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Las venas abiertas de América Latina by Eduardo Galeano

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lun4russell's review

4.0

Fue, para mí, un libro desafiante en distintos niveles. Tardé bastante en leerlo pero aquí estamos, del otro lado, odiando al sistema en el que vivimos y a quienes lo consolidan.

historicalmaterialgirl's review against another edition

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It's one thing to think colonialism is bad and another to study it, feel your jaw drop and blood boil at the details, at the complete and utter destruction of an entire continent. Saying you hate colonialism is an understatement.

Galeano writes history with the flourish of a novelist's pen; I was as hooked as I was horrified. He illustrates with historical-modern day parallels that colonialism hasn't died, it's become abstracted. It's relegated to confusing economic terms that control entire countries, ecologies and human populations. How important is the difference between leading a war against a country and, decades later, funding and arming a war against that country? How important is the difference between running a country as a colony and then, later, making it economically dependent on you (and helping a coup in it if they nationalize a resource you want)?

After reading (most of) this, it's now plain to me how capitalism really is the root of all evils, it's not an "equal set of oppression" to homophobia, ableism, etc that the term intersectionality had me thinking. That isn't to dismiss the material, life-ending effects of homophobia and racism, but just that those don't explain why. The primitive accumulation of someone else's economy is why there are deadly, poisonous, unnecessary mines across the world. Capitalism is why the colonizers were there. Capitalism is why there is a global south. Capitalism is what has destroyed the land and wiped out entire cultures.

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