Paying Tribute to Eduardo Galeano

Eduardo Galeano, leading leftist intellectual and writer has died at the age of 74.

Uruguayan Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America, (1971) is a stunning account of how imperialism works. It traces the exploitation of Latin America by colonisers, from Spain five centuries back to the US in more recent times. It's important to recall today that this book was banned for many years in different countries including Uruguay under military dictators. Galeano was arrested, then exiled after the military coup in 1973 in Uruguay when Juan Maria Bordaberry took over.

Newsclick pays tribute to this writer and his work's blazing testimony to the human costs of imperialism.

Image Courtesy: en.wikipedia.org

In a 2013 interview, Galeano said, "We have a memory cut in pieces. And I write trying to recover our real memory, the memory of humankind, what I call the human rainbow, which is much more colorful and beautiful than the other one, the other rainbow. But the human rainbow had been mutilated by machismo, racism, militarism and a lot of other isms, who have been terribly killing our greatness, our possible greatness, our possible beauty."

http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2015/4/13/rip_eduardo_galeano_chronicler_of_latin

"This world is not democratic at all," he says. "The most powerful institutions, the IMF [International Monetary Fund] and the World Bank, belong to three or four countries. The others are watching. The world is organised by the war economy and the war culture."

And yet there is nothing in either Galeano's work or his demeanour that smacks of despair or even melancholy.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jul/23/eduardo-galeano-children-days-interview

The following passages are excerpted from Eduardo Galeano’s book Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History, just out in paperback (Nation Books).

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eduardo-galeano/a-world-of-violence_b_6971256.html