Eduardo Galeano Dead, Prolific Writer Was 74

[marylander1940]

Award-winning Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano and leading leftwing intellectual has died, El Pais reported.

 

He was 74.

 

Galeano was best known for his 1971 anti-imperialist work, "Open Veins of Latin America," which details Latin America's exploitation at the hands of foreign powers, beginning with Spanish and Portuguese, colonization five centuries ago and continuing to the present with the United States. The book was banned for years across the continent, including in Uruguay, at the hands of military dictatorships. Galeano himself was arrested and exiled after a military coup lead by Juan Maria Bordaberry took over Uruguay in 1973.

 

The book has been widely praised and has been translated into at least 20 languages. In 2009, the Guardian called Galeano "one of the most well-known and celebrated writers in Latin America."

 

"We have a memory cut in pieces," he once told "Democracy Now. "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.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/13/eduardo-galeano-dead-dies_n_7054062.html

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LljDp1Rq8fY

 

Btw, I don't agree with this book. I'm sure "large ownership" of land right after the conquest instead of homestead act, made a huge difference between the development of the land South of the border. Adam Smith said, give a man a garden as a loan and he'll turn it into a desert, give him the desert in property and he'll turn it into a garden. We can apply this to Utah and the highlands of Brazil as wealthy as California because they were never good for growing coffee and large state ownership, but what the hell happened in Appalachia, why the 50 years long Socialist war on poverty has been a failure and huge burden on taxpayers from other states.

The social status by birth and skin color too, but it's too complex to blame everything going wrong on one simple fact and assume we're victims and can't help our destiny. Sounds like the life of deception in our inner city poor communities and trailer parks. I won't go long about this, I'm sure yinz have plenty to say about this issue.

[k9lover]

This is the first time I hear about Uruguay since the infamous biting incident last World Cup.