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

by Eduardo Galeano

  I finished writing Open Veins in the last days of 1970.

  In the last days of 1977 Juan Velasco Alvarado died on an operating table. His coffin was carried shoulder-high to the cemetery by the greatest multitude ever seen in the streets of Lima. Born in a humble house in north Peru’s dry lands, General Velasco Alvarado had headed a process of social and economic reforms. It was the deepest and most far-reaching attempt at change in his country’s recent history. After the 1968 revolt the military government pushed a genuine agrarian reform and opened a road to recovery of the natural resources usurped by foreign capital. But some time before Velasco Alvarado died, the funeral of the revolution had been held. The creative process had a fleeting life: it ended up strangled by the blackmail of loan sharks and merchants and by the implicit fragility of any paternalistic project with no organized popular base.

  On the eve of Christmas, 1977, while General Velasco Alvarado’s heart was beating its last in Peru, the fist of another general who in no way resembled him pounded on a desk in Bolivia. General Hugo Banzer, dictator of Bolivia, said NO to amnesty for the prisoners, the exiled, and the fired workers. Four women and fourteen children, who had come to La Paz from the tin mines, then started a hunger strike.

  “This isn’t the moment,” pronounced the wiseacres. “We’ll let you know when.…”

  The women sat down on the floor.

  “We’re not asking you,” they said, “we’re telling you. The decision has been taken. Up there at the mine it’s a permanent hunger strike. You get born and the hunger strike starts right then and there. And that’s where we have to die too. It’s slower, but we have to die too.”

  The government reacted with castigations and threats, but the hunger strike let loose forces that were long pent up. All Bolivia was shaken and showed its teeth. Ten days later there were no longer four women and fourteen children: 1,400 workers and students had gone on hunger strike. The dictatorship felt the ground wobbling beneath its feet. And the general amnesty was won.

  Thus two Andean countries crossed the frontier between 1977 and 1978. Further north in the Caribbean, Panama awaited the promised liquidation of the colonial status of its canal after thorny negotiations with the new U.S. government; and in Cuba the people were having a party: the unconquered socialist revolution was celebrating its first nineteen years of life. A few days later in Nicaragua a furious multitude poured out into the streets. Dictator Somoza, son of dictator Somoza, peered out through the keyhole. Various businesses were put to the torch by the angry people. One of them, Plasmaféresis by name, specialized in vampirism. This concern which went up in smoke at the beginning of 1978 was the property of Cuban exiles, and its business was selling Nicaraguan blood to the United States. (In the blood business, as in all others, what the producers receive is barely a tip. The Hemo Caribbean outfit, for example, pays Haitians $3 per liter of blood, which it resells for $25 in the U.S. market.)

  In August of 1976 Orlando Letelier published an article describing the terror of the Pinochet dictatorship and the “economic liberty” of small privileged groups as two sides of the same coin.2 Letelier, who had been a minister in Salvador Allende’s government, was exiled in the United States. There he was blown to pieces shortly afterwards.3 He submitted in his article that it was absurd to talk of free competition in an economy such as Chile’s, subjected to the monopolies which play with prices at their whim, and laughable to mention workers’ rights in a country where genuine unions are outside the law and the military junta fixes wages by decree. Letelier described the massive destruction of gains made by the Chilean people during the Popular Unity government. The dictatorship had returned to their former owners half of the industrial monopolies and oligopolies which Allende nationalized, and put the other half up for sale. Firestone had bought the national tire factory, Parsons and Whittemore, a big paper plant. The Chilean economy, wrote Letelier, is more concentrated and monopolized now than on the eve of the Allende government.4 Business free as never before, people in jail as never before; in Latin America free enterprise is incompatible with civil liberties. Free market? The price of milk has not been controlled in Chile since early in 1975. The result is as expected. Two firms dominate the market. The price of milk for consumers went up immediately by 40 percent, while for the producers it went down by 22 percent.

  Infant mortality, substantially reduced during the Popular Unity regime, rose dramatically with Pinochet. When Letelier was assassinated in a Washington street, one quarter of Chile’s population was getting no income and survived thanks to foreign charity or their own stubbornness and guile.

  The abyss that exists in Latin America between the well-being of the few and the misery of the many is infinitely greater than in Europe or the United States. Hence the methods necessary to maintain it are much more ruthless. Brazil has an enormous and excellently equipped army but devotes only 5 percent of the national budget to education. In Uruguay half the budget now goes for the armed forces and police, and the function of one fifth of the active population is to watch, trail, and punish the others.

  Undoubtedly among Latin America’s most important and tragic events of these years of the seventies was the military insurrection that overthrew Salvador Allende’s democratic government on September 11, 1973, and submerged Chile in a bath of blood.

  A little earlier, in June, a coup d’état in Uruguay had dissolved the parliament, put unions outside the law, and banned all political activity.5

  In March of 1976 the Argentine generals returned to power: the government of Juan Domingo Perón’s widow had become a stench and it fell, unregretted and unsung.

  The three southern countries are today a festering sore upon the globe, cronic bad news. Torture, kidnapping, murder, and exile have become the daily round. These dictatorships are tumors to be extirpated from healthy organs—or are they the pus that betrays the infection of the system?

  There is always, I believe, a close relationship between the intensity of the threat and the brutality of the response. I doubt if present events in Brazil and Bolivia can be grasped without taking into account the experience of the João Goulart and Juan José Torres regimes. Before they fell, these governments had put into effect a series of social reforms and promoted a nationalist political economy, during a process that was cut off in 1964 in Brazil and in 1971 in Bolivia. In the same way we could well say that Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay are expiating the sin of hope. The cycle of deep changes under Allende, the banners of justice that mobilized Argentina’s working masses and rose high during the short-lived Héctor Cámpora government in 1973, and the stepped-up politicization of Uruguayan youth, were all challenges not to be tolerated by a system that was impotent and in crisis. The potent oxygen of liberty was explosive for the specters, and the pretorian guard was summoned to save law and order. The clean-up plan is a plan of extermination.

  The Congressional Record of the United States is replete with irrefutable evidence of interventions in Latin America. Guilt-ridden consciences purge themselves in the imperial confessionals. Recently official admissions of U.S. responsibility for various disasters have multiplied. Full public confessions have proved among other things that the U.S. government directly participated in Chilean politics by bribery, espionage, and blackmail. The strategy for the crime was planned in Washington. Kissinger and the intelligence services were carefully preparing the fall of Allende ever since 1970. Millions of dollars were distributed among enemies of the legal Popular Unity government. That, for example, was how the truck owners in 1973 could keep going their long strike which paralyzed much of the country’s economy. The assurance of impunity loosens tongues. When the coup took place against Goulart, the United States had in Brazil its largest embassy anywhere on earth. Lincoln Gordon, the ambassador, admitted to a journalist thirteen years later that his government had long been financing the forces opposing the reforms. “What the hell,” said Gordon, “that was more or less a habit in those days.… The CIA used to dole out
political funds.”6 In the same interview Gordon explained that when the coup took place the Pentagon had a huge aircraft carrier and four supply ships stationed off the Brazilian coast “in case the anti-Goulart forces should ask for our help.” That help, he said, “wouldn’t be just moral. We would back them up logistically, with supplies, munitions, oil.”

  Since President Jimmy Carter announced a policy of human rights, it has become the custom for Latin American regimes imposed by U.S. intervention to formulate indignant pronouncements against U.S. intervention in their internal affairs.

  The U.S. Congress resolved in 1976 and 1977 to suspend economic and military aid to various countries. But most U.S. external aid doesn’t go through the congressional filter. So despite pronouncements, resolutions, and protests General Pinochet’s regime got $290 million of direct U.S. aid in 1976 without congressional authorization. When General Videla’s dictatorship in Argentina was a year old it had received $500 million from private U.S. banks and $415 million from two institutions (World Bank and Bank for International Development) in which the United States has decisive influence. Argentina’s special rights for International Monetary Fund loans, $64 million in 1975, had risen to $700 million two years later.

  President Carter’s concern about the butchery in some Latin American countries seems healthy, but the present dictators are not self-taught: they have learned the techniques of repression and the arts of government at academies run by the Pentagon in the United States and the Panama Canal Zone. These courses are still being given today, and no change is known to have been made in their content. The Latin American military men who are now causing a scandal in the United States have been good pupils. A few years ago when he was defense secretary, Robert McNamara, now president of the World Bank, spelled it out: “They are the new leaders. I don’t need to expatiate on the value of having in leadership positions men who have previously become closely acquainted with how we Americans think and do things. Making friends with those men is beyond price.”7

  One wonders if those who made us paralytic might offer us a wheelchair?

  The bishops of France speak about another sort of responsibility, deeper and less visible: “We, who belong to nations purporting to be the world’s most advanced, form a part of those who benefit from exploitation of the developing countries. We do not see the sufferings that this inflicts on the flesh and spirit of entire peoples. We help to reinforce the division of the present world in which the domination of poor by rich, of weak by strong, is conspicuous. Do we know that our squandering of resources and raw materials would not be possible without the control of international exchange by the Western countries? Do we not see who profits from the arms traffic, of which our country has provided sad examples? Do we perhaps understand that the militarization of poor countries’ regimes is one of the consequences of economic and cultural domination by the industrialized countries, where life is ruled by the lust for profits and the power of money?”8

  Dictators, torturers, inquisitors: the terror has its officials, just as it has post offices and banks, and they apply it because it is necessary. It isn’t a case of a plot by the perverse. General Pinochet may look like a figure in Goya’s “black art,” a prize specimen for psychoanalysts, or the inheritor of a savage tradition from the banana republics. But the clinical or folkloric roots of this or that dictator, which provide seasoning for history, are not history. Who would dare maintain today that World War I broke out because of the complexes of Kaiser Wilhelm, who had one arm shorter than the other? As Bertolt Brecht wrote at the end of 1940 in his working diary: “In democratic countries the violent character inherent in the economy doesn’t show itself; in authoritarian countries the same holds true for the economic character of violence.”

  In Latin America’s southern lands the centurions have taken over power as a function of the needs of the system: the terrorism of the state is put into action when the dominant classes can pursue their business by no other means. Torture wouldn’t exist in our countries if it weren’t effective; formal democracy would continue if it could be guaranteed not to get out of the hands that hold power. In difficult times democracy becomes a crime against national security—that is, against the security of internal privilege and foreign investment. Our devices for mincing human flesh are part of an international machinery. The whole society is militarized, the state of exception is made permanent, and the repressive apparatus is endowed with hegemony by the turn of a screw in the centers of the imperial system. When crisis begins to throw its shadow, the pillage of poor countries must be intensified to guarantee full employment, public liberties, and high rates of development in the rich countries. The sinister dialectic of victim-hangman relations: a structure of successive humiliations that starts in international markets and financial centers and ends in every citizen’s home.

  Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. It has more foot-washers than shoeshiners: little boys who, for a penny, will wash the feet of customers lacking shoes to shine. Haitians, on the average, live a bit more than thirty years. Nine out of every ten can’t read or write. For internal consumption the barren mountain sides are cultivated. For export, the fertile valleys: the best lands are given to coffee, sugar, cacao, and other products needed by the U.S. market. No one plays baseball in Haiti, but Haiti is the world’s chief producer of baseballs. There is no shortage of workshops where children assemble cassettes and electronic parts for a dollar a day. These are naturally for export; and naturally the profits are also exported, after the administrators of the terror have duly got theirs. The slightest breath of protest in Haiti means prison or death. Incredible as it sounds, Haitian workers’ wages lost 25 percent of their wretched real value between 1971 and 1975.9 Significantly, in that period a new flow of U.S. capital into the country began.

  I recall an editorial in a Buenos Aires daily a couple of years ago. An old conservative newspaper was bellowing with fury because some international document depicted Argentina as an underdeveloped country. How could a cultured, European, prosperous, white society be measured by the same yardstick as a poor black country such as Haiti?

  Of course the differences are enormous, although they have little to do with the analytical categories of Buenos Aires’s arrogant oligarchy. But with all the diversities and contradictions one could mention, Argentina isn’t outside the vicious circle that strangles the Latin American economy as a whole. No intellectual exorcism can remove it from the reality that, to a greater or smaller extent, the other countries of the region share with it.

  General Videla’s massacres are, after all, no more civilized than those of “Papa Doc” Duvalier or his successor to the throne, although in Argentina the technological level of the repression is higher. Essentially both dictatorships act at the service of the same objective: to supply cheap labor to an international market that demands cheap products.

  Fresh from taking power, the Videla dictatorship hastened to ban strikes and decree freedom of prices while putting wages behind bars. Five months after the coup d’état, the new foreign investment law put foreign and national enterprises on an equal footing. Thus free competition put an end to the unfair handicap suffered by certain multinational corporations vis-à-vis local concerns—for example, poor unprotected General Motors, whose world sales volume equals the entire gross national product of Argentina. Also now liberated, with gossamer limitations, is the remission of profits abroad and the repatriation of invested capital.

  When the regime was a year old the real value of wages had fallen by 40 percent. The feat was accomplished by terror. “Fifteen thousand disappeared, 10,000 jailed, 4,000 dead, tens of thousands exiled—that is the naked balance sheet of the terror,” as the writer Rodolfo Walsh totted it up in an open letter. Walsh sent the letter on March 29,1977, to the three chiefs of the governing junta. On the same day he was kidnapped and disappeared.

  Unimpeachable sources confirm that a diminutive part of the new direct foreign investments
in Latin America really comes from their country of origin. According to a U.S. Department of Commerce survey10 a mere 12 percent of the funds comes from the enterprises’ U.S. headquarters, 22 percent comes from profits made in Latin America, and the remaining 66 percent from internal-credit, and above all international-credit, sources. The proportion is similar for investments of European or Japanese origin. And it must be borne in mind that 12 percent of investment coming from the enterprises’ headquarters is often nothing more than the result of transfer of already used machinery or simply reflect the arbitrary appraisal placed by the enterprises upon their industrial “know-how,” their patents, and their brand names. Thus the multinational corporations not only usurp the internal credit of countries where they operate, in exchange for a distinctly dubious capital contribution, but also multiply those countries’ external debts.

  Latin America’s external debt in 1975 was almost three times greater than in 1969.11 In 1975 approximately half of Brazil’s, Mexico’s, Chile’s, and Uruguay’s incomes from exports went for amortization and interest on the debt, and for paying the profits of foreign concerns operating in those countries. Servicing of debt and profit remittances in that year swallowed 55 percent of Panama’s exports and 60 percent of Peru’s.12 In 1969 every Bolivian owed $137 to foreigners; in 1977, $483. The inhabitants of Bolivia weren’t consulted, nor did they see a centavo of those loans that put the rope around their necks.