Reading Galeano in Costa Rica

I recently had occasion to re-read Eduardo Galeano’s book, the Open Veins of Latin America, and to do it while traveling in Costa Rica.

Open Veins was written in 1970, and remains relevant a half-century later (and it would have been current and relevant to debates half a century before, had it been written in 1920). There are some heart-rending moments, where Galeano talks full of hope about Salvador Allende’s plans in Chile (Allende was overthrown in 1973). But there is also vindication – he talks about how much progress the Cuban Revolution has made in a decade (by 1970) and half a century later, Cuba is sending its doctors to save lives all over the world. In the decades after Galeano’s book, Cuba also helped overthrow South African apartheid, which must have seemed an intractable reality when Galeano wrote Open Veins, and survived the collapse of its ally, the USSR, by inventing agroecology.

I wanted to write this newsletter about an experience that maybe you have had: you read a book, then decades later you re-read it and it is a completely different experience. There is so much on this second read that my eyes glossed over when I first read it without knowledge of the surrounding history. I’m also perpetually amazed by how much people seemed to know in the 1970s – about imperialism, about environmental issues, and even about history – that was since forgotten and is only being picked up again now. Has there been a review of imperialism in the Americas that surpasses Open Veins? Has there been a review of imperialism in Africa that surpasses How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney? Let me know if you think there is one that I missed.

Let me share with you some of the stories that struck me this time around, in this book that I now think of as one of the best economics textbooks out there.

No accomplices here

In telling the story of Tupac Amaru’s revolt against the Spanish in Peru, Galeano has a dialogue between an Inquisitor who talks to Tupac Amaru after his capture. “The Examiner Areche entered his cell to demand, in exchange for promises, the names of his rebel accomplices. Tupac Amaru replied scornfully: ‘There are no accomplices here otehr than you and I. You as oppressor, I as liberator, deserve to die.’” [Listeners to the Civilizations Series know that I scour history for quotes like these by invincible anti-colonial heroes…]

1703 Methuen Treaty, 1713 Assiento Contract and the rise of England

Galeano talks about the importance of the 1703 Methuen Treaty between Portugal and England, which basically enabled England to take over Portugal’s economy – including all the resources of the Americas (notably Brazilian gold) that Portugal had stolen in the previous two centuries. Portugal and England were the two countries Ricardo built his “Theory of Comparative Advantage” on – the England-serving theory that said that England should specialize in building manufacturing power while Portugal supplied it with wine (even though what Portugal was actually supplying wasn’t wine, but Brazilian gold). Between the Methuen Treaty and the Assiento Treaty with Spain of 1713 which granted England a monopoly over the slave trade to the Americas, we see the basis of England’s rise. The Portuguese prime minister, the Marquis de Pombal, in 1755 said that “the English had conquered Portugal without the trouble of a conquest.”

The commodity doesn’t bring wealth

Story after story in Open Veins is of the discovery of some immense new source of wealth (sugar, gold, silver, nitrates…) which creates a boom, after which the area of the boom is abandoned to squalor. There are two points here. First, commodities don’t make a town or a nation wealthy – they provide wealth to be siphoned to the metropole of the time. And second, that the particular commodity doesn’t seem to matter – the commodities are depleted but the relationship of subordination (and of Open Veins) remains constant. Venezuela was a cacao monopoly before it was an oil monopoly; Chile was the go-to place for guano before copper; Bolivia was about silver before tin and gas…

Slave revolts and the Black Kingdom of Palmares, 1693

There are slave revolts described by Galeano that I wish I’d covered in Civilizations! One in 1522 in Santo Domingo by the slaves of Diego Columbus (the son of *that* Columbus). A huge revolt in Guiana; in Brazil they built a Black Kingdom of Palmares, which “throughout the eighteenth century had successfully resisted dozens of military expeditions sent to suppress them… assaults by thousands of soldiers were fruitless against the guerrilla tactics which, until 1693, made the refuge invulnerable.” The Black Kingdom had positive human *and* positive ecological consequences: “Palmares was the one corner of Brazil where agriculture was being diversified. Guided by their own experience or that of their ancestors… the [Africans] raised corn, sweet potatoes, beans, manioc, bananas, and other foods” where only sugar was growing elsewhere in Brazil. Finally the Portuguese sent the biggest army seen in Brazilian history to invade.

19th Century British-sponsored regime changes

The names Sandino, Zapata, Arbenz, and Cardenas probably ring bells for you but names like Ubico, Artigas, and Balmaceda were less familiar. Jose Artigas of Argentina/Uruguay, a leader from 1811-1820 and contemporary of Simon Bolivar, is one that Galeano feels has been wronged by history “the victim of impassioned vilification by official historians”, “he fought against Spanish and Portuguese, and his forces were finally crushed by a pincer movement from Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires – instruments of the British Empire.” He levied tariffs, enacted land reforms, passed an agrarian code in 1815 – but when he was defeated, his enemies undid most of what he’d made.

There’s also Juan Manuel de Rosas of Argentina in the 1840s, who Galeano also thinks has been done wrong by history (and his Wikipedia page would certainly indicate as much). De Rosas introduced a tariff banning “iron and tinplate manufactures, riding equipment, ponchos, belts, wool or cotton waistbands, coarse woolen cloth, farm products, carriage wheels, tallow candles and combs, and levied heavy duties on coaches, shoes, cordage, clothing, saddles, dried fruits, and alcoholic beverages.” Industry flourished for about 10 years, until “the guns of British and French warships smashed the chains across the Rio Parana to open up the interior waterways that Rosas had kept firmly closed.” The intervention was asked for by a petition from “1500 bankers, traders, and industrialists” who asked the British government to intervene. De Rosas was limited, Galeano argues, because he “always remained true to his class” and so could never undertake a “dynamic, sustained, industrial policy.”

1886-1890, Chile had a President Jose Manuel Balmaceda, who “undertook the most ambitious development plan in its history.” The program was wide-ranging, from nationalizing industry to modernizing education. The British press called him a “butcher” and a “dictator of the worst stripe”, supporting a rebellion and a civil war in which London “generously financed the rebels” while “British warships blockaded the Chilean coast.” It was Balmaceda-must-go. When he was defeated, the British Ambassador wrote home: “The British community makes no secret of its satisfaction over the fall of Balmaceda, whose victory, it is thought, would have ipmlied serious harm to British commercial interests.”

But the most shocking story for me was that there was basically a genocide against Paraguay, sponsored by the British and conducted by Paraguay’s neighbours, in 1870. Somehow, Galeano argues, Paraguay had escaped imperialist absorption until then “the only country that foreign capital had not deformed”. Early 19th century dictators maintained a developmentalist outlook: “When the invaders appeared on the horizon in 1865, Paraguay had telegraphs, a railroad, and numerous factories manufacturing construction materials, textiles, linens, ponchos, paper and ink, crockery and gunpowder.” There was a military industry, a steel industry, a merchant fleet, a stable currency and a balance of payments surplus. “It did not owe one penny abroad, yet was able to maintain the best army in South America.” So, British commerce decided it had to be destroyed. Edward Thornton, the British minister in Buenos Aires, was a key plotter – it was an invasion by a Triple Alliance of Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil. Paraguay’s president Solano Lopez was presented as “the Attila of America”, etc. The war lasted five years. “Men and women, young and old, fought like lions… when bullets and spears finally finished off the Paraguayan president… he managed to say, ‘I die with my country’ – and it was true. Paraguay died with him.” When the war began, Galeano says, Paraguay’s population was around the same as Argentina’s. By the end, it was 250,000. It destroyed the invaders as well as the invaded. “The financial bankruptcy of the three countries deepened their dependency on Britain. The Paraguay massacre left its mark on them forever.” So an early, unsung, British-sponsored, genocidal regime change in the Americas around the same time as the crushing of the Morant Bay Uprising in Jamaica.

Concluding notes: protectionism, and culture

Galeano’s analysis of US protectionism is also of interest. He argues that the rise of the US occurred precisely because the US didn’t make Britain rich the way the Caribbean made Britain rich and the way Latin America made Britain rich. He calls it “the importance of not being important”, which combined with racial indulgence towards its settler colonies to give them space to grow to industrial power. Ulysses Grant is quoted: “For centuries England has relied on protection, has carried it to extremes, and has obtained satisfactory results from it. After two centuries, England has found it convenient to adopt free trade… Very well then… within two hundred years, when America has gotten out of protection all that it can offer, it too will adopt free trade.” It’s pithy but it isn’t quite right either – since England never abandoned protectionism where it matters and neither has the US. Free trade isn’t a phase: it’s always for others, never for the metropole.

There’s so much more in this book that I’ve only written up half my notes here. But I’ll leave you with this quote which has been on my mind ever since, about the importance of culture and of education.

“Latin American universities turn out mathematicians, engineers, and programmers who can only find work in exile: we give ourselves the luxury of providing the US with our best technicians and ablest scientists, who are urged to emigrate by the high salaries and broad research possibilities available in the north. At the same time, whenever a Latin American university or center of higher learning tries to stimulate the basic sciences, to lay the foundations for a technology that is not copied from foreign patterns and interests, a timely coup d’etat destroys the experiment on the pretext that it is an incubator of subversion. The University of Brasilia, crushed in 1964, was an example of this. And the truth is that the armor-plated archangels who guard the established order are not mistaken: an autonomous cultural policy, when it is genuine, requires and promotes deep changes in all existing structures.”

If you’ve read (or re-read) this book lately, what jumped out for you?

-Justin