Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan author whose anti-capitalist polemic “The Open Veins of Latin America” served for decades as a lodestar for leftist dissenters worldwide and who last year startled his admirers when he impugned the book’s writing and scholarly value, died April 13 in Montevideo, the capital. He was 74.
The cause was lung cancer, the Uruguayan publication Brecha reported.
Mr. Galeano had been a prominent journalist in Uruguay since his teens, when he began submitting cartoons to a socialist newspaper, and continued to write prolifically (and read voraciously) until recent years.
In his 20s and 30s, he edited or founded influential political and cultural journals and twice went into exile to escape military dictatorships, first in Uruguay and then in Argentina, where he was once denounced as a “corrupter of youth.”
A hallmark of his work was the powerful and elegant epigram on the struggle for human dignity, a vision he laid out as a battle between those who conquer and those who resist. “Power is like a violin,” he once noted. “It is held by the left hand and played by the right.”
His left-wing politics and literary craftsmanship put him in a league with the Colombian-born Nobel laureate , though his fame never reached the same level in the United States. Mr. Galeano was a novelist, a short-story writer, a memoirist and the author of
The work that established him as a force in radical politics and history far beyond Uruguay was “,” first published in Spanish in 1971.
The manifesto, promoted as a work of political economy, was a boundary-defying blend of Marxist screed, searing social history, autobiography and travelogue. It used impassioned language, stirring poems and even cartoons to detail the legacy of European colonizers and Western corporations that sought to loot Central and South America for human and natural resources.
The efforts by long-ago generations of outsiders to exploit the region led, he wrote, to a “contemporary structure of plunder” that continued to cause widespread impoverishment, inequality and underdevelopment.
“The human murder by poverty in Latin America is secret,” Mr. Galeano wrote. “Every year, without making a sound, three Hiroshima bombs explode over communities that have become accustomed to suffering with clenched teeth.”
“Open Veins” was widely translated, sold hundreds of thousands of copies throughout what was then called the Third World and became a staple of many American college classrooms. Its biggest impact was in Latin America, which was then and would remain awash in military regimes and right-wing dictatorships for years to come.
Author Isabelle Allende, who said her copy of Mr. Galeano’s book was one of the few items with which she fled Chile in 1973 after the military leader Augusto Pinochet came to power, once called “Open Veins” “a mixture of meticulous detail, political conviction, poetic flair, and good storytelling.”
“Open Veins” had a sales spike in the United States when Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who once described the book as “a monument in our Latin American history,” handed a copy in 2009 to President Obama when they met at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago.
The book was not universally embraced among the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking intelligentsia, especially as many former Third World nations such as Brazil began to experience an economic rise.
Many found Mr. Galeano’s work irredeemably self-pitying and said it ignored many problems born from home-grown ills, such as destructive populist leaders on the left and nationalistic ideologues on the right.
Along with Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Mr. Galeano was among those who came in for a drubbing in the bestselling volume “Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot,” a 1999 collaboration by Colombian writer Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, the exiled Cuban author Carlos Alberto Montaner and the Peruvian journalist and author Álvaro Vargas Llosa (son of Mario).
The writers, who favored free-market policies, claimed they had once been “idiots” seduced by the left in their younger years. “In reality, except for cultural factors, nothing prevented Mexico from doing what Japan did when it almost totally displaced the United States’ production of television sets,” they wrote.
Last year, at a book fair in Brazil that feted “Open Veins,” Mr. Galeano made the startling announcement that he was distancing himself from his best-known work. “Open Veins’ tried to be a book of political economy, but I didn’t yet have the necessary training or preparation,” he was quoted as saying. He also noted “grave errors” of leftist regimes, which seemed like an implicit rebuke of the Castro brothers in Cuba and the late Chavez in Venezuela.
Moreover, he added, his own rhetoric seemed stale and leaden, a product of an era of dictatorships and 1960s-style revolution.
“Reality has changed a lot, and I have changed a lot,” he said at the book fair. “Reality is much more complex precisely because the human condition is diverse. Some political sectors close to me thought such diversity was a heresy. Even today, there are some survivors of this type who think that all diversity is a threat. Fortunately, it is not.”
Eduardo German Hughes Galeano was born Sept. 3, 1940, into a middle-class Catholic family in Montevideo with European lineage. At 20, he became editor in chief of the journal Marcha, one of the country’s most influential political and cultural weeklies.
He was forced to leave Uruguay in 1973 — at the start of a 12-year military dictatorship — and founded the publication Crisis while in Argentina.
That journal, he once told the Toronto Globe and Mail, “was cultural, but not in a narrow sense, dealing only with books and theater and film. . . . Not only were we offering the best of Latin American literary production, but we were looking for the unknown voices, from the country, from the walls. All the voices not sanctified by those in power.”
After a military coup in Argentina in 1976, Mr. Galeano left for post-Franco Spain to escape persistent threats against his life. He had glibly told one caller, “The schedule for calling in threats, sir, is from six to eight.”
The phenomenal success of “The Open Veins of Latin America” led Mr. Galeano to expand it into three further volumes in a series called “” that were published throughout the 1980s. The trilogy earned him an American Book Award in 1989. He returned to Montevideo in 1985.
His 1978 memoir, “,” was an acerbic and surreal portrait of life under the dictatorships in Uruguay and Argentina. Amid the “dirty war” in Argentina, in which thousands of real and perceived government enemies were killed or “disappeared,” he noted how prominent writers went missing without a word while state-controlled newspapers reported “the complete list of earthquake victims in Udine, Italy.”
His marriages to Silvia Brando and Graciela Berro ended in divorce. In 1976, he wed Helena Villagra. A complete list of survivors could not be immediately confirmed.
Mr. Galeano’s other notable books — including “” (1989), “” (2004) and “” (2008) — were often impressionistic vignettes of art, politics and people. And, like most of his work, they hewed to his belief in the power of language to provoke social and political change.
“Perhaps I write because I know that the people and the things I care about are going to die and I want to preserve them alive,” Mr. Galeano once told the reference guide Contemporary Authors.
“I believe in my craft; I believe in my instrument. I can never understand how writers could write while cheerfully declaring that writing has no meaning. Nor can I ever understand those who turn words into a target for fury or an object of fetishism. Words are a weapon: The responsibility for the crime never lies with the knife. Slowly gaining strength and form, there is in Latin America a literature that does not set out to bury our own dead but to perpetuate them; that refuses to clear up the ashes and tries, on the contrary, to light the fire. Perhaps my own words may help a little to preserve for people to come, as the poet put it, ‘the true name of each thing.’ ”
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