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

by Eduardo Galeano

  Citibank doesn’t appear as a candidate on any list, in the few Latin American countries that still have elections; and none of the generals who run the dictatorships is named International Monetary Fund. But whose is the hand that executes, whose the mind that gives the orders? He who lends, commands. In order to pay, more must be exported; and more must be exported in order to finance imports and to confront the hemorrhage of profits and “royalties” that the foreign concerns drain into their central coffers. The increase of exports, whose purchasing power shrinks, implies hunger wages. Massive poverty, the key to success for an economy skewed to the outside, prevents such growth of the internal consumer market as is necessary for smooth economic development. Our countries are becoming echoes and losing their own voice. They depend on others, they exist to the extent that they respond to others’ needs. And in turn the remodeling of the economy as a function of external demand brings us back to the original hangman’s rope: it opens the doors for pillage by foreign monopolies and forces us to seek new and larger loans from the international bankers. The vicious circle is perfect: foreign debt and foreign investment oblige us to multiply exports that they themselves devour. The task can’t be accomplished with gentlemanly matters. To fulfill their function as hostages of foreign prosperity, Latin American workers must be held prisoner, either inside or outside the bars of the jails.

  Savage exploitation of labor is not incompatible with intensive technology. It never was, in our countries: consider the legions of Bolivian workers who left their lungs in the Oruro mines in the time of Simón Patiño in a system of wage-slavery, yet with very modern machinery. The “tin baron” knew how to combine the highest levels of technology in his day with the lowest levels of wages.13

  Furthermore in our day, importation of the most advanced economies’ technology coincides with expropriation of locally capitalized industries by the all-powerful multinationals. The capital-centralizing movement is achieved by “ruthless wiping out of ’obsolete’ entrepreneurial levels which, not by accident, are precisely those of national ownership.”14 The speeded-up denationalization of Latin American industry carries with it a growing technological dependency. Technology, the decisive key to power, is monopolized in the capitalist world by the metropolitan centers. It comes to us second-hand but those centers charge for the copies as if they were the originals. In 1970 Mexico paid twice as much as in 1968 for importation of foreign technology. Between 1965 and 1969 Brazil doubled its payments, and so did Argentina over the same period.

  Technology transfer swells the astronomical foreign debts and has devastating effects on the labor market. In a system organized to drain off profits abroad, the labor force of “traditional” enterprise has ever less opportunities for employment. In exchange for a dubious shot in the arm for the rest of the economy, the islets of modern industry sacrifice workers as they reduce the labor time necessary for production. The existence of a large and growing army of unemployed in turn facilitates the destruction of the real value of wages.

  Even the documents of the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) now talk about a new international division of labor. The technicians hazard the hope that, within a few years, Latin America will perhaps export as much manufactures as it now sells raw materials and food.

  The wage differentials between developed countries and those in development, including Latin America, may bring about a new division of activities between countries, displacing from the former to the latter for competitive reasons those industries in which labor costs are very important. Labor costs for manufacturing industry, for example, are generally much lower in Mexico or Brazil than in the United States.15

  Sparkplug of progress or neocolonial adventure? Electrical and non-electrical machinery is already one of Mexico’s chief exports. And in Brazil, the sale abroad of vehicles and armaments grows. Some Latin American countries are experiencing a new stage of industrialization, largely induced and oriented by foreign needs and the foreign masters of the means of production. Won’t this be another chapter to add to our long history of “development toward the outside”? In world markets the constantly rising prices don’t correspond generically with “manufactured products” but with commodities of a more sophisticated and technological nature which is exclusive to the more developed economies. Whatever Latin America sells—raw materials or manufactures—its chief export product is really cheap labor.

  Hasn’t our experience throughout history been one of mutilation and disintegration disguised as development? Centuries ago the conquest cleared our lands to plant crops for export and annihilated the indigenous populations in the mines to satisfy the demand abroad for silver and gold. The diet of the pre-Columbian population that could survive the exterminations deteriorated as the foreigners progressed. In our day the people of Peru produce fishmeal very rich in protein, for the cattle of the United States and Europe, but proteins are conspicuously absent from the diet of most Peruvians. The Volkswagen affiliate in Switzerland plants a tree for every car it sells—gracious ecological gesture—while the Volkswagen affiliate in Brazil uproots thousands of acres of forest to dedicate them to intensive production of meat for export. The Brazilian people, who very rarely eat meat, sell more and more meat abroad. Recently Darcy Ribeiro remarked to me that there isn’t much difference between a “Volkswagen republic” and a “banana republic.” For every dollar produced from exporting bananas, just eleven cents remain in the producing country,16 and of those eleven cents only a meager part goes to the plantation workers. Do the proportions change when a Latin American country exports automobiles?

  Slave ships no longer ply the ocean. Today the slavers operate from the ministries of labor. African wages, European prices. What are the Latin American coups d’état but successive episodes in a war of pillage? The dictators hardly grasp their scepters before they invite foreign concerns to exploit the local, cheap, and abundant work force, the unlimited credit, the tax exemptions, and the natural resources that await them on a silver tray.

  Employees of the Chilean government’s emergency plan get a wage equivalent to $30 a month. A kilo of bread costs half a dollar, so they get two kilos of bread a day. The minimum monthly wage in Uruguay and Argentina is the present equivalent of six kilos of coffee. In Brazil it is $60 a month but the boias frias, migrant rural workers, get from fifty cents to $1 a day on the coffee, soybean, and other export-crop plantations. The fodder consumed by Mexican cattle contains more protein than the diet of campesinos who tend them. The meat of these cattle is destined for a few privileged mouths within the country and above all for the international market. Agriculture for export flourishes in Mexico beneath the shield of a generous policy of credits and official facilities, while the amount of protein available per inhabitant fell between 1970 and 1976, and in rural areas only one of every five Mexican kids has normal weight and height.17 In Guatemala rice, corn, and beans for internal consumption are left to the will of God, but coffee, cotton, and other export products absorb 87 percent of the credit. Of every ten Guatemalan families who work at raising and harvesting coffee, the country’s chief source of foreign exchange, hardly one gets a minimally adequate diet.18 In Brazil only 5 percent of agricultural credit goes for rice, beans, and manioc, which constitute the basic diet of Brazilians; the rest goes for export products.

  The recent collapse of world sugar prices did not, as it once did, set off a famine among Cuba’s campesinos. In Cuba malnutrition no longer exists. On the other hand the almost simultaneous rise of world coffee prices did nothing to ease the chronic poverty of Brazilian coffee workers. The rise in coffee prices in 1976—a euphoria brought about by frosts that devastated Brazilian crops— “was not directly reflected in wages,” as a high official of the Brazilian Coffee Institute recognized.19

  Actually export crops are not in themselves incompatible with the welfare of the population, nor do they in themselves contradict an “inward” economic development. Sugar sales abroad have in fact give
n Cuba leverage to create a new world in which all have access to the fruits of development, and solidarity is the axis of human relations.

  So we know who is condemned to pay for the crisis of system-adjustment. The prices of most of the products Latin America sells decline implacably in relation to the prices of what it buys from countries that monopolize technology, trade, investment, and credit. To make up the difference and meet the obligations to foreign capital, Latin America must cover in quantity what it loses in price. In this framework the southern dictatorships have cut workers’ wages in half and turned every production center into a forced labor camp. The workers also have to compensate for the fall in value of their labor power, which is the product they sell in the market. They must make up in quantity—quantity of hours— what they lose in purchasing power of their wages. The laws of the international market are thus reproduced in the microworld of every Latin American worker’s life. For workers who have “the luck” to count on a regular job, the eight-hour day exists only in the dead letter of the laws. They often work ten, twelve, even fourteen hours; and not a few have lost their Sundays.

  Simultaneously on-the-job accidents have multiplied—human blood offered on the altar of productivity. Three examples in Uruguay at the end of 1977:

  • Railroad quarries producing stones and ballast double their output. In early spring, fifteen workers die in a gelignite explosion.

  • Lines of unemployed outside a fireworks factory; children working on the production lines; records broken. On December 20, an explosion: five workers dead, dozens wounded.

  • At 7 a.m. on December 28, workers refuse to enter a fish-canning factory because they smell a strong odor of gas. They are threatened: if they don’t go in, they lose their jobs. They continue to refuse. Renewed threats: we’ll call in the army. The firm has already summoned the army on other occasions. The workers enter. Four dead, many hospitalized. Ammonia gas was escaping.20

  Maria Carolina de Jesus was born amid garbage and vultures.

  She grew, suffered, worked hard; loved men, had kids. She kept a notebook where she jotted down, in crude handwriting, an account of her tasks and her days.

  A journalist happened to read the notebooks and Maria Carolina de Jesus became a famous writer. Her book Quarto de Despejo,* diary of five years in a sordid Sâo Paulo slum, was read in forty countries and translated into thirteen languages.

  A Cinderella in Brazil, transformed into a global consumer product, Maria Carolina de Jesus left the slum to tour the world, be interviewed and photographed and garlanded by critics, regaled by the gentry and received by presidents.

  * Published in English as Child of the Dark (New York: Dutton, 1962).

  The years passed. Early in 1977, on a Sunday morning, Maria Carolina de Jesus died, amid garbage and vultures. No one remembered the woman who had written: “Hunger is the dynamite of the human body.”

  She who had lived on leftovers could ephemerally become one of the elect. She was allowed to sit at the table. After the dessert, the magic was broken. And while her dream lasted, Brazil had continued to be a country where one hundred workers are injured every day in work accidents and where four of every ten children are obliged from birth to become beggars, thieves, or magicians.

  The statistics may wear a smile, but the people get taken. In systems organized upside down, when the economy grows, social injustice grows with it. In the most successful phase of the Brazilian “miracle,” infant mortality rose in the slums of the country’s wealthiest city. The sudden oil boom in Ecuador brought color TV instead of schools and hospitals.

  The cities swell up to the point of explosion. In 1950 Latin America had six cities with a population of more than a million. In 1980 it will have twenty-five.21 On the edges of great urban centers the hordes of workers expelled from the countryside share the fate that the system reserves for “surplus” city youth. In the Latin American picaresque style the hustlers perfect ways to survive. “The productive system has demonstrated patent insufficiency to generate productive employment which absorbs the region’s growing labor force, especially the large contingents of urban labor.…”22

  An International Labor Organization study recently showed that Latin America has more than 110 million persons in a condition of “serious poverty.” Seventy million of them can be considered “indigent.”23 What percentage of the population eat less than they need? In the technicians’ language, those receiving “incomes below the cost of minimal balanced diet” are 42 percent of the population of Brazil, 43 percent of Colombians, 49 percent of Hondurans, 31 percent of Mexicans, 45 percent of Peruvians, 29 percent of Chileans, 35 percent of Ecuadoreans.24

  How to stifle the rebellious explosion of the great condemned majorities? How to head off those explosions? How to avoid those majorities becoming ever larger, if the system doesn’t function for them? Leaving aside charity, the police remains.

  In our countries the terror industry pays dearly, like any other, for foreign “know-how.” U.S. repression technology, tested at the four corners of the earth, is bought and applied. But it would be unjust not to credit Latin America’s ruling classes with a certain creative capacity in this field.

  Independent economic development was beyond the capacity of our bourgeoisies, and their attempts to create a national industry had a short low flight, like a hen’s. Throughout our historical process the masters of power have likewise demonstrated their lack of political imagination and their cultural sterility. On the other hand they did know how to set up a giant fear machine and have made their own contributions to the technique of exterminating persons and ideas. In this sense the recent experience of the Río de la Plata countries is revealing.

  “The task of disinfection will take us a long time,” the Argentine brass warned when they took the stage. The armed forces were successively summoned by Uruguay’s and Argentina’s ruling classes to crush the forces of change, tear them up by the roots, perpetuate the internal orders of privilege, and generate economic and political conditions that would seduce foreign capital: scorched earth, tranquility and order, workers cheap and meek. There is nothing more orderly than a cemetery. The population immediately became the internal enemy. Any sign of life, of protest, or even mere doubt, is a dangerous challenge from the standpoint of military doctrine and national security. So complicated mechanisms of prevention and punishment have been developed.

  A deep rationality lurks behind appearances. To operate effectively, the repression must appear arbitrary. Apart from breathing, any human activity can constitute a crime. In Uruguay torture is applied as a routine system of interrogation: anyone may be its victim, not only those suspected or guilty of acts of opposition. In this way panic fear of torture is spread through the whole population, like a paralyzing gas that invades every home and implants itself in every citizen’s soul.

  In Chile the hunt for human prey left a balance of 30,000 dead, but in Argentina they don’t shoot: they kidnap. The victims “disappear.” The invisible armies of the night carry out the task. There are no corpses and no one is responsible. In this way the bloodbath has the more impunity for not being “official,” and thus collective anxiety is more potently spread around. No one renders accounts, no one offers explanations. Each crime builds horrible uncertainty in persons close to the victim and is also a warning for everyone else. State terrorism aims to paralyze the population with fear.

  To get a job and keep it in Uruguay, one needs to stay in the good graces of the military. In a country where it’s so tough to find work outside of the barracks and police stations, this not only serves to drive into exile a good part of the 300,000 citizens listed as leftists. It is also useful as a threat hanging over those who stay. Montevideo newspapers often feature public penitences and declarations by citizens who beat their breasts just in case: “I have never been, I am not, I never will be.…”

  In Argentina it is no longer necessary to ban any book by decree. The new Penal Code penalizes, as always, th
e writer and publisher of a book considered subversive. But it also penalizes the printer (so that no one will dare to print a text that is merely doubtful) and the distributor and the bookstore (so that no one will dare sell it); and as if this weren’t enough, it also penalizes the reader, so that no one will dare read it, much less keep it. Thus the consumer of a book gets the same treatment the law applies to consumers of drugs.25 In this program for a society of deaf mutes, each citizen has to become his own Torquemada.

  In Uruguay it is a crime not to inform on your neighbor. Students entering the university swear in writing that they will denounce anyone who indulges on campus in “any activity outside the functions of study.” The student assumes co-responsibility for whatever occurs in his presence. In this program for a society of sleepwalkers, all citizens must be their own and others’ policeman. However, the system—with good reason—is mistrustful. There are 100,000 police and soldiers in Uruguay, but there are also 100,000 informers. Spies work the streets, cafes and buses, factories and high schools, offices and the university. Anyone voicing a complaint about life being so expensive and so hard ends up in jail: he or she has committed a “crime against the moral force of the Armed Forces,” for which the price is three to six years behind bars.

  In the January 1978 referendum, one voted “Yes” for the Pinochet dictatorship by marking a cross beneath the Chilean flag. To vote “No,” one put the cross beneath a black rectangle.

  The system would like to be confused with the country. The system is the country, says the official propaganda that bombards the citizenry day and night. The enemy of the system is a traitor to the fatherland. Capacity for indignation against injustice and a desire for change are proofs of desertion. In many Latin American countries, citizens who aren’t exiled beyond the frontiers live as exiles on their own soil.