In simple terms he points out, that while Brazil might export Volkswagen's to Africa, America and the rest of Latin America, the profits went to German capitalism. The arrival of capitalism in its modern form, simply deepened and extended the project. Galeano demonstrates how, from their earliest days, they were places to enrich colonial capitals. The Latin American colonies never had a chance. The poverty, brutality and racism that helped fuel this slavery was to be repeated on a larger scale very soon. Helping to enrich the kings and queens of Europe, and their merchants. Before African slaves arrived in South America, Galeano points out that tens of thousands of indigenous people had been forced to work the silver mines of Potosi in Bolivia. The blood and sweat of millions of slaves extracted yet further wealth from the continent, concentrating it in England, Spain and elsewhere. While Galeano's book is a story of people, it is rooted very much in the exploitation of Latin America's natural resources, wood, silver, gold, oil and so on.Įarly European capitalism drew strength and wealth for its nascent factories and machinery from the exploitation of Latin America. Food for the slaves of future plantations, cash crops and fuel for export industries. Columbus brought, on his second voyage, some of the plants that would further shape the destiny of the continent. With this, as Christopher Mann's recent book 1493 has demonstrated, came the diseases that destroyed millions of indigenous peoples. The glitter of gold on the necklaces of the natives, triggered a gold lust that led to a tsunami of exploration and colonisation. Galeano begins his story with the pillage that began almost as soon as Christopher Columbus trod on the soil of the West Indies. In Galeano's words, those who argue that Imperialism no longer has an interest in Latin America "forget that a legion of pirates, merchants, bankers, Marines, technocrats, Green Berets, ambassadors and captains of industry have, in a long black page of history, taken over the life and destiny of the most of the people's of the south."
Written in the early 1970s, the book has never been more relevant, as many of the general themes that Galeano identifies occurring forty years ago have their similarities today. Its subtitle, "five centuries of the pillage of a continent" sums up the general historical approach of the author. Eduardo Galeano's classic history of Latin America, is not a cheerful book.
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