Critique de Open Veins Of Latin America par Josh

I'm a little bit surprised at how controversial this book apparently is. I mean, it's true that Galeano makes some controversial claims, but the most scandalous stuff he talks about is generally well documented.

For instance, it's a matter of historical record that the U.S. sponsored the overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan government in 1954, and then sponsored a brutal military dictatorship that tortured and killed a lot of people. It's also uncontroversial that a large part of why Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere is that after the country's successful slave revolt in 1804 the French government demanded (and thanks in part to pressure from the U.S. received) a massive indemnity to compensate them for the loss of their slave colony which Haiti didn't fully pay until 1947.

Slightly more controversially, Galeano argues for Dependency Theory, which is basically the idea that rich countries maintain dominance over poor countries by actively discouraging them from moving up the value chain in the exploitation of their own resources. Historically this meant that colonies served as sources of raw materials or labor-intensive products, while capital intensive sectors (e.g. industry) stayed in the home country. Coffee is an easy example: from a $2 cup of coffee around 2 cents of that goes to the farmer (maybe 3 cents if it's fair trade). You're also, almost certainly, buying it from a company based in a country that produces almost no coffee. The reasons for this, and what we ought to think about it, are legitimately complicated and Galeano probably does oversimplify and get a bit out of his depth here.

So, yeah: Four stars for being right about most of the stuff that matters, minus 1 star for some oversimplification being wrong about some things that don't much matter.

p.s. One bit of unintentional black humor in the book: Galeno was writing in 1971, shortly after Salvadore Allende had been elected president of Chile and shortly before he was to be overthrown and killed in a U.S.-backed coup. Galeno, not knowing the future, noted that the U.S. government was clearly displeased by Allende but felt that there wasn't much they could because he "is president by every precept of representative democracy preached by Washington."