" Each time I hear about wars in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Africa, and anywhere else,
I always ask the same question, with no answer: "Who is selling the arms?
Who is making profit from this human tragedy?" I have never found the answer in
the media, and it's the main question you should ask when you hear about a war."
- Eduardo Galeano.
BY DAVID BARSAMIAN
EDUARDO GALEANO is one of Latin America's most distinguished writers, storytellers,
journalists, and historians. His classic work is Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of
the Pillage of a Continent (Monthly Review Press, 1973). His other books include Book of
Embraces (Norton, 1992), We Say No: Chronicles 1963-1991 (Norton, 1992), and the
award-winning trilogy Memory of Fire, reissued by Norton last year. His latest book, also
published last year by Verso, is Soccer in Sun and Shadow.
Under the soft languid tones of Galeano's Uruguayan speech is a razor-sharp intellect
infused with a poetic sensibility, a biting wit, and a commitment to social justice. He apologizes
to Shakespeare and to any other native speaker for his English. But I found in listening to
him that his creative and accented version actually made me hear more.
Born in Montevideo in 1940, he was a kind of prodigy. At thirteen, he was already submitting
political commentary and cartoons to a local socialist weekly. Later, he was the editor of
various journals and newspapers, including the daily Epoca. In 1973, he went into exile in
Argentina, where he founded and edited the magazine Crisis. He lived in Spain from 1976 to
1984 and then returned to Uruguay.
A scathing critic of the media and consumerism, Galeano writes in We Say No: "The mass
media does not reveal reality; it masks it. It doesn't help bring about change; it helps avoid
change. It doesn't encourage democratic participation; it induces passivity, resignation, and
selfishness. It doesn't generate creativity; it creates consumers."
In his book Days and Nights of Love and War (Monthly Review Press, 1982), he explains why
he does what he does: "One writes out of a need to communicate and commune with others,
to denounce that which gives pain, and to share that which gives happiness. One writes
against one's solitude and against the solitude of others. . . . To awaken consciousness, to
reveal identity--can literature claim a better function in these times?"
Galeano takes readers on a tour of Latin America--"the continent," as Isabel Allende
describes it, "that appears on the map in the form of an ailing heart." His imaginative writing
style supplies oxygen to patients in all hemispheres. Here's the mythic opening of Faces and
Masks, part two of Memory of Fire:
"The blue tiger will smash the world. Another land, without evil, without death, will be born
from the destruction of this one. This land wants it. It asks to die, asks to be born, this old
and offended land. It is weary and blind from so much weeping behind closed eyelids. On the
point of death, it strides the days, garbage heap of time, and at night, it inspires pity from the
stars. Soon the First Father will hear the supplications, land wanting to be another, and then
the blue tiger who sleeps beneath his hammock will jump."
Galeano was in Santa Fe in late April to receive the first $250,000 Prize for Cultural Freedom
from the Lannan Foundation. In addition, another $100,000 was given to three alternative
cultural institutions, designated by Galeano, in Uruguay. Lannan, an upstart in the foundation
world, has progressive politics, though its wealth comes from a former director of the
multinational company ITT. Lannan hit the news in March when it boldly stepped in to cover
the printing costs for a bilingual children's book Historia de los Colores: The Story of Colors
(Cinco Puntos Press), written by Subcomandante Marcos. The original funding from the
National Endowment for the Arts was abruptly canceled when it learned the identity of the
book's author.
At the reception following his prize ceremony, Galeano was interviewed by The Progressive.
Q: Open Veins of Latin America has sold more than a million copies. It's been translated into
many languages. You wrote it in three months, which is a phenomenally short period of time.
How did you generate such a burst of energy?
Eduardo Galeano: Coffee. The real author of this book was coffee. I drank oceans of it
because at that time, 1970, I was working in the mornings at the university in Montevideo. I
was the editor of university publications. In the afternoons, I was working for private
publishers also as an editor, rewriting and correcting books on any subject you can imagine,
like the sexual life of mosquitoes. Then, from 7:00 or 8:00 in the evening to 5:00 or 6:00 in
the morning, I was writing Open Veins. I didn't sleep for three months. But it was an
advertisement for coffee's virtues. So be careful with coffee if you don't want to become a
leftwinger.
Q: What accounts for the book's staying power?
Galeano: Perhaps masochism. I can't understand it. The book brings to the nonspecialized
reader a lot of historical information. I didn't discover the facts I'm telling in Open Veins. I tried
to rewrite history in a language that could be understood by anybody. Perhaps this is why the
book has had such success. At the beginning, it had no success at all. But later, it opened its
own road and went on walking, and it's still walking.
Perhaps the central idea of the book, which may work as a spinal cord, is that you cannot
confuse a dwarf with a child. They have the same size, but they are quite different. So when
you hear all the technocrats speaking about developing countries, they are implying that we
are living in a sort of infancy of capitalism, which is not true at all. Latin America is not a stage
on the way toward development. It is the result of development, the result of five centuries of
history.
Q: You could have had a comfortable life writing for magazines or teaching in universities, but
a long time ago you decided to labor on behalf of the voiceless.
Galeano: I don't feel there is anyone who is voiceless. Everybody has something to say,
something that deserves to be heard by others. So I never shared this attitude of becoming
the voice of the voiceless. The problem is that just a few have the privilege of being heard.
I'm not a martyr, not a hero.
We all have the right to know and to express ourselves, which is nowadays very difficult as
long as we are obeying the orders of an invisible dictatorship. It is the dictatorship of the
single word, the single image, the single tune, and perhaps it's more dangerous than other
dictatorships because it acts on a world scale. It's an international structure of power which is
imposing universal values that center on consumption and violence. It means that you are
what you have. If you don't have, you are not. The right to be depends on your ability to buy
things. You are defined by the things you have. It's like you are driven by your car. You are
bought by your supermarket. You are seen by your TV screen. You are programmed by your
computer. We have all become tools of our tools.
Q: Is there any end to this cycle?
Galeano: If the consumption society imposes its values all over the world, then the planet would disappear. We cannot afford it. We don't have enough air, earth, or water to pay the price for such a disaster.
The model imposed on all of Latin America is not Amsterdam or Florence or Bologna; in these cities, cars are not the owners of the streets. These are cities with bikes, with public transport, with people walking. Cities that people feel they own. Cities that provide a common place. Cities were born from the human necessity of encounter. Cities were born as a result of, "I want to meet friends. I want to be with other people." Today, cities are places where machines encounter machines. We humans have become intruders.
And what do we want to become like? Los
Angeles, a city in which cars own much more
space than people. This is an impossible dream.
We cannot become them. If the entire world has
the same quantity of cars as the U.S. with its
one-person, one-car, then the planet will
explode. We have poisoned the air, poisoned the earth, poisoned the waters, poisoned the
human souls. Everything is poisoned.
When a Latin American president in his speech says, "We are becoming part of the First
World," in the first place he's lying. Second, this is practically impossible. And in the third
place, he should be in jail because this is an incitement to crime. If you say, "I want
Montevideo to become Los Angeles," you are inviting the destruction of Montevideo.
Q: A lot of people in the United States, when they think of Latin America, see a vast beach, a
playground, from Cancún and Acapulco to Copacabana and Mar del Plata. Or they see a
threatening and menacing face: narcotraffickers, leftist guerrillas, favelas, and shantytowns.
What do you make of the U.S. attitude toward Latin America?
Galeano: I am astonished each time I come to the U.S. by the ignorance of a high percentage
of the population, which knows almost nothing about Latin America or about the world. It's
quite blind and deaf to anything that may happen outside the frontiers of the U.S.
I was a professor at Stanford University three years ago. Once I was talking with an old
professor, an important and cultured man. Suddenly, he asked me, "Where do you come
from?"
I said, "Uruguay."
He said, "Uruguay?"
As I knew that nobody knows where Uruguay is, I quickly tried to change the subject and talk
about something else.
But he was gentle enough to say, "Well, we have been doing terrible things there."
I suddenly realized that he was speaking about Guatemala because The New York Times
had just published some articles about CIA involvement in Guatemala.
I said, "No, this is Guatemala."
"Oh, Guatemala."
"Yes, Guatemala."
This ignorance of what's happening outside the States implies a high degree of impunity. The
military power can do whatever it wants because people have no idea of where Kosovo is or
Iraq or Guatemala or El Salvador. And they have no idea that, for instance, centuries before
New York was established, Baghdad had one million inhabitants and one of the highest
cultures in the world.
The same is true for "our" America, the other America--we are not just echoes of the master's
voice.
Q: Or the shadow of his body.
Galeano: Even the ruling classes in Latin America dream to become shadows and echoes.
I'm always saying that our worst sin in Latin America is the sin of stupidity because we enjoy
looking at our own caricature. For instance, when I meet Latin Americans here in the States,
they say, "Now I am in America." Ah, you're in America now, because you are in the States.
Before you were where? Greenland? Asia? Japan? We have accepted this distorted vision of
ourselves looking at the mirror which despises and scorns us.
Q: You write about the injustice of poverty.
Galeano: In this world, you have injustice on such a broad scale. The difference, the gap,
between rich and poor people in material terms has been multiplied in these thirty years
since I wrote Open Veins.
The last U.N. report says that in 1999, 225 persons own a fortune equivalent to the total
amount of what half of humanity earns. It's a very unjust distribution of bread and fishes.
But at the same time, the world is equalizing in the habits it imposes. We are condemned to
accept the global uniformization, a sort of McDonaldization of the entire world. This is a form
of violence against all the worlds that the world contains. I usually say that I reject the idea of
being obliged to choose between two possibilities: Either you die of hunger or you die of
boredom. We are practicing each day--and we don't notice it because it's invisible, it's
secret--a sort of massacre of our capacity to be diverse, to have so many different ways to
live life, celebrate, eat, dance, dream, drink, think, and feel. It's like a forbidden rainbow. Now
we are being more and more obliged to accept a single way. And this single way is being
mainly produced in U.S. factories.
Q: You took to radical politics at a very early age. Was it family influence?
Galeano: No, it was my liver. Perhaps I'm still trying to organize indignation. My mind, which is
not especially brilliant, is sometimes useful to organize my feelings, trying to make sense of
them, but the process is coming from the feeling to the thoughts and not in the opposite way.
In politics, as in everything else, I am always seeking a perhaps impossible but desirable
communion between what I think and what I feel, which is also an intention to develop, to win,
to conquer, to discover a language able to express at once emotions and ideas, what
Colombians in the small towns on the Caribbean coast call the "feel-thinking language." It's a
language which is able to reunite what has been divorced by dominant culture, which is
always breaking in pieces everything it touches. You have a language for ideas and another
language for emotions. The heart and the mind divorced. The public speech and the private
life. History and present, also divorced.
Q: You say that history is not a Sleeping Beauty in some museum.
Galeano: Official history is a Sleeping Beauty, sometimes a sleeping monster, in the
museums. But I believe in memory not as an arrival place but as a point of departure, a
catapult throwing you to present times, allowing you to imagine the future instead of
accepting it. Otherwise it would be absolutely impossible for me to have any connection with
history if history were just a collection of dead people, dead names, dead facts. That's why I
wrote Memory of Fire in the present tense, trying to keep alive everything that happened and
allow it to happen again as soon as the reader reads it.
Q: Your trilogy, Memory of Fire, is a dramatic departure from traditional history. You use an
amalgam of poetry, news items, and scholarship. What inspired you to do that?
Galeano: I never accepted the frontiers of the soul, nor did I accept frontiers in the art of
writing. When I was a child, I had a Catholic education. I was trained to accept that the body
and the soul were enemies, that the body was the source of sin, guilt, pleasure, infecting the
soul like the Beauty and the Beast.
It was very difficult for me to internalize this idea, this divorce. I always noticed the
contradiction between what I really felt inside me and what I was receiving as revealed truth,
coming from God. At that time I believed in him and I believed that he believed in me, so it
was not easy to live this contradiction.
When I was ten or eleven, I had this terrible crisis. I felt this panic of feeling guilty about my
body--associated, I suppose, with the fact that I was becoming sexual. My body was
something like a source of perdition for me, condemning me to hell. Now I accept it. I know
perfectly well that I'm going to hell, and I'm getting trained in warm tropical countries to accept
the flames. It won't be so terrible.
When I began writing, I felt I had to respect the border separating essays and nonfiction from
those other genres, like poetry or short stories or novels.
I hate to be classified. This world has an obsession with classification. We are all treated like
insects. We should have a label on the front. So many journalists say, "You are a political
writer, right?" Just give me the name of any writer in human history who was not political. All
of us are political, even if we don't know that we are political.
I feel that I am violating frontiers, and I am very happy each time I can do that. I suppose I
should be working as a smuggler instead of a writer, because this joy of violating a frontier is,
indeed, revealing a smuggler inside me, a delinquent.
Q: You recently received a prize from the Lannan Foundation, which was established from
funds from a former director of International Telephone and Telegraph, ITT, a multinational
corporation which you've written very critically about and which figured prominently in the
overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile.
Galeano: I didn't receive the prize from ITT. I received the prize from the Lannan Foundation.
Q: But the seed monies came from there.
Galeano: It's a good trip from hell to heaven.
Q: Why do you think the U.S. is such a violent society?
Galeano: I wouldn't say the U.S. is a violent society. It contains also energies of beauty and
democracy. I wouldn't fall in my own trap, saying, "The big bad guy in the world is the U.S." It
would be too easy. Reality is much more complex.
There is a culture of violence, a military culture, impregnando todo, marking everything,
spreading, permeating everything it touches. You have, for instance, the entertainment
industry, which is thick with violence, oceans of blood coming from the TV or the big screens.
Everything is exploding all the time--cars, people. It is a sort of continuous bombing of
everything. It is the old story of the chicken and the egg, which came first? The entertainment
industry says, "We are innocent. A violent reality is reflected by the mirror of films or TV. We
are not inventing violence. Violence comes from the streets." But in this circle, the media are
having an influence.
So there is perhaps an invisible connection between Yugoslavia and Littleton, Colorado. Both
are expressions of the same culture of violence. Wars are made in the name of peace, and
military actions always are called humanitarian missions. We are receiving daily doses of
violence through the news, films, and in the streets.
The world is a violent place. And it's very easy to condemn poor people who steal or kidnap
or kill. It's like condemning drug addicts. But it's not so easy to find the roots and condemn
the system which generates crime and the use of drugs. There is much anxiety and anguish
that everybody is eating and drinking each day.
Q: What about the Pentagon's role?
Galeano: The huge U.S. military budget is preposterous. Who is the enemy? It's like a
Western movie. You need a bad guy. If he doesn't exist, then you invent him. In the States,
you need new villains. Saddam Hussein this morning, Milosevic this afternoon. But you need
a bad guy. What a poor God without a Satan to fight against!
One of the big paradoxes in this upside-down world is that the five countries empowered to
take care of peace are also the five biggest producers of arms. Almost half of the total
weapons in the world are made by the United States, followed by Great Britain, France,
Russia, and China. These are the countries with the right of veto in the U.N. Security Council.
The U.N. was born to bring peace to the world, but the five countries with this sacred,
beautiful, poetic mission of peace are also the five ones conducting the business of war.
Uruguay is in the U.N. General Assembly. It's absolutely symbolic. The Assembly can make
suggestions, but the decisions are made by the five countries that own and control the world.
?
The twentieth century has been a century of wars--more than 100 million people killed. This
is a great quantity of persons, a multitude. Each time I hear about wars in Yugoslavia, Iraq,
Africa, and anywhere else, I always ask the same question, with no answer: "Who is selling
the arms? Who is making profit from this human tragedy?" I have never found the answer in
the media, and it's the main question you should ask when you hear about a war. Who is
selling the arms? The five dominant countries that are taking care of peace. It's terrible, but
it's a reality.
Q: What can we learn from indigenous people?
Galeano: A lot. First, the certitude of communion with nature. Otherwise you may confuse
ecology with gardening. You may take nature for a landscape. Nature is you, me. We are
part of nature, so any crime committed against nature is a crime committed against humanity.
But I don't share the view that we're committing suicide because I'm not committing suicide.
It's just 20 percent of the human population wasting natural resources and poisoning the
earth; 80 percent are suffering the consequences.
When political leaders sometimes say, with hand on heart, "We are committing suicide," they
are referring to a crime committed by the most profitable industries in the world. Las que más
dañan son las que más ganan, those that damage the most, gain the most. And they are all
green. When I was young, green were the valleys, verdes valles, green were the jokes,
chistes verdes, and green were the old men pursuing girls, los viejos verdes. Now, everybody
is green. The World Bank is green. The International Monetary Fund is green. The chemical
industry is green. The automobile industry is green. Even the military industry is green.
Everybody's green.
It's interesting because in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Europe conquered
America, lots of Indians were punished or burned alive because they were committing the sin
of idolatry. They were adoring nature.
Today, the system of power no longer speaks of nature as an obstacle that should be
overcome in order to get profits. Conquering nature, nature as something to be
vanquished--this was the old language. The new language now is about protecting nature.
But in both cases, language is revealing the divorce. We human beings and nature are
different.
We should learn from Indian culture the deep sense of communion. This is something for
God to include in the Ten Commandments. It would be the Eleventh Commandment: "You
should love nature, to which you belong."
Q: How did you react to the collapse of the Soviet Union?
Galeano: I never felt myself identified with the so-called socialism of the Soviet Union. I
always felt it wasn't socialism at all. It was an exercise in bureaucratic power with no
connection to people. They were acting in the name of people, but they despised them. They
were paying tribute in their speeches and all the official language, but they were treating
people as a minority, as children or sheep.
So I didn't feel that socialism was dead when the Soviet Union collapsed. That it collapsed in
such an easy way was eloquent enough: There was almost no blood, no tears, no nothing.
But socialism is not dead because it hasn't been born. It's something I hope that humanity
may perhaps find.
The present situation--from the point of view of the poor countries, the outskirts of the
world--is much worse than before because with the Soviet Union you had at least a certain
balance of power. Now this balance of power has disappeared, and so we have no choices.
The possibilities of acting with a sense of independence have narrowed.
Q: Are there any hopeful signs you can point to?
Galeano: There are a lot of signs of hope inside the U.S. and Mexico, and inside other
countries, as well. You have a lot of movements but most of them have no echoes in the
media. They are more or less secret because they act on a local level. Sometimes they are
very small. But they are incarnating an answer, looking for a different world, not accepting
the present world as their destiny but living it as a challenge. You have a lot of small
movements everywhere fighting for human rights, against sexual discrimination, against
injustice, against exploitation of children, preserving and developing agricultural forms which
are not damaging to the earth.
There is a popular movement in Mexico called El Barzón. Nobody knows about it outside
Mexico, but it's very important. It's a spontaneous movement born from the necessity to resist
the pressures of Mexican banks. In the beginning, it was no more than a hundred or so
people defending what they had--their homes, their businesses, their farms--against the
voracious financial powers. But it grew and grew, and now there are more than one million
persons. They have become so important that when a delegation from El Barzón went to
Washington, it was received by the vice president of the International Monetary Fund. I
suppose this is such an important man he doesn't even speak to his wife, but he received El
Barzón.
A lot of movements are telling us hope is possible, tomorrow is not just another name for
today.
Q: You make a distinction between charity and solidarity.
Galeano: I don't believe in charity; I believe in solidarity. Charity is vertical, so it's humiliating.
It goes from top to bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other and learns from the
other. I have a lot to learn from other people. Each day I'm learning. Soy un curioso. I'm a
curious man, always devouring other people, their voices, their secrets, their stories, their
colors. I'm stealing their words; maybe I should be arrested.
Q: Explain the term abrigar esperanzas.
Galeano: A beautiful Spanish expression, abrigar esperanzas, to shelter hope. Hope needs
to be abrigada, protected.
Q: Because it's fragile?
Galeano: She's fragile, and a little delicate, but she's alive. I have friends who say, "I'm
entirely hopeless. I don't believe in anything." But you go on living. How is it? I hope I never
lose hope, but if that day comes and I'm sure that I have nothing to expect, nothing to believe
in, and that the human condition is doomed to stupidity and crime, then I hope I will be honest
enough to kill myself. Of course, I know that the human condition is something at once
horrible and marvelous. Estamos muy mal hechos, pero no estamos terminados. We are very
badly made, but we are not finished.
David Barsamian is the director of Alternative Radio in Boulder, Colorado.
Mitayo Potosi
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