markets.) The United States’ dumping of cotton has not affected the imperial hold of a U.S. firm, Anderson, Clayton & Co., over this product in Latin America, or interfered with U.S. purchases, through the firm, of Mexican cotton for resale to other countries.

  World trade of Latin American cotton nevertheless remains lively thanks to its extremely low production costs. Even reality-concealing official figures betray the wretched standards of pay for actual work. In Brazil it is done either for hunger wages or on a serf basis. In Guatemala, plantation owners boast of paying 19 quetzals (about $10) a month, most of it in kind at prices they themselves determine. Mexican migrant workers, moving from harvest to harvest at $1.50 a day, suffer from underemployment and consequent undernutrition. The lot of Nicaraguan cotton workers is much worse, and Salvadorans, who supply cotton to Japanese textile industries, consume fewer calories and proteins than the hungry peasants of India.

  In Peru’s economy cotton is the second agricultural source of foreign currency. José Carlos Mariátegui has noted how foreign capitalism, in its constant search for land, labor, and markets, came to control Peru’s export crops by foreclosing the mortgages of debt-delinquent landowners.25 When General Velasco Alvarado’s nationalist government came to power in 1968, less than one-sixth of the land suitable for intensive cultivation was being used, per capita income was fifteen times less than in the United States, and consumption of calories was among the world’s lowest. But cotton production, like sugar, was still dictated by the same non-Peruvian criteria exposed by Mariátegui. The best lands, those along the coast, belonged to U.S. enterprises or to landlords who, like the Lima bourgeoisie, were only nationals in a geographical sense. Five big concerns (two of which—Anderson, Clayton and Grace—are based in the United States) dominated the export of cotton and sugar and also produced them in their own “agro-industrial complexes.” Coastal sugar and cotton plantations—supposedly centers of prosperity and progress in contrast to sierra latifundios—paid hunger wages until the 1969 agrarian reform expropriated them and handed them over to the workers as cooperatives. According to the Inter-American Committee for Agricultural Development, the income for each member of a coastal worker’s family amounted to a mere $5 a month.26

  With thirty affliliates in Latin America, Anderson, Clayton has a monopoly: it not only sells cotton, but its network controls the financing and industrialization of the fiber and its derivatives, and also produces food on a large scale. In Mexico, for example, while the company owns no land, it still dominates cotton production and the 800,000 Mexicans who harvest the crop are in fact at its mercy. It buys the excellent Mexican cotton at a very low price, having previously extended credits to producers on the condition that they sell to it at the price with which it opens the market. In addition to advancing money, it supplies fertilizers, seeds, and insecticides; it reserves the right to supervise the application of fertilizer, the sowing, and the harvesting. It fixes its own price for ginning the cotton, and uses the seeds in its oil, fat, and margarine factories. In recent years the firm, not content with dominating the cotton business, has even broken into the candy and chocolate fields, recently buying the well-known firm Luxus.

  Anderson, Clayton is also involved in coffee, and is the chief exporter of Brazilian coffee. It first took an interest in that business in 1950, and three years later it had dethroned the American Coffee Corporation. It is also the top producer of Brazilian foodstuffs and is one of the country’s thirty-five most powerful firms.

  CHEAP HANDS FOR COFFEE

  Some people rank coffee almost on a par with oil in its importance on the international market. At the beginning of the 1950s Latin America was supplying four-fifths of the coffee the world consumed; since then the competition of “robust” African coffee, lower in quality but also in price, has reduced Latin America’s share. Nevertheless, one-sixth of the currency the region obtains abroad now comes from coffee. Its price fluctuations affect fifteen countries south of the Río Grande. Brazil is the world’s top producer, getting about half of its export income from coffee. El Salvador, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Haiti also largely depend on coffee, and it accounts for two-thirds of Colombia’s foreign exchange.

  Coffee brought inflation to Brazil. Between 1824 and 1854 the price of a man doubled. At that figure, and with their prosperous days a thing of the past, neither the north’s cotton producers nor the Northeast’s sugar producers could afford slaves. Brazil’s center of gravity moved south. In addition to slave labor, the coffee producers used European immigrants, who brought in 50 percent of the harvests in a sharecrop-ping setup that still prevails in Brazil’s interior. Today’s tourists who drive through the woods for a swim at Tijuca beach are unaware that there, in the mountains surrounding Rio de Janeiro, big coffee plantations existed more than a century ago. Flanking the Sierra, these plantations spread toward the state of São Paulo in their endless pursuit of the humus of virgin lands. Toward the end of the century coffee planters, by then the new Brazilian social elite, sharpened their pencils and totted up their accounts: subsistence wages worked out cheaper than the purchase and maintenance of increasingly scarce slaves. With the abolition of slavery in 1888, the combined forms of feudal serfdom and wage labor that still persist were inaugurated. From then on an army of “free” farmhands would accompany coffee on its travels. The Rio Paraíba became the country’s richest area, to be quickly ruined by a plant whose destructive form of cultivation left forests razed, natural reserves exhausted, and general decadence in its wake. Previously virgin lands were pitilessly eroded as the plunder-march of coffee advanced, weakening the plants and making them vulnerable to diseases. The coffee plantation invaded the broad purple plateau west of São Paulo, converting it into a “sea of coffee” with slightly less crude farming methods, and continued advancing westward. It reached the banks of the Paraná where, facing the Mato Grosso savannas, it turned south; in recent years it has again moved west along the Paraguayan border.

  Today São Paulo is the most developed state in Brazil, containing the country’s industrial center, but its coffee plantations still teem with “vassal inhabitants” who pay rent for their land with their and their children’s toil. In the prosperous post-World War I years the coffee growers’ voracity virtually ended the system under which plantation workers could grow food crops on their own. Now they can only do it by paying rent in the form of wageless labor. The latifundista also uses contractual sharecroppers who are allowed to raise seasonal crops in return for planting still more coffee trees for his benefit. Four years after planting, when the branches are yellow with beans, the land has multiplied in value and it is time for the sharecropper to move on.

  Coffee plantations pay even less in Guatemala than cotton plantations. On the southern slopes the owners claim to
pay $ 15 a month to the thousands of natives who descend southward each year from the altiplano to sell their labor during the harvests. The plantations have private police forces: there, as the popular saying has it, “a man is cheaper than a mule,” and the repressive apparatus sees that he remains so. In the Alta Verapaz region the situation is even worse. The planters have no trucks or carts: they do not need them since it costs less to use the Indians’ backs.

  Coffee is basic to the economy of El Salvador, a little country owned by a handful of oligarchical families: monoculture makes it necessary to import the beans—the people’s only source of protein—corn, vegetables, and other foods the country traditionally produced. A quarter of all Salvadorans die of avitaminosis, or severe vitamin deficiency. As for Haiti, it has Latin America’s highest death rate, and more than half of its children are anemic. The wages Haiti requires by law belong in the department of science fiction: actual wages on coffee plantations vary from $.07 to $.15 a day.

  In Colombia, where suitable slopes abound, coffee is king. According to a Time magazine report in 1962, only 5 percent of the price yielded by coffee in its journey from tree to U.S. consumer goes into the wages of the workers who produce it.27 * In contrast to Brazil, most Colombian coffee is produced not by latifundios but by minifundios—small farms which tend to become increasingly smaller and smaller. Between 1955 and 1960, 100,000 new plantations appeared, most of them minute— less than one hectare. Small and very small farmers produce three-quarters of the coffee exported by Colombia, and 96 percent of the plantations are minifundios. “Juan Valdés’ smiles in the ads, but in fact atomization of the land is steadily forcing his living standards down and making it easier for the Federación Nacional de Cafeteros, which represents the big landowners and virtually monopolizes trade in the product, to manipulate the situation. Farms of less than a hectare produce starvation incomes—an average of $130 a year.