Open Veins of Latin America

Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America opens with the arrival of European settlers in the early period of colonialism in Latin America and concludes with a discussion of Latin America’s present-day economic structure, which bares the same or worse conditions for the most marginalized people. By drawing this extended history, Galeano intends to show the relationship between the colonial past and the neocolonial present of Latin America. The past and the present share in the different forms of enslavement of marginalized people, growing poverty and unemployment, and political repression. In his descriptions of foreign exploitation of Central American lands, for instance, Galeano points to the ways in which peasants had to give up their land to the wealthy class who carried out the agenda of foreign enterprises. Meanwhile, Indians endured working the land until they died of ill treatment. Galeano remarks, “The colonial order was revived with the forcible recruitment of labor and with laws against vagrancy, while fugitive workers were pursued with guns” (124). The time period which Galeano describes takes place well after the early period of colonialism, yet the violence had persisted through the years.

While Latin America abolished slavery, the harsh conditions and exploitative practices of modern-day labor appear to be an extension of the brutal system.