Sadly another truthsayer has gone, Eduardo Galeona, poet laureatte of the anti-globalisation movement, a Uruguayan writer, poet, anti-capitalist, radical author and journalist of much depth. A committed socialist, whose historical works condemned European and US colonialist exploitation of Latin America over 5 centuries, which made him a revered figure among leftists. He died aged 74 after a battle with lung cancer.
Weaving tapestries of society obscured by historians, his books ( he was a productive writer of over 30 books) presented alternative histories that gave equal weight to the suffering of the downtrodden, as to the grand achievements of better known historical figures.
Born in 1940, he turned his writing , and indeed his life, into a powerful manifesto against injustice and exploitation. As he himself put it, Galeano wrote for “the hungry, the sleepless, the rebels, the wretched of this earth.”
Nowhere is this commitment more clear than in his masterpiece, “Open Veins of Latin America.” Ever since it was published in 1971, the book has never stopped selling — and has indeed been immortalized as a Latin American monument.
Even today, it’s a required text in many social science courses around the world, including in universities. Written furiously in just 12 weeks, while military dictatorships took control of Brazil, Chile and Argentina ,“Open Veins in Latin America” denounces the systemic exploitation Latin America has historically been subject to.
He was forced to flee from Uruguay to neighboring Argentina in 1973, after he was briefly imprisoned by the recently installed military dictatorship, which banned his book Open Veins. He was blacklisted by death squads in Argentina following a military coup and tried to kill him but he fled to Spain.and survived.
The following is one of his fine poems. R.I.P
The right to dream of a better world ( El derecha a sonar)
The right to dream is a poem written and read by Eduardo Galeona.
In 1948, and again in 1976, the United Nations proclaimed long lists of human rights, but most of the worlds people still enjoy only the rights to see, hear and remain silent.
Suppose we excercise the never proclaimed right to dream? Lets set our sights above the abominations of today, to divine another possible world
In a style that was at the same time polemical irascible and accessible, Galeano exposed the hidden brutalities of colonialism and corporate globalization,– as well as the unsung beauties of the humble, the vernacular, the quotidian across Latin America.
“No computer could count the crimes that the pop culture business commits each day against the human rainbow and the human right to identity. But its devastating progress is mind-boggling. Time is emptied of history, and space no longer acknowledges the astonishing diversity of its parts. Through the mass media the owners of the world inform us all of our obligation to look at ourselves in a single mirror. "
“Whoever doesn’t have, isn’t. He who has no car or doesn’t wear designer shoes or imported perfume is only pretending to exist. Importer economy, impostor culture: we are all obliged to take the consumer’s cruise across the swirling waters of the market. Most of the passengers are swept overboard, but thanks to foreign debt the fares of those who make it are billed to us all. Loans allow the consuming minority to load themselves up with useless new things, and before everyone’s eyes the media transform into genuine needs the artificial demands the North of the world ceaselessly invents and successfully projects onto the South.”
Galeano was one of earliest writers to popularize an understanding of the structural relation between great affluence and accumulation in some parts of the globe and amongst a small stratum of society within every country, and the suffering and deprivation suffered in the vast “backyard” of this narrow but tremendous privilege: “
To turn infamies into feats, the memory of the North is divorced from the memory of the South, accumulation is detached from despoliation, opulence has nothing to do with plunder. Broken memory leads us to believe that wealth is innocent of poverty.”
He was forced to flee from Uruguay to neighboring Argentina in 1973, after he was briefly imprisoned by the recently installed military dictatorship, which banned his book Open Veins. He was blacklisted by death squads in Argentina following a military coup and tried to kill him but he fled to Spain.and survived.
Persecuted for his journalistic provocations, Galeano spoke truth to power and inspired readers to stand up to the fascist terror and militarism that had gripped so many Latin American countries for decades. An indefatigable risk-taker and provocateur, Galeano served as editor of important journals like Crisis, which he had co-founded and which focused much of its substantial intellectual energy on critiquing abuses of power in Uruguay and elsewhere in Latin America.
"We have a memory cut in pieces" he once told Democracy Now. "And I write trying to recover our real memory, the memory of humankind, what I call the human rainbow, which is much more colourful and beautiful than the other one, the other rainbow. But the human rainbow has been mutilated by machismo, racism, militarism, and a lot of other isms,who have been terribly killing our greatness, our possible greatness, our possible beauty."
The following is one of his fine poems. R.I.P
The right to dream of a better world ( El derecha a sonar)
In 1948, and again in 1976, the United Nations proclaimed long lists of human rights, but most of the worlds people still enjoy only the rights to see, hear and remain silent.
Suppose we excercise the never proclaimed right to dream? Lets set our sights above the abominations of today, to divine another possible world
Edward Galeano - Interview ; Living without fear.
