“May his work and example of struggle remain with us to inspire us to build a better future.” Bolivian President Evo Morales called Galeano a “maestro of the liberation of the people.” Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa said in his Twitter account: “Eduardo Galeano: Uruguayan writer and dear friend, the veins of Latin America are open because of your passing.”īrazilian President Dilma Rousseff said in a statement that Galeano’s death was a loss for those fighting for a more just and united Latin America. Latin America’s leftist leaders Monday paid homage. “That’s why I wrote in the present tense - like Benjamin Franklin is waiting for a green light just at the corner now,” Galeano told the interviewer. In a 1988 stop in Los Angeles on a national book tour, Galeano told a Times interviewer that his idiosyncratic style was an attempt to “recover memory as a key to open doors, not looking back but looking forward, not as an act of nostalgia but an act of hope.” “There is nothing neutral about this historical chronicle,” Galeano warned in the preface to “Memory of Fire.” “Unable to distance myself, I take sides.” Galeano followed “Open Veins” with the equally popular “Memory of Fire” trilogy, a series of vignettes of North and South America history that one Times reviewer described as a “poetic scrapbook.” Others used another metaphor to say the books were tapestries of outrage directed at perpetrators of murder and plunder. He knew firsthand the boot of oppression, having been arrested in 1973 by Uruguay’s right-wing military regime and forced into exile, first in Argentina, then in Spain until 1985. Galeano didn’t spare Latin American governments, using vignettes showing a panoply of injustices including murders of reformers and modern-day subjugation of indigenous peoples.

The veins of latin america