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In April Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez reached out to Barack Obama and gave him a gift. It wasn’t a billion barrels of crude or a letter of resignation, which were no doubt what Obama was hoping for, but rather a very normal and inoffensive-looking book (this was still far better than Evo Morales’ gift, which was another round of accusations that the US was trying to kill him. Sigh).
The book was Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, a tome of some existing fame which became an instant bestseller as it was passed from Chavez to Obama.
The title should give some indication as to what the book is about, but given that the gift was an untranslated Spanish-language edition, it’s safe to say Obama hasn’t spent much time pouring over its pages. To avoid the potentially awkward consequences that could ensue from the next meeting between Chavez and Obama (“how did you like your gift” “oh yeah, it was pretty, um, interesting” “so which bits did you like the best” “well definitely the um, the start was pretty, like, um, hey look, there’s Kevin Rudd!” “Who?”), I thought I’d provide some cheat notes to help Obama. He’s a busy man after all; he has a Peace Prize to earn…
Title: Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
Author: Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan journalist and freelance political exile.
Published: 1971, and then again later.
Chapter Summaries
Introduction: 120 Million Children in the Eye of the Hurricane. Explains how Latin America is exploited.
Chapter 1: Lust for Gold, Lust for Silver. Explains how Latin America is exploited.
Chapter 2: King Sugar and other Agricultural Monarchs. Explains how Latin America is exploited.
Chapter 3: The Invisible Sources of Power. Explains how Latin America is exploited.
Chapter 4: Tales of Premature Death. Explains how Latin America is exploited.
Chapter 5: The Contemporary Structures of Power. Explains how Latin America is exploited.
Seven Years After. Explains how Latin America is still exploited.
Setting
Venezuelan oil fields, Bolivian silver mines, Brazilian favelas, Caribbean sugar plantations, Central American banana plantations, Brazilian coffee plantations, Chilean guano deposits and copper mines, nineteenth century Paraguay, Zapatista Mexico, the Panama Canal, Argentine prisons, leaky slave galleons, denuded rainforests………..
Characters
The Spanish. Outsiders that harvested, mined and plundered Latin America for their own benefit. Villains.
The English, and to a lesser extent the other Europeans. Outsiders that harvested, mined and plundered Latin America for their own benefit. Came after the Spanish (see above). Villains.
The USAmericans. Outsiders that harvested, mined and plundered Latin America for their own benefit. Came after the English (see above). Villains.
The Oligarchy. Insiders that privatised, mortgaged and sold Latin America for their own benefit. Villains.
The International Monetary Fund. See the USAmericans.
Augusto Pinochet. Chilean general who became president/dictator through a violent coup. Friend of the Oligarchy (see above) and the USAmericans (see above). A villain.
Salvador Allende. Chilean socialist president overthrown by Augusto Pinochet (see above). A hero.
Isabel Allende. First cousin once removed of Salvador Allende (see above). Wrote the foreword to Open Veins. Likes it. Fled Augusto Pinochet’s coup (see above) carrying a copy of Open Veins (an early edition, before she had written the foreword).
Old Woman. Lives in a São Paulo hovel. Drinks coffee from small tin can and talks to author. Claims that Brazil is “ours”. An anecdote.
Quotes
“We have maintained a silence closely resembling stupidity”.
“The massacres of Indians that began with Columbus never stopped”.
“The human murder by poverty in Latin America is secret – every year, three Hiroshima bombs”.
“There are less than 1,000 computers in Latin America and 50,000 in the United States”.
“One wonders if those that made us paralytic might offer us a wheelchair”.
“One writes to answer the questions that buzz in one’s head”.
Notes for the President (of the USA)
* Don’t take anything Galeano says too personally, after all you were only 10 years old when this book was published, and not directly complicit in, for example, the CIA’s support of Pinochet.
* Galeano is opposed to slavery, to indentured labour, to serfdom, and to other forms of labour exploitation. By aligning yourself similarly you may be able to reach out to those of the left like Galeano and Hugo Chavez. These people cannot vote for you, but being cordial to them might boost your popularity with certain demographics (most of whom also cannot vote for you).
* The CIA, the IMF, the green berets and the oil companies are for the large part unpopular within Latin America. This may be because every time they become involved in Latin America people start dying (according to Galeano). Finding less polarising cultural ambassadors to send to the region may prove worthwhile.
* Galeano wrote Open Veins in the years after Che Guevara was assassinated. Neither this event nor the ongoing embargo seem to have ended the Communist threat in the region. Cuba may be the country that has changed the least from the time of the book’s publication to today. It might be time to consider a new Cuba strategy.
* Five hundred years of exploitation has not caused Latin America to love unreservedly the Spanish (see above) or the English (see above) or the USAmericans (see above). For the USAmericans at least it is not to late to rethink this approach. It might be time to call off the conquest.
Would the history of the Americas have been different if it hadn’t been Columbus that discovered them? Hard to say, but probably not; Columbus was just one of the many opportunists floating about Europe and the world at the time. If it hadn’t been him it would have been someone very like him.
One thing is certain though, Columbus was a real bastard. From the moment he arrived in the new world, still thinking – due to his vast under-estimation of the circumference of the world – that it was east Asia, Columbus was thinking only of how he could make use of the indigenous populations. They seemed obedient, quick to learn and poorly defended; they would, he observed, make great slaves.
A part of the old bastard’s arrangement with the crown of Spain was that he would be governor of all new lands he discovered. During his years of exploration and colonisation, Columbus comported himself like a true bastard, demanding great tributes of gold from the indigenous people that had at times welcomed him. He tortured or mutilated those that could not pay tribute (which was practically everyone given the Caribbean possessed almost no gold) and enslaved many more, shipping them (and probably also syphilis) to Europe. The Taino people were scattered over the Caribbean and probably numbered several hundred thousand when Columbus first arrived. A few years later their numbers had halved; fifty years later they were on the brink of extinction.
All this bastardry was brought to the attention of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, and as a consequence of numerous testimonies (he was an unpopular bastard), and also of the overly-generous initial arrangement extended to him which the monarchs quickly came to regret, Columbus was put into chains, and like his victims shipped across the Atlantic. Unlike his victims though, Columbus was released and the bastard died prosperous and old (for the time).
In most countries that care, October 12 is Columbus Day, but how should this day be celebrated? What to do with the bastard Columbus? Columbus’s discovery – although it would be fairer to say he claimed, rather than discovered the New World – set the Americas onto a very different path. It begun the mestizo-isation of the hemisphere, the mixing and clashing and dissolving of cultures which has made the Americas what they are today. Such a shame it all started with a bastard, and that so many more bastards followed his lead.
Columbus’s name has been omitted from the celebrations in Mexico. Instead October 12 has been entitled ‘Dia de la Raza’, Day of the Race, which is intended to encapsulate the rich heritage and many peoples of Latin America, without overt reference to all that initial bastardry. Columbus isn’t going to be forgotten – the Spanish empire couldn’t get rid of him and neither can we – but at least by focusing on what came after him, and not on what the old bastard actually did, we can perhaps get on with overturning the unfinished centuries of exploitation that he initiated, and perhaps we can dare to imagine a hemisphere free of such bastards.
The first national holiday wheeled around, landing on a Wednesday, breaking up school as it broke up the thunderstorms that had been skulking about for days.
September 16 is Independence Day in Mexico. On the preceding day at school we had corralled the kids into the central patio for a flag ceremony, involving marching and saluting and the withering eye of the school director. Long strips of the Mexican red and white and green covered the city. Sombrero pedlars had been dragging their carts about the city for weeks.
On the eve of the 16th people gather in plazas all over Mexico, and at 11pm commemorate the cry of liberty. In Mexico City’s monster Zocalo the president leads the cry, and is echoed by cries of Viva! from thousands and thousands of throats. He vivas liberty, he vivas the heroes and martyrs of Mexican independence, and last and most emphatically he vivas Mexico itself, again and again, accompanied by the roar of his people. Then the bell ringing and fireworks commence.
All that shouting and bellringing is intended as a kind of grand re-enactment of Miguel Hidalgo’s first cry of liberty. In 1810 on the night of the 15th Hidalgo stood outside his parish church and decried the colonial Spanish government, declaring death to the Spaniards and the birth of a new and egalitarian Mexico.
Less than a year later, though, Hidalgo had been captured, executed, dismembered and exhibited. Independence from Spain was still ten years away for Mexico. A number of other figureheads for the revolution arose; virtually all of them were at some point exiled from Mexico. Many were executed during or after the war.
So why Hidalgo? Why celebrate the beginning of the war of independence and not the end of it? Next year Mexico will celebrate its bicentenary, again basing the date on Hidalgo’s cry for freedom and not on the actual advent of Mexican independence. Bolivia did the same thing earlier this year, leapfrogging all its neighbours by counting its anniversary from the beginning of its struggle, not the end of it.
Perhaps the reason is that Agustin de Iturbide, who you could say ended the war of independence, was not the radical that Hidalgo was; he became the first emperor of Mexico, his new country representing little of the equality that Hidalgo had envisioned (Iturbide was also executed).
Perhaps by dying early in the struggle Hidalgo evaded the fate of Iturbide, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna and Porfirio Diaz, all of whom started as military heroes and ended up as deposed tyrants. Hidalgo started the war but didn’t have to finish it, didn’t have to stitch together an awkward harmony out of the disparate elements of the independence movement. He didn’t have to govern; he was already dead and popular.
Perhaps Hidalgo’s charisma and personality are what have immortalised him. An errant priest who read French enlightenment texts, spoke indigenous languages and fathered two children, Hidalgo exemplified all of the quirks that a hero of the people could need.
Whatever the reason, the hero has been chosen, and his cry has been immortalised with a national holiday. The holiday should fall on the 15th, but the date too has been chosen; the 15th was already booked for the aforementioned Porfirio Diaz’s birthday (which is no longer significant). Figures like Diaz rise and fall but Hidalgo remains forever the hero of the independence he never knew.
…Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán
Probably the most despicable of the Spanish conquistadors, Guzmán arrived in Mexico after most of the initial conquering had taken place. He defamed Hernán Cortés and insinuated himself into (very corrupt) government, before marching into the west to pillage, torture, enslave and slaughter – accounts of his rampage read like a Cormac McCarthy novel. He also found time to found a few settlements, before he was arrested and spent his remaining days in a Spanish prison. The most significant settlement was given the name of his birthplace in Spain – Guadalajara.
…Mariachis
Traditionally a large band of spiffily-dressed troubadours playing all string instruments, mariachi culture has evolved to include brass instruments and groups of varying sizes and styles. They still wear big hats, and still tend to make their living serenading lovers, or playing weddings and 15th birthdays (although they can be hired on the spot for any occasion from the plazas in which they congregate).
…The Mexican Hat Dance
Mexico’s national dance, the Jarabe Tapatío is a relatively recent invention; the musical medley was composed in the 19th century and the standard choreography was developed in the early 20th century. The dance is (of course) one of courtship, the man approaching and dazzling the woman with his machismo, then disgracing himself with drunkenness, before recovering to conquer his woman (is there any other narrative?).
…Tequila (almost)
The real home of tequila is Tequila, sixty kilometers from Guadalajara. Although the blue agave plant had long been used to produce modestly alcoholic beverages, it was Hernán Cortés that introduced distilling to the area (before Guzmán ruined his fun), sealing the area’s celebrity fate and putting it forever on the booze world map.
…José Clement Orozco
One of Mexico’s big three social-realist muralists, Orozco was born in Guadalajara and is now buried there. Influenced by Goya, Orozco’s murals are grand, bleak things, eschewing idealistic themes such as the triumphs of socialist man in favour of depicting human suffering and struggle; “instead of red and yellow sunsets I painted pestilential shadows… and instead of nude Indians, drunk women and men”. His doom and gloom style can be found in most of Guadalajara’s most famous buildings.
…Gael García Bernal
Politically aware, down-to-earth, multilingual chicmagnet who has played Che Guevara twice (as if he wasn’t loved enough), Bernal was born in Guadalajara, studied in London (where he mixed drinks and worked in construction to support himself) and now lives in Madrid (I think) with his girlfriend and baby son. Bernal is still very active within latin cinema, which is perhaps not surprising given there are about fifty million women in Mexico who nurse daily fantasies of doing the hat dance with him.
…one more gringo
When I stepped off the plane in Guadalajara I already had a job, an apartment, and a cat lined up; such things I’d been told were impossible for foreign teachers in Mexico, but largely thanks to couchsurfing and a friend I had met in Kansas City this was the easiest settling-in-to-a-new-place that I’ve ever done. Apart from the jetlag; I’ve never been so lagged in my life. For a week all I could do was lie awake watching lightning illuminate the nighttime windows. During the days I tried to make myself explore; I’d drag my enormous head, my heavy hands about the neighbourhood, and then spend the muggy afternoons in a daze. As the jetlag passed though the city around me began to sink in. First impression; the people are incredibly, incredibly warm and friendly. Second impression: they speak way too much English, which may scupper my plans to become magnificently and completely fluent within the year…
I said my tearful goodbyes to my little world in Sucre, having delayed the inevitable for a full month, striking off one by one every name from my list of intended cities-to-visit, until there were only two names left, Samaipata and Santa Cruz; a cursory visit to the lush low and lower lands of Bolivia’s East before I left the country behind.
The last day in Sucre was all rushed goodbyes and slow shuddering hugs before a bus rushed me off and into the night. At 4am I was left on the dusty highway on the outskirts of Samaipata and spent the next few hours loitering about the town, the air full of rooster howls and dog cries, until a hostel opened its doors.
Samaipata is talked up on Bolivia’s gringo trail. Situated at less-than-troublesome altitude and between animal-rich national parks, milennia-old ruins and the villages where Che Guevara passed his last days, it is known as a place to relax in between partaking of the many adventures in the region. I’d long had my eyes on the Che trail, but as the time dwindled away it too had been scrubbed from the list of intended destinations.
Samaipata by daylight looked almost identical to Samaipata in the small hours of the morn. The town was empty, its lush central plaza abandoned, most of the shops and restaurants closed. Only the string of tour agencies had opened, but the price for a personal tour (there certainly wasn’t anyone around to share a tour with) per day was almost double what most Bolivian make in a month, and as usual the miser within me screamed his arid objections. There just didn’t seem to be any way to do anything in Samaipata; I was left my scratching my head and wondering whether Che Guevara had died of boredom.
On my first afternoon I wandered out to El Fuerte, the only Samaipata site more or less within walking distance. A pretty and mysterious place it is, perched, on a hilltop overlooking green valleys. ‘The Fort’ itself is a natural stone slab atop the ridge and riddled with ornamental carvings and niches for holding ancient, long-disappeared idols. The usual myths implicating extra-terrestrials, vasts hordes of gold and super-sophisticated, mysteriously-extinct cultures surround the site; more likely, though, is that generations and epochs of different groups, aided by the sculptural tendencies of nature, gradually hacked and wore away more and more of the site until what was once a curiously big rock became a bizarre bastion of half-terraces and empty nooks and crannies; a place that even today seems eerie and haunted by ghosts or fairies or deities.
The site is slowly being reconstructed and groomed back into service, and the pilgrims are coming, although mostly on half-day guided tours. I was there alone, picturing jabbering deities in every niche, and wondering why Che had picked such a tranquil and isolated spot in which to foment revolution in Bolivia.
I decided to visit some of the Che sites; no doubt there were ways of reaching them that didn’t cost 1000Bs per night. It was just that no one seemed to know what they were. Checking out of Samaipata I had to grapple with the usual dodgy maths and suddenly inflated prices, and speculated that maybe these had been responsible for the death of Che Guevara.
I was very lucky on the dusty highway outside of town. Before long an open-topped truck rolled up which was heading to Vallegrande, where the body of Che was presented to the media and then buried with minimal honour. Over the side of the truck i went; it was full of bags of rice, as well as decrepit furniture and one enormous karaoke machine. Alone in the back, I dozed in the sun, the silly truck-riding grin smeared across my face.
Approaching Vallegrande I asked the driver if he would be continuing on, and he rattled off a vague list of villages further along the road, including La Higuera, where Che was captured and executed. It was only later on, after an immense woman heaved up among the rice bags beside me had begun asking for money, that the driver explained that he wouldn’t actually be going to La Higuera, but that it was a quick walk to the village from where he would drop me off. I wondered if I had missed that point earlier, his clenched country drawl near impossible to decipher, or whether he had just felt no need to mention such details. And I wondered if accent problems and cultural barriers had killed Che Guevara (and apparently they had played their part, Che’s faction learning the Guaraní of the lowlands and not the Quechua of the mountains we were winding among).
The sun set over the endless folds of ridge and valley, and I was left at the roadside with another clench-jawed campesino who was very very uncomfortable in my presence. He kept his distance, head bowed, wolfing down bruised bananas, but with the aid of the cookies stashed in my pack I prised sentences out of him. The driver had said (this I am sure of), that this guy would take me into town, and that it would take less than an hour. After an hour the guy stopped abruptly, said that this was his home, and disappeared over a gate of sticks. Perhaps Che had died by the stoic mistrust and suspicion of the locals (and this too must have played a part, because the revolution certainly didn’t ignite out here).
Alone in the dark with a pack on my back, I decided that this was exactly how Che would have spent his time here. I followed my shadow cast by the moon, and tried to keep my imagination away from the things moving in the trees and bushes.
An hour later I caught a glimpse of La Higuera, a few lights glimmering among the trees. When I came to the town it was deserted, save for the grumble of the generator and the drawn-out creak of the guesthouse gate. The guesthouse was also deserted. Did Che Guevera perhaps die of a spooked and lonely heart? For one of the rare times in this whole jaunt, I craved gringo company.
The town was not completely deserted though; on the main plaza – consisting of three Che monuments and a few sleeping dogs – a gas lantern shone light through the open door of a tiny shop. Into that puddle of light stepped an old lady with a nervous tic and an oozing eye. She offered me stern hospitality, and a headful of reminiscences about the last days of Che.
La Higuera turned out to be beautiful and tiny and well worth the trek. As my host told me over dinner and then breakfast and then lucnh, before ‘the war’ the village had numbered 80 families. Now it numbers about 20. Those that remain are sustained by the slowly increasing trickle of Che tourists. Che may be revered all over the world, but nowhere more so than here, where he is probably alone responsible for the ongoing existence of the village, and certainly for the constant supply of Cuban doctors and investment (the newish school I stayed in was built with Cuban support). The town, being of Santa Cruz province but also of the Quechua-speaking impoverished mountains, is divided between admiration and distrust of Evo Morales, but for Che, a man of more extreme socialistic tendencies, they have nothing but adoration.
And finally, this is how Che died, according my hostess, told over stale bread and gritty coffee and piles of potato and corn, and quite different to how I had previously read, written and imagined the story to go.
Che had stayed in the village, sleeping outside the schoolhouse in which he would later be incarcerated, with his tiny band of revolutionaries. Three hundred soldiers had descended on the village in pursuit, and Che’s group had been forced to flee, jettisoning their scant supplies as they headed down into the dry quebradas below. The soldiers had been unable to find the group, though they had combed the area. They offered anyone in the town $100US for information about the guerillas, but no one would have betrayed them for any money. The guerillas had holed up in a natural cave, inside as big as a house but virtually impossible to find from the outside. Eventually a cattle farmer passing through the quebradas stumbled upon their position and informed the soldiers, who set out en masse. The final shootout took place on the banks of a stream, shaded by old trees. Thirty soldiers were killed, as were four guerillas; Che and his companions ‘Willy’ and ‘Chino’ were captured and taken to La Higuera. Che was a shadow of his former romantic self, his beard long, his face blackened, sick and skinny, his boots in tatters. In the evening he was given his last meal, peanut soup (sopa de mani) and chicken – such ingredients as can’t be found in La Higuera any more – which he devoured with hunger. At 3am he was taken outside and placed against a wall. He said ‘you are only going to kill a man, not the revolution’, and then was shot several times. A helicopter came, scattering the terrified locals. Che’s body was flown to Vallegrande where it was cleaned and exhibited. His hands were cut off and made their way to his widow in Cuba, his body was buried in Vallegrande.
