It is a heartbreaking book. Mortifying. Is a denouncing text – historical; where the author making good use of language, which, through the magic of simplicity, brings us “up to date” with a lot of data, those that since time immemorial have been injecting us through very well designed texts, within of a curriculum that, more than anything, kept us stultified. As an example, there is the battle of Santo Cerro, in La Vega Dominican Republic.
Many of those yellow texts told us ad nauseam, some realities that for a long time, their authors implanted in us, to see some actors as long-suffering heroes, whose actions and through other readings already adults, made us see other contexts that they were not quite as they “appeared”, including in our historical learning school books.
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These opened the doors of reason for us, in a somewhat reflective and critical way, to analyze and come to the conclusion of the infinite contributions that this part of the world, called Americacontributed so that certain powers, for example, the European ones, and later some of Americatoday they could display their wealth based on the suffering of our exploited indigenous race, and something else.
The text, “Las venas abiertas de América Latina” authored by a teacher of a teacher in literary struggles, such as Mr. Eduardo Galeano, consists of 349 pages. Its first edition came out in 1971, although the same and according to the data written in the same book, it was finished writing in 1970, in the city of Montevideo, Uruguay.
The book is easy to read. With 19 editions in a row, which I must say, I got it at a time when I was in one of the bookstores in the city of Santiago de los Caballeros, and whose edition was published in 2020, as a result of turning 50. years of being released to the public.
From the beginning, the reader can notice that he is before an author with a certain antipathy towards the so-called first world countries, where with a language, as we said at the beginning, simple, however; It is through this that we see the aftertaste of a Galeano, branding our countries as the so-called third world, “working as a servant” to the so-called powerful (page 15).
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Although we have cited the aftertaste of the author, due to the way in which these great powers, starting with the Europeans, bled dry in all orders, both economically and in the human part of this part of the world, Galeano, in a way, if you will, up to ” arrogant”, he tells us, that “from the discovery to the present day, everything has always been transmuted in European capital, or later, North American, and as such it has accumulated and continues to accumulate in distant centers of power” (page 16 ).
He points out, on page 31, the dastardly way in which “The conquerors also practiced, with political skill, the technique of betrayal and intrigue. They knew how to exploit, for example, the resentment of the peoples subjected to the imperial rule of the Aztecs and the divisions that were tearing apart the power of the Incas”, something truly rude and that still several centuries away, continues to be practiced as a bad legacy of the Spaniards, which caused (at that time) enmities to arise between those peoples, often dangerous and even insurmountable.
We also see, but on page 32, how the Europeans brought with them countless viruses and bacteria that, according to what he tells us, “like a biblical plague, smallpox and tetanus, various pulmonary, intestinal, and venereal diseases, trachoma, typhus, leprosy, yellow fever, cavities that rotted the mouth”, which were part of a foreignized culture that was imposed on this part of the world, causing hundreds of deaths in the various indigenous peoples of this continent, which was later called America.
When one reads this book, but conscientiously, one ends up agreeing with Galeano, who on page 38 states that “America was a European business”and so he urges us, but now on page 48 when he clinches us, that “The economic structure of the Iberian colonieswas born subordinated to the external market, and consequently, centralized around the export sector, which concentrated income and power”.
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Now, one cannot specify in which of the European settlements there was more massacre, if in Mexico with the Aztecs, in Spain, in Peru, or in Boliviathe latter country where to this day the remnants of a slave-owning ignorance are still observed, which massacres an important segment of its society, and those that still continue to pay a high price today, for being their territories together with Brazil Y Venezuelainexhaustible sources of natural wealth based on their mining.
For example, with frightening clarity, one reads in the text on which we reflect, and it is, that in Brazil, “The mothers they killed his children to save him from the torment of the mines” (page 52) and later, in page 54, he tells us that in the mercury mines “the poison penetrated the very marrow, weakening all the members and causing a tremor constant, dying the workers, generally in a space of 4 years”.
The above happened together with other atrocities that due to lack of space we will not enumerate, but we will underline, as an important note to this writing; Well, in many other colonized areas, as was the case in Mexico, the situation there was more than alarmingly grotesque, dantesque, as it says “Darcy Ribeirothe fuel of the colonial productive system”, were the indigenous people (page 59).
The enormous millionaire riches in gold, copper, tin, silver and others, which were extracted from Peru, Mexico, Brazil, Bolivia and Hispaniola, were one of the main reasons for adventurers and emissaries of their rulers to come to this part of the world. and using torture, deceit, and divisions among the various tribes as a weapon, to fatten their economic coffers, and with them, contribute to the construction in those nations of sumptuous palaces that, according to Eduardo Galeano, were built with every drop of money. indigenous blood.
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On page 82, there is a fragment, which powerfully caught my attention as a Dominican, when the author describes that “the best sugar in the world sprouted from the spongy soil of the plains of the coast of Haiti, a French colony that at that time it was called saint domingue” and goes on to say, that “To the north and west, Haiti became a dumping ground for slaves”.
In addition to gold, silver, tin, copper and sugar, they were, as we expressed in previous lines, other ingredients that were highly desirable in the subjugating nationswhich they saw in this part of the world, the table of their salvation for today to be what the media present to us, countries of the so-called First world.
Finally, we could say that these, in addition to what was previously described, fed their economies based on the ignorance of our ancestors, which since those times has submerged us in a so-called Third Worldism, the one that still makes us see ourselves in diapers for to initiate a path to a first world that, due to the division of our America, truncates the dream of progress and socio-economic stability, of course, in some of the nations of the courtyard.