This Blood: Reflecting on The Open Veins of Latin America

In The Open Veins of Latin America, Eduardo Galeano details the centuries of extraction that that colonizing European powers exercised over the land and the peoples of Latin America. In the chapter “Lust for Gold, Lust for Silver,” Galeano highlights the purely extractive nature of this colonization. In reading, I learned several things that I did not know. The first being that often the colonization was often not a state endeavor, but one in which adventurers set out to make their names and their riches, but they need capital for boats and men to cross over with (14). The other thing was just how small the initial crews were who were so accomplished in being able to lay waste to the indigenous populations because of their more advanced weaponry, horses, and germs they carried with them, on purpose or not: “Cortez landed at Veracruz with nor more than 100 sailors and 508 soldiers; he had 16 horses 32 crossbows, 10 bronze cannon, a few harquebuses, muskets, and pistols” (16).

                What is striking about reading Galeano is that despite reading alternative texts like Zinn’s People’s History or Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me is that the narrative I grew up with was based on North America, but it was more than that, it was a triumphal history of conquest. In America, we tell the stories of the Jamestown settlers or the Pilgrims outside of Boston and how they interacted with the natives. In one narrative, Squanto, who is famous for helping the Pilgrims is someone to be celebrated. But Squanto from another light is a race-traitor, allowing the white people to come in and take over the villages that had been abandoned because a plague wiped out all the native people. We do not know the stories of the native people because in part they had no writing. They had no one to tell their story of a plague that was on par or worse than the fourteenth century European Black Death. But they had no one to tell their story because they were the losers in the tale. We do not hear about them on the other hand because to think of them, or the victims of our four centuries of “Indian Removal” make the narrative less triumphalist.

                Galeano’s book is hard to read because of its detail. The problem is the detail is just one horrible thing after another about how the native peoples were treated. They died from contact, they died from war, they were enslaved in horrible conditions – and why? The goal was to pull a shiny metal from the earth. They took the treasures of the Incas and the Aztecs and “reduced it and made it bars” (19). Details like that make the contemporary reader shake their head in wonder at all that was lost culturally to go on top of lamenting the horrible conditions. You read of “Many natives of Haiti [who] anticipated the fate imposed by their white oppressors: they killed their children and committed mass suicide” (15). Reading those details makes me ask what we would do as a culture with a similar narrative. What would humans do if they met a similarly malevolent alien species, intent on using us as slaves? The stories we tell ourselves continue that triumphalism. In our movies, we fight back and defeat the aliens though unique human creativity or moxie. But the reality is that with novel pathogens and weapons, it would be hard to fight back. The ones who ended their lives may be more heroic than we know. Unfortunately, we westerners inherited the taboo against suicide, so that may be a harder act to undertake. Here is to hope that no aliens with bad intentions invade in my lifetime. That is a choice I do not want to have to make.

Works Cited

Cypher, J. M. (2014). The process of economic development. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Belfrage, C., & Galeano, E. H. (1997). Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. Monthly Review Foundation Incorporated.