Eduardo Galeano: The World’s Conscience And The Soul Of Latin America

In 2009, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez would, for the first time, officially be in the same room as U.S. president Barack Obama. History understood the symbolic weight of the moment: Hugo Chavez was the leader of a country that had been exploited for centuries by Europeans and the United States, and was now governed through a socialist system; Obama stood on the opposite pole, at the center of capitalism, the United States of America. Two leaders with opposing worldviews, the exploiter and the exploited, the North and the South, would stand side by side.

What happened that day would be etched not only into politics, but into literary history as well. In front of the entire world press, Hugo Chavez walked toward Obama and announced that he was gifting him the book in his hand. Obama, as if trying to hide his instant surprise, retreated behind a polite smile. He accepted the gift and limited himself to a thank you.

The book’s title was The Open Veins Of Latin America, and its author was Eduardo Galeano.

Becoming A Legend After A Gift

The book, which focuses on how Europeans plundered Latin American countries for the last 500 years, had actually been written in the 1970s. Yet it gained its real fame after that legendary gift moment. It broke sales records worldwide, went through new printings one after another. On Amazon, the world’s largest online retail site, it climbed from around the fifty-four-thousandth spot on the bestsellers list to fifth. It earned cult book status.

Its author, Galeano, was given the nickname “the world’s conscience” because of the humane core running through all his works. In his own country, Uruguay, he had reached the rank of an “saint.”

He Was Going To Be A Footballer, He Became The World’s Conscience

“Saint” Eduardo Galeano was born in 1940 in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, during the years when the Second World War was ravaging the world. For years, he tried to become a footballer; instead, he became a journalist. When he was only fourteen, his drawings were being published in a newspaper. He worked as an editor for various magazines.

In 1971, he published The Open Veins Of Latin America, one of the masterpieces of left-wing literature. Two years after the book’s publication, a coup took place and he was imprisoned. After being released, he moved to Argentina. There, he was caught in another coup. He ended up on a list of people to be killed. His books were banned in Argentina and in his homeland Uruguay.

After that, he moved to Spain. He lived highly productive years there. He wrote the trilogy Memories Of Fire. In 1985, he was able to return to Uruguay, and he lived there until the end of his life.

Galeano, one of the leading names in left culture, died at the age of 74 in April 2015 due to lung cancer. Just hours after the death of another giant literary figure, Günter Grass, who also emphasized injustice in the world, Galeano’s departure meant that, within a single day, the oppressed across the world were left even more alone.

Why “The World’s Conscience”?

Calling Galeano “the world’s conscience” is not an exaggeration. Even The Open Veins Of Latin America alone could have been enough to prove he deserved that title. But Galeano also wrote about the oppressed, exploited, forgotten, marginalized, denied, and impoverished peoples and individuals in other regions of the world.

He gave space to their stories, their resistance against oppression, and their cries. He placed the human being at the center of all his work. Under the influence of his years in journalism, he used short sentences and a poetic language. Thanks to this style, he managed to transform texts that could have been a dull history book in someone else’s hands into literature.

He wrote history not from official institutions, but from the perspective of the oppressed. For this reason, his works were banned in lands ruled by repressive regimes. Because Galeano was the voice of resistance and of those who resist. Yet despite all his greatness, he was remarkably humble.

“I don’t want to teach anyone anything. All I want is to tell stories that deserve to be told; that’s all.”

He did tell stories that deserved to be told, but I am not sure we deserved to listen to him.

The Flesh-And-Blood Soul Of Latin America

Eduardo Galeano is the soul of Latin America made flesh, walking on the soil of the world. In his life and in his writing, rebellion, sorrow, or rather a comfortless pain sprouting from despair, supernatural images, friendship, brotherhood, and football, one of Latin Americans’ indispensable passions played with heart and soul, stand side by side.

Coming from a journalistic tradition, Galeano could write what he wanted to tell in a plain, striking style, yet with a tone far from bombast. At this point, it is essential to free Galeano from the associations of the word “journalist” and separate him from the media suns who have staked out the street corners of office plazas.

Resistance To The Postmodern Age

Because Galeano also lived in the modern period, he stood, alongside intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, in fulfilling the duty of resisting the distorted structures of postmodern thought, society, and culture.

For example, about television, the foremost tool of mass hypnosis, Galeano says:

“TV empties into the void images that repeat the established order, and voices with echoes; there is not a single point on earth they cannot reach. The whole planet is one huge suburb of Dallas. While we consume imported feelings like canned sausages, little television children, raised to watch life instead of making it, shrug and move on.”

On media and freedom of expression, he also makes striking observations:

“In Latin America, freedom of expression consists of the right to protest on a few radio stations and local newspapers. The police no longer need to ban books: prices alone are enough to ban them.”

Conclusion: A Lasting Voice

The legacy Eduardo Galeano left behind is not limited to books. He is the symbol of being a voice for the oppressed, of writing history not through the eyes of the victors but through the eyes of the wronged, of standing against injustice, and of faith in the human being despite everything.

A writer who was banned, exiled, targeted for death, yet never fell silent. A person who dreamed of becoming a footballer, yet became the world’s conscience. An artist who turned the blood flowing from Latin America’s open veins into words.

Without Galeano, the world may be a little quieter, a little colder. But what he wrote continues to live in the memory of the oppressed and in the hearts of those who resist.