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

by Eduardo Galeano

  * The price breakdown is as follows: 40 percent for middlemen, exporters, and importers; 10 percent for taxes imposed by both governments; 10 percent for transport; 5 percent for publicity by the Pan-American Coffee Bureau; 30 percent for plantation owners; and 5 percent for workers’ wages.

  BURN THE CROPS? GET MARRIED? THE PRICE OF COFFEE DICTATES ALL

  What’s this? An electroencephalogram of a lunatic? In 1889 coffee was worth two cents and six years later it had risen to nine; three years later it was down to four, five years after that to two. A typical period. The graph of coffee prices, like those of all tropical products, has always resembled a clinical epilepsy chart—more than ever when it shows the value of coffee in exchange for machinery and industrial products. Colombian President Lleras Restrepo complained that in 1967 his country had to pay fifty-seven sacks of coffee for a jeep that had only cost seventeen sacks in 1950. Figures offered at the same time by Brazilian Minister of Agriculture Herbert Levi were more dramatic: for a tractor, which had cost 70 sacks of coffee fourteen years earlier, Brazil now had to pay 350 sacks. When President Getulio Vargas put a bullet through his heart in 1954, the price of coffee played a role in the tragedy: “The crisis in coffee production came,” he wrote in his moving final testament, “and the price of our chief product went up. We tried to defend the price and the answer was such violent pressure on our economy that we had to give in.” Vargas hoped that his blood would buy salvation for the Brazilian people.

  If the 1964 coffee crop had been sold on the U.S. market at 1955 prices, Brazil would have received $200 million more. A drop of only one cent in the price meant a loss of $65 million to the combined producing countries. With the price falling continually between 1964 and 1968, the consuming country—the United States—helped itself to more and more millions from the producing country, Brazil. But for the benefit of whom? Of the coffee-drinking citizen? In July 1968 Brazilian coffee cost 30 percent less in the United States than in January 1964, but U.S. consumers did not pay less: they paid 13 percent more. Thus in the 1964-1968 period middlemen kept the 13 percent as well as the 30 percent, feathering their nests twice over. In the same period the price Brazilian producers received for each sack of coffee dropped by half.28 Who are the middlemen? Six U.S. concerns control more than a third of the coffee that leaves Brazil, and another six control more than a third of what enters the United States: these firms dominate the business at both ends.29 Just as United Fruit monopolizes the sale of bananas from Central America, Colombia, and Ecuador, as well as their importation and distribution in the United States, so U.S. firms run the coffee business and Brazil only participates as supplier and victim. The Brazilian state takes over the stocks when overproduction demands the accumulation of reserves.

  But isn’t there an International Coffee Agreement to stabilize prices on the market? The World Coffee Information Center published a detailed document in Washington in 1970 to try and convince legislators that the United States should keep the agreement in force after September. The report affirms that the agreement’s chief beneficiary has been the United States, which consumes more than half the coffee sold in the world. The purchaser of the coffee beans always gets a bargain. In the U.S. market, the trivial rise in price (for the middleman’s benefit, as we have seen) has been much less than the general rise of living costs and internal wage levels; U.S. exports rose in value by one-sixth between 1960 and 1969, and in the same period the value of coffee imports dropped. And one must bear in mind that Latin American countries use depreciated foreign currency from coffee sales to buy ever costlier U.S. products.

  It is much more profitable to consume coffee than to produce it. In the United States and Europe coffee creates income and jobs and mobilizes substantial capital; in Latin America it pays hunger wages and sharpens economic deformation. It provides work for more than 600,000 people in the United States: those who distribute and sell Latin American coffee there earn infinitely more than the Brazilians, Colombians, Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and Haitians who plant and harvest it on the plantations. And incredible as it seems, coffee—so ECLA tells us—puts more wealth into European state coffers than it leaves in the hands of the producing countries. In effect, in 1960 and 1961 the total taxes levied on Latin American coffee by European Economic Community countries amounted to about $700 million, while supplier countries (in terms of the f.o.b. value of exports) only got $600 million.30 The rich countries that preach free trade apply stern protectionist policies against the poor countries: they turn everything they touch—including the underdeveloped countries’ own production—into gold for themselves and rubbish for others. The international coffee market operates so exactly like a funnel that Brazil recently agreed to impose high taxes on its soluble coffee exports, a reverse protectionism designed to protect the interests of competing U.S. manufacturers. Instant coffee made in Brazil is cheaper and better than that made by the flourishing U.S. industry; but then, of course, in a system of free competition some are freer than others.

  In this kingdom of organized absurdity, natural disasters become blessings from heaven for the producing countries. They raise prices and permit the mobilization of accumulated reserves. Fierce frosts wrecked the 1969 harvest in Brazil and sealed the fate of many producers, especially the weakest, but at the same time pushed up coffee prices on the world market and appreciably lightened the “stock” of 60 million sacks—the equivalent of two-thirds of Brazil’s external debt—which the state had accumulated to defend prices. The warehoused coffee, progressively deteriorating and losing value, could have ended up in a bonfire. It would not have been the first time. The collapse of prices and the shrinkage in consumption after the 1929 crisis caused Brazil to burn 78 million sacks; thus the efforts of 200,000 people during five harvests went up in flames. This was a typical crisis in a colonial economy: it came from outside. Apart from burning the coffee, the fall of the planters’ and exporters’ profits in the 1930s produced a bonfire in currency values. Such is the normal Latin American mechanism to “socialize the losses” of the export sector: losses of foreign currency are compensated in national currency through devaluation.

  The consequences of rising prices are no better. While they lead to more sowing for more production, and multiply the area devoted to the fortunate crop, this acts as a boomerang since an abundance of the product demolishes prices and leads to disaster. Such was the fate of Colombia in 1958 when it harvested the coffee sown so enthusiastically four years earlier, and similar cycles have recurred throughout that country’s history. Colombia is so dependent on coffee and its external price that “in Antioquia the marriage curve responds sensitively to the coffee-price curve. Par for the course in a dependent structure: even the propitious moment for a declaration of love on an Antioquian hillside is decided on the New York Stock Exchange.”31

  THE TEN YEARS THAT EMPTIED COLOMBIA’S VEINS

  Back in the 1940s the noted Colombian economist Luis Eduardo Nieto Arteta wrote an apologia for coffee. Coffee had achieved what neither mines nor tobacco, nor indigo nor quinine, had managed to produce in the country’s previous economic cycles: it had given birth to a mature and progressive order. Textile factories and other light industries had arisen in coffee-producing areas—Antioquia, Caldas, Valle del Cauca, Cundinamarca—and not by accident. A democracy made up of small farmers raising coffee had turned Colombians into “moderate and sober people. … The strongest premise for normality in the functioning of Colombian political life has been the attainment of our own kind of economic stability. Coffee has produced it, and with it tranquillity and moderation.”32

  Violence soon erupted again. For all the panegyrics, coffee had no magic with which to end Colombia’s long history of revolt and bloody repression. This time—for ten years, from 1948 to 1957—small and large plantations, desert and farmland, valley and forest and Andean plateau were engulfed in peasant war; it put whole communities to flight, generated revolutionary guerrillas and criminal bands, and turned the count
ry into a cemetery: it is estimated to have left a toll of 180,000 dead. The bloodbath coincided with a period of economic euphoria for the ruling class. But is the prosperity of a class really identifiable with the well-being of a country?

  The violence began with a confrontation between Liberal and Conservative parties, but the dynamic of class hostilities steadily sharpened its class-struggle character. The Liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán—known half contemptuously and half fearfully to his own party’s oligarchy as “The Wolf” or “The Idiot”—had won great popular prestige and threatened the established order. When he was shot dead, the hurricane was unleashed. First the spontaneous bogotazo—an uncontrollable human tide in the streets of the capital; then the violence spread to the countryside, where bands organized by the Conservatives had for some time been sowing terror. The bitter taste of hatred, long in the peasants’ mouths, provoked an explosion; the government sent police and soldiers to cut off testicles, slash pregnant women’s bellies, and throw babies in the air to catch on bayonet points—the order of the day being “don’t leave even the seed.” Liberal Party sages shut themselves in their homes, never abandoning their good manners and the gentlemanly tone of their manifestos, or went into exile abroad. It was a war of incredible cruelty and it became worse as it went on, feeding the lust for vengeance. New ways of killing came into vogue: the corte corbata, for example, left the tongue hanging from the neck. Rape, arson, and plunder went on and on; people were quartered or burned alive, skinned or slowly cut in pieces; troops razed villages and plantations and rivers ran red with blood. Bandits spared lives in exchange for tribute, in money or loads of coffee, and the repressive forces expelled and pursued innumerable families, who fled to seek refuge in the mountains. Women gave birth in the woods. The first guerrilla leaders, determined to take revenge but without clear political vision, took to destroying for destruction’s sake, letting off blood and steam without purpose.

  The names adopted by the protagonists of violence—Gorilla, Evil Shadow, The Condor, Redskin, The Vampire, Black Bird, Terror of the Plains—hardly suggest a revolutionary epic, yet the scent of social rebellion was in the couplets sung by their followers:

  I’m just a campesino,

  I didn’t start the fight,

  But if they come asking for trouble,

  They’ll get what’s coming to them.

  There is no doubt that indiscriminate terror, mixed with the cry for justice, had emerged in the Mexican Revolution. In Colombia many just ran amok, yet that violent decade gave birth to the political guerrillas who later raised the banner of social revolution over broad areas they came to occupy and control. Hounded by the repressors, the peasants took to the mountains to organize agriculture and self-defense. The so-called independent republics continued to offer refuge to the persecuted after Conservatives and Liberals signed a peace pact in Madrid. In an ambiance of toasts and mutual goodwill, the leaders of both parties agreed to take turns in power under a banner of national unity, and then began the “clean-up” operations against foci of subversion. In one of these operations alone—the crushing of the rebels in Marquetalia—1.5 million projectiles were fired, 20,000 bombs were dropped, and 16,000 soldiers were mobilized on the ground and in the air.

  At the height of the violence one official said, “Don’t bring me stories, bring me ears.” Could the sadism of the repression and the ferocity of the war be explained clinically? Were they the result of inherent evil in the protagonists? A man who cut off the hands of a priest, set fire to his body and his house, and later cut him in pieces and threw him in a sewer, cried after the war was over: “I’m not guilty. Leave me alone.” He had lost—yet in a certain sense retained—his reason: the horror of all the violence merely exposed the horror of the system. For coffee did not bring happiness and harmony as Nieto Arteta had prophesied. It is true that coffee opened up railroads, highways, and the Rio Magdalena to navigation, and that thanks to coffee enough capital was accumulated to found some industries. But the ascendancy of coffee did not affect either the oligarchical social order or the dependence of the economy on foreign power centers; on the contrary, both became far more oppressive for Colombians. Toward the end of the violent decade, the United Nations published the results of a study of nutrition in Colombia (and there has been absolutely no improvement since then): 88 percent of Bogotá schoolchildren suffered from avitaminosis, 78 percent from riboflavinosis, and more than half were below normal weight; avitaminosis affected 71 percent of workers and 78 percent of Tensa Valley peasants.33 The study showed “a marked insufficiency of protective foods—milk and its derivatives, eggs, meat, fish, and some fruits and vegetables—which together provide protein, vitamins, and salt.” It is not only the flash of gunfire that reveals social tragedy. Statistics show that Colombia has seven times more homicides than the United States, and that one in every four Colombians of active age has no regular job. Every year 250,000 people come onto the labor market while industry fails to generate new jobs; the latifundio-minifundio system not only cannot absorb more labor, but it constantly banishes more people to swell the ranks of the unemployed in city slums. In Colombia over a million children do not attend school. This does not discourage the system from running forty-one public and private universities, each with its own faculties and departments, to educate the children of the elite and middle class.*

  * Professor Germán Rama found that some of these venerable groves of academe contain in their libraries, like some precious patrimony, complete bound volumes of the Spanish edition of the Reader’s Digest.34

  THE WORLD MARKET CASTS ITS SPELL OVER CENTRAL AMERICA

  Central American lands were comparatively unmolested up until the middle of the past century. In addition to food, the area produced cochineal and indigo with modest capital, a meager labor force, and few worries. Both the indigo plant and the cochineal bug, busily multiplying on the prickly surface of the nopal cactus, were in steady demand in European textile industries, but both of these natural pigments met a synthetic death around 1850, when German chemists invented aniline and other cheaper dyes. Thirty years after this victory of the laboratory over nature it was coffee’s turn. Central America was transformed: by 1880 its newborn plantations were raising almost one-sixth of the world’s coffee production. Coffee locked the region firmly into the world market. First English, then German, and finally U.S. buyers gave life to a native coffee bourgeoisie, which became the political power after the revolution led by Justo Rufino Barrios early in the 1870s. Agricultural specialization, dictated from abroad, set off a frenzy of land and labor grabbing: the Central American latifundio of today was born under the banner of free labor.

  Great tracts of idle land—belonging to no one, or to the Church, or to the state—passed into private hands, and Indian communities were frenetically plundered. Peasants who declined to sell their land were hauled off into the army; plantations became human compost pits for Indians. The colonial order was revived with the forcible recruitment of labor and with laws against vagrancy, while fugitive workers were pursued with guns. Liberal governments modernized labor relations by introducing wages, but recipients of the wages became the property of upstart coffee planters. At no time in the ensuing century, of course, were periods of high prices reflected in wages, which have remained at the hunger level no matter how much was paid for the coffee. This helped prevent the development of any internal consumer market in Central America. As elsewhere, the ever expanding cultivation of coffee discouraged food-raising for the home market. These countries too were condemned to a chronic scarcity of rice, beans, corn, wheat, tobacco, and meat. A bleak subsistence agriculture barely survived on the high semi-barren lands to which the latifundio drove the Indians when it appropriated the lower and more fertile areas. The Indians who work on the plantations at harvest time spend part of the year on tiny mountain plots raising the corn and beans without which they could not survive. They are the world market’s “labor reserve.” Nothing has changed in a
century: the latifundio and minifundio together make up a system based on ruthless exploitation of Indian labor. In general—but especially in Guatemala—this structure of labor force appropriation is visibly identified with racism: Indians suffer the internal colonialism of whites and mestizos blessed ideologically by the dominant culture, just as Central American countries suffer foreign colonialism.

  Early in our century banana enclaves made their appearance in Honduras, Guatemala, and Costa Rica. A few railway lines financed by native capital had been built to take coffee to the ports. U.S. concerns took over these railroads and built others, to carry the products of their own plantations exclusively, while monopolizing electric light, the mails, telegraph and telephone, and—a no less important public service—politics: in Honduras a mule costs more than a deputy, and throughout Central America U.S. ambassadors do more presiding than presidents. The United Fruit Company swallowed up its competitors in the production and sale of bananas and became Central America’s top latifundista, while its affiliates cornered rail and sea transport. It took over the ports and set up its own customs and police. The dollar in effect became the national currency of Central America.