Open Veins of Latin America

by Eduardo Galeano

  The international Moloch-machine has kept on grinding: countries at the service of commodities, people at the service of things.

  With the passage of time methods of exporting crises are perfected.

  Monopoly capital reaches its highest peak of concentration, and international domination of markets, credits, and investment makes possible the systematic and growing transfer of contradictions: the outposts pay the price for the prosperity of the centers.

  The international market remains one of the master keys to this operation.

  There the multinational corporations impose their dictatorship--multinational (as Paul Sweezy explains) because they operate in many countries, yet highly and assuredly national in ownership and control. The global organization of inequality is not affected by the fact that (for example) Brazil now exports Volkswagens to other South American countries and to the distant markets of Africa and the Middle

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  East. In the last analysis it is the German Volkswagen concern that has considered it more convenient to export cars to certain markets from its Brazilian affiliate: the low production costs and cheap labor are Brazilian, the high profits are German.

  Nor is the straitjacket magically broken when some raw material manages to escape from the curse of low prices. This has been the case with petroleum since 1973. Isn't petroleum an international business? Standard Oil of New Jersey (now known as Exxon), Royal Dutch/Shell, Gulf. Are they Arabian or Latin American enterprises? Who takes home the lion's share? The hubbub raised against oil-producing countries has in fact been most revealing. They dared defend their prices and immediately became the scapegoats for inflation and unemployment in Europe and the United States. Did the most developed countries ever consult with anyone before raising the price of any of their products? For twenty years the price of oil sagged and sagged. Its paltry market quotation represented a giant subsidy for the world's great industrial centers whose products at the same time got dearer and dearer. Relative to the ceaseless price rises of U.S. and European products, the new price of oil has no more than brought it back to its 1952 levels. Crude oil merely recovered in 1973 the purchasing power it had two decades earlier.

  Among the important events of these seven years was the nationalization of oil in Venezuela. It didn't break Venezuela's dependency with respect to refining and marketing, but it opened a new space of autonomy. From soon after its birth the state concern Petroleos de Venezuela took first place among Latin America's 500 biggest enterprises. It began seeking markets apart from the traditional ones and rapidly found fifty new customers.

  But as always when the state takes over a country s principal wealth, it is appropriate to ask who runs the state. Nationalization of basic resources doesn't in itself imply redistribution of income for the majority's benefit, nor does it necessarily endanger the power and privileges of the dominant minority. In Venezuela the economy of waste and extravagance continues intact. The neon-lit center is as resplendent as ever with the squandermania of a multimillionaire class. In 1976 imports rose by 25 percent, largely to finance the super-luxury articles

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  which inundate the Venezuelan market. Commodity fetishism as a symbol of power, human existence reduced to competitive and consumer relationships. In the ocean of underdevelopment the privileged minority apes the lifestyle and fashions of the richest members of the world's most opulent societies. In the bedlam of Caracas, as in New York, commodities that are "natural" by definition--air, light, silence become ever costlier and costlier. "Watch out,"

  warns Juan Pablo Perez Alfonso, patriarch of Venezuela's nationalism and prophet of the recovery of its oil, "one can die from indigestion as well as from hunger."1

  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."

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  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, Plasmaferesis 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. 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

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  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 fi
rms 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'etat 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 Peron'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?

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  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 Joao Goulart and Juan Jose 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 Hector Campora 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 270

  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 271

  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 ountries 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 tim
es 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

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  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 shoe shiners: 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?