Eduardo Galeano is a Uruguayan essayist, journalist and historian. He was editor in chief of Marcha, a weekly journal with contributors such as Mario Vargas Llosa and Mario Benedetti. He also wrote for Epocha and University Press. In 1973 after a military coup in his country, Mr. Galeano was imprisoned and then exiled from Uruguay. In exile in Argentina, he started the magazine Crisis. In 1976, another military coup forced him from his adopted country and put him on the list of those condemned to death. He then moved to Spain where he wrote Memory of Fire
.
Open Veins of Latin America won the Casas de America prize in 1970 and was the first of his books to be translated into English. He writes with eloquence of Latin America's 500 years of occupation and of the cultural, emotional and physical genocide of our people and our land. His prose is so beautiful, even while writing of rape, pillage, abuse of power and other atrocities. He combines both fact and imagery into a sublime reading experience.
Mr. Galeano documents meticulously the statistics of exploitation and murder - the facts, the numbers, and most importantly the emotions and situations behind the well documented data. He speaks of how the genocide of Latin America’s indigenous peoples and the enslavement of the African people were the very foundation for “the giant industrial capital.”