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

by Eduardo Galeano

  THE THIRTEEN NORTHERN COLONIES AND THE IMPORTANCE OF NOT BEING BORN IMPORTANT

  In Latin America, private appropriation of land always came before its useful cultivation. The most backward aspects of the present property system are not the offspring of crises, but emerged in periods of great prosperity; inversely, periods of economic depression have tempered the voracity of the latifundistas in acquiring new acreage. In Brazil, for example, the decline of sugar and the virtual disappearance of gold and diamonds made possible, between 1820 and 1850, legislation providing that anyone who occupied land and made it produce acquired title to it. The rise of coffee as a new “king product” produced the 1850 Law of Lands, cooked to the taste of oligarchic politicians and military men and denying ownership of land to those who worked it when the great spaces of the interior, to the south and west, were being opened up. This law was subsequently “reinforced and ratified… by abundant legislation that decreed purchase as the only form of access to land, and created a civil registration system that would make it nearly impossible for a poor farmer to legalize his land, and stipulated as the sale value of the unoccupied government lands much higher price levels than the current ones for land already appropriated.”58

  U.S. legislation in the same period had the opposite aim: it was to promote the internal colonization of the country. Covered wagons rolled westward into virgin lands with pioneers who extended the frontier at the cost of slaughtered Indians. The Homestead Act of 1862 assured every family of ownership of a quarter section, a lot one-half mile square; each beneficiary committed himself to farm his parcel for a minimum of five years. The public domain was colonized with startling speed and the population grew and spread like a great oil smear. The fertile land that was to be had almost gratis drew European peasants like a magnet: they crossed the ocean and then the Appalachians onto the wide-open prairies. Thus it was free farmers who occupied the new central and western territories. As the country grew in extent and population, unemployment was avoided by the creation of farm jobs, and at the same time an internal market—the multitude of farmer-proprietors—was generated with substantial purchasing power to sustain industrial development.

  In contrast, the rural workers who have pushed Brazil’s frontier inland for more than a century have not been—and are not—free peasant families seeking a piece of land of their own, but (as Ribeiro notes) braceros contracted to serve latifundistas who have already taken possession of the great open spaces. The interior deserts have never been accessible, except in this way, to the rural population. Workers have hacked their way through the jungle with machetes to open up the country for the benefit of others. Between 1950 and 1960, sixty-five Brazilian latifundios absorbed a quarter of the new land brought under cultivation.

  These two opposite systems of internal colonization reveal one of the most important differences between U.S. and Latin American development models. Why is the north rich and the south poor? The Rio Grande is much more than a geographical frontier. Is today’s profound disequilibrium, which seems to confirm Hegel’s prophecy of inevitable war between the two Americas, to be traced to U.S. imperialist expansion, or does it have more ancient roots? In fact, back in the colonial beginnings, north and south had already generated very different societies with different aims.* The Mayflower pilgrims did not cross the sea to obtain legendary treasures; they came mainly to establish themselves with their families and to reproduce in the New World the system of life and work they had practiced in Europe. They were not soldiers of fortune but pioneers; they came not to conquer but to colonize, and their colonies were settlements. It is true that a slave-plantation economy like Latin America’s developed later south of the Delaware, but there was a difference: the center of gravity in the United States was from the outset the farms and workshops of New England, from which came the victorious armies of the Civil War. New England colonists, the original nucleus of U.S. civilization, never acted as colonial agents for European capitalist accumulation; their own development, and the development of their new land, were always their motivation. The thirteen colonies served as an outlet for the army of European peasants and artisans who were being thrown off the labor market by metropolitan development. Free workers formed the base of that new society across the ocean.

  * Lewis Hanke and the other authors of Do the Americas Have a Common History? stretch their imaginations in vain trying to find parallels between Northern and Southern historical processes.

  Spain and Portugal, on the other hand, had an abundance of subjugated labor in Latin America. Enslavement of the Indians was followed by the wholesale transplantation of Africans. Through the centuries, a legion of unemployed peasants was always available to be moved to production centers: as precious metal or sugar exports rose and fell, flourishing centers coexisted with centers of decay, and the latter provided labor for the former. This structure persists to our time; today, as yesterday, it means low wage scales because of the pressure of the unemployed on the labor market, and frustrates the growth of an internal consumer market. But also in contrast to the Northern Puritans, internal economic development was never the goal of the ruling classes of Latin American colonial society. Their profits came from outside; they were tied more to the foreign market than to their own domain. Landlords, miners, and merchants had been born to fulfill the mission of supplying Europe with gold, silver, and food. Goods moved along the roads in only one direction: to the port and overseas markets. This also provides the key to the United States’ expansion as a national unit and to the fragmentation of Latin America. Our production centers are not interconnected but take the form of a fan with a far-away vertex.

  One might say that the thirteen colonies had the fortune of bad fortune. Their history shows the great importance of not being born important. For the north of America had no gold or silver, no Indian civilizations with dense concentrations of people already organized for work, no fabulously fertile tropical soil on the coastal fringe. It was an area where both nature and history had been miserly: both metals and the slave labor to wrest it from the ground were missing. Those colonists were lucky. Furthermore, the northern colonies, from Maryland to New England to Nova Scotia, had a climate and soil similar to British agriculture and produced exactly the same things. That is, as Sergio Bagú notes, they did not offer products complementary to the metropolis. The situation in the Antilles and the mainland Spanish-Portuguese colonies was quite different. Tropical lands produced sugar, tobacco, cotton, indigo, turpentine; a small Caribbean island had more economic importance for England than the thirteen colonies that would become the United States.

  These circumstances explain the rise and consolidation of the United States as an economically autonomous system, one which did not drain abroad the wealth it produced. The ties between colony and metropolis were slender. In Barbados and Jamaica, on the other hand, only the capital necessary to replace worn-out slaves was reinvested. Thus it was not racial factors that decided the development of the one and the underdevelopment of the other: there was nothing Spanish or Portuguese about Britain’s Antillean islands. The truth is that the economic insignificance of the thirteen colonies permitted the early diversification of their exports and set off the early and rapid development of manufacturing. Even before independence, North American industrialization had official encouragement and protection. And England took a tolerant attitude while it strictly forbade its Antillean islands to manufacture so much as a pin.

  3. The Invisible Sources of Power

  As LUNGS NEED AIR, SO THE U.S. ECONOMY NEEDS LATIN AMERICAN MINERALS

  In June 1969, when the astronauts had put the first human footprints on the moon, the father of that achievement, Werner von Braun, announced to the press a U.S. plan for a remote space station with functions that were less remote: he heralded an observation platform from which we will be able to examine all the wealth of the earth, including unknown petroleum, copper, and zinc deposits.

  Petroleum continues to be our world’s ch
ief fuel, and the United States imports one-seventh of the petroleum it consumes. Bullets are needed to kill Vietnamese, and bullets need copper: the United States buys abroad one-fifth of the copper it uses. Shortages of zinc cause increasing anxiety: over half comes from abroad. Planes cannot be built without aluminum, and aluminum cannot be produced without bauxite: the United States has almost no bauxite. Its great steel centers— Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Detroit—do not get enough iron from the Minnesota deposits, which are on the way to exhaustion, and there is no manganese within the United States: one-third of its iron and all of its manganese are imported. Nor has it any nickel or chrome of its own to produce jet engines. Tungsten is needed to make special steels and one-fourth of that is imported.

  This growing dependence on foreign supplies produces the growing identification of the interests of U.S. capitalists operating in Latin America with U.S. national security. The internal stability of the world’s greatest power is closely linked with its investments south of the Río Grande. About half of those investments are in the extraction of petroleum and minerals, indispensable for the U.S. economy in peace and war. In 1959, the chairman of the Chamber of Commerce International Department said: “Historically, one of the United States’ chief reasons for investing abroad has been to develop natural resources, particularly minerals and more especially petroleum. It is quite obvious that incentives for this type of investment can only grow. Our needs for raw materials are continually increasing as the population expands and living standards rise. At the same time our domestic resources are depleted.”1 Government, universities, and big corporations invest astronomic amounts in scientific laboratories, which make new discoveries and inventions at a dizzy pace, but the new technology still has not found a substitute for the basic materials nature alone provides. At the same time, the materials necessary to meet the challenge of its industrial growth become increasingly scarce in the United States’ own subsoil.

  BY-PRODUCTS OF THE SUBSOIL: COUPS D’ÉTAT, REVOLUTIONS, SPY DRAMAS, ETC.

  The wealth of iron beneath Brazil’s Paraopeba valley overthrew two presidents—Jânio Quadros and João Goulart—before Marshal Castelo Branco, who made himself dictator in 1964, graciously handed it over to the Hanna Mining Company. An earlier friend of the U.S. ambassador, President Eurico Dutra (1946-1951), had handed Bethlehem Steel the 40 million tons of manganese in the state of Amapá—one of the world’s biggest deposits—for 4 percent of the income from exporting it. Since then Bethlehem has been moving the mountains to the United States so enthusiastically that in fifteen years’ time Brazil may have no manganese for its own steel industry. Furthermore, thanks to the generosity of the Brazilian government, $88 of each $100 Bethlehem invests in mineral extraction are tax exempt, in the name of “regional development.” As we can see, the experience of the lost gold of Minas Gerais—“white gold, black gold, rotten gold,” as the poet Manuel Bandeira wrote—has gone for nothing: Brazil continues the gratuitous self-plunder of its own natural sources of development.* In Bolivia, the Matilde mine contains lead, silver, and abundant zinc twelve times more pure than that in U.S. mines; between massacres of miners, dictator René Barrientos, who seized power in 1964, handed it over to Phillips Industries, a Dutch conglomerate. The firm was authorized to remove the crude zinc for processing in its refineries abroad, paying the state no less than 1.5 percent of the sale value. In Peru in 1968, page 11 of the agreement which President Fernando Belaúnde Terry had signed with a Standard Oil affiliate was mysteriously lost; General Juan Velasco Alvarado overthrew Belaúnde, took the reins, and nationalized the firm’s wells and refinery. In Venezuela, the largest U.S. military mission in Latin America sits on Standard and Gulf’s great petroleum lake. Argentina’s frequent coups d’état erupt before or after each offer of oil concessions. Copper was a far from minor factor in the Pentagon’s disproportionate military aid to Chile before the electoral victory of Salvador Allende’s left coalition; U.S. copper reserves had fallen by more than 60 percent between 1965 and 1969. In 1964, Che Guevara showed me, in his office in Havana, that Batista’s Cuba was not merely sugar: the Imperium’s blind fury against the revolution was better explained, he thought, by Cuba’s big deposits of nickel and manganese. The United States’ nickel reserves subsequently fell by two-thirds when Nicaro Nickel was nationalized and President Johnson threatened an embargo on French metal exports if the French bought nickel from Cuba.

  * The Mexican government, on the other hand, saw in time that the country, one of the chief exporters of sulphur, was being emptied of it. Texas Gulf Sulphur and Pan-American Sulphur had insisted that the reserves still in their concessions were six times greater than they actually were. The government decided in 1965 to limit foreign sales.

  Minerals had much to do with the fall of Cheddi Jagan’s socialist government, which at the end of 1964 had again won a majority of votes in what was then British Guiana. The country now called Guyana is the world’s fourth producer of bauxite and Latin America’s third producer of manganese. The CIA played a decisive role in Jagan’s defeat. Arnold Zander, leader of the strike that served as a provocation and pretext to deny electoral victory to Jagan, afterward admitted publicly that his union had dollars rained upon it from one of the CIA foundations. The new regime—very Western and very Christian—guaranteed the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) against any danger to its interests in Guyana: it could continue tranquilly removing the bauxite and selling it to itself at the same price as in 1938, although the price of aluminum had since soared.* The danger was indeed past. Arkansas bauxite costs twice as much as Guyana bauxite. The United States has very little bauxite on its own territory, but using cheap imported raw material it produces almost half of the world’s aluminum.

  * Arthur Davis, long-time chairman of Alcoa, died in 1962 leaving $300 million to charitable foundations, with the express condition that the money not be spent outside the United States. Not even through this channel could Guyana recover at least some of its stolen wealth.

  The United States depends on foreign sources for most of the minerals it needs to maintain its ability to wage war. The jet engine, the gas turbine, and nuclear reactors have a great influence over the demand for materials only obtainable abroad, and there is a clear link between the imperative need for strategic minerals, indispensable for the maintenance of U.S. military-atomic power, and the massive purchase of land—usually by fraudulent methods—in Brazil’s Amazonia. During the 1960s many U.S. firms, represented by professional adventurers and contrabandists, descended in a hectic “rush” upon these enormous forests, which under an agreement signed in 1964 had already been flown over and photographed by the U.S. air force. Scintillometers to detect deposits of radioactive minerals, electromagnetic devices for x-ray photography of subsoils rich in nonferrous minerals, and magnetometers to detect and measure the iron were all used. With the aid of a U.S. government geological survey, information and photos concerning the extension and depth of Amazonia’s hidden wealth were put in the hands of interested private concerns. Gold, silver, diamonds, gypsum, hematite, magnetite, tantalite, titanium, thorium, bauxite, zinc, chrome, and mercury were detected. Photographing everything from the virgin forest of Mato Grosso to the southern Goiás plains, the intrepid lensmen (as ecstatically reported in the final Latin American edition of Time in 1967) captured God’s-eye views showing lightning flashes of half a dozen distant storms on the same exposure as brilliant sunshine. The government had offered tax exemptions and other seductions to colonizers of these wild, magical lands. Before 1967, according to Time, foreign capitalists had bought, at $.07 an acre, a tract larger than Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire put together. “We must,” said the director of the government’s Amazonian development agency, “keep the doors wide open to foreign investment, for we need more than we can get.” To justify the U.S. air force’s aerophoto excursions, the government had previously declared it lacked the resources for the job. Again par for the cou
rse in Latin America: its resources are always surrendered to imperialism in the name of its lack of resources.

  The Brazilian Congress managed to conduct an investigation which brought forth a voluminous report.2 In this were listed cases of sale or usurpation of 20 million-odd hectares of land, forming so odd a shape that (said the investigating commission) “they constitute a cordon to isolate Amazonia from the rest of Brazil.” The “clandestine exploitation of highly valuable minerals” appears in the report as one of the United States’ chief motives for opening a “new frontier” in Brazil. Army testimony stresses “the interest of the U.S. government in maintaining under its control a vast tract of land for later use, whether for exploitation of minerals—especially radioactive ones—or as a base for organized colonization.” Says the National Security Council: “A suspicious factor is that the areas occupied or being occupied by foreign elements are the same areas where sterilization campaigns for Brazilian women are carried on by foreigners.” In fact, according to the newspaper Correio da Manhã, “more than twenty foreign religious missions, mainly of the U.S. Protestant church, are occupying Amazonia, functioning in places that are richest in radioactive minerals, gold, and diamonds.… They make extensive use of sterilization, using the intrauterine device, and teach English to the catechized Indians. … Their areas are surrounded by armed elements and no one can enter them.”3 Note that Amazonia is the largest of all the habitable deserts on our planet. Birth control has been introduced into this great empty space to avoid demographic competition by the very few Brazilians who live and reproduce in remote corners of the immense forests and plains.

  General Riograndino Kruel told the congressional investigating commission that “contraband in materials containing thorium and uranium amounts to an astronomical one million tons.” Shortly before, in 1966, Kruel (then federal police chief) had denounced a U.S. consul’s “insolent and systematic interference” in the open trial of four U.S. citizens accused of smuggling Brazilian atomic minerals. To the general’s mind the fact that forty tons of radioactive minerals had been found in their possession was enough to convict them. Soon afterward three of the contrabandists mysteriously fled the country.