Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent

by Eduardo Galeano

  The violence did not stop after that: it has been a way of life in Guatemala ever since the period of humiliation and fury begun in 1954. Corpses—although not quite so many—continue to turn up in rivers and on roadsides, their featureless faces too disfigured by torture to be identified. The slaughter that is greater but more hidden—the daily genocide of poverty—also continues. In 1968 another expelled priest, Father Blase Bonpane, reported on this sick society in the Washington Post: “Of the 70,000 people who die each year in Guatemala, 30,000 are children. The infant mortality rate in Guatemala is forty times higher than in the United States.”

  THE FIRST AGRARIAN REFORM: 150 YEARS OF DEFEAT FOR JOSÉ ARTIGAS

  It was the dispossessed of Latin America who, with spears and machetes, really fought against Spanish power at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Independence did not reward them; it betrayed the hopes of those who had shed their blood. Peace came, and with it a new era of daily misery. Landowners and businessmen increased their fortunes while poverty grew among the masses. The intrigues of Latin America’s new masters grew, and the four viceroyalties of the Spanish empire blew up and gave birth to many new nations, splinters of a might-have-been national unity. The “nation,” as the subcontinent’s gentry conceived it, looked too much like a busy port, inhabited by the mercantile and financial clientele of the British Empire, with latifundios and mines in the background. A legion of parasites, who had received the War of Independence communiqués while dancing minuets in city salons, used British-made wineglasses to drink toasts to freedom of trade. The most pompous republican slogans of the European bourgeoisie came into fashion as our countries placed themselves at the service of English industrialists and French thinkers. But what sort of “national bourgeoisie” was ours, composed of landlords, big wheelers and dealers and speculators, frock-coated politicos, and intellectuals of borrowed cultures? Latin America quickly gave birth to bourgeois constitutions well varnished with liberalism, but there was no creative bourgeoisie in the European or U.S. style to accompany them, one which would undertake as its historical mission the development of a strong national capitalism. The bourgeoisies of our countries came into being as mere instruments of international capitalism, liberally oiled cogs in the global mechanism that bled the colonies and semicolonies. These shop-window bourgeois, moneylenders, and merchants who monopolized political power had no interest in developing local manufactures, which died in the egg when free trade opened the doors to the avalanche of British merchandise. Nor were their associates, the landlords, interested in resolving “the agrarian question,” except to the extent that they could feather their own nests. The latifundio was consolidated on a foundation of plunder.

  Economic, social, national frustration: a series of betrayals followed independence, and Latin America, split apart by its new frontiers, was doomed as before to monoculture and dependence. Agrarian reform was a demand from the beginning. In 1824 Simón Bolivar issued the Trujillo Decree, designed to protect the Indians and reorganize the land-ownership system in Peru. Its legal provisions in no way limited the Peruvian oligarchy’s privileges, which remained intact despite the Liberator’s good intentions, and the Indians were as exploited as they had been before. Earlier, Miguel Hidalgo and José María Morelos had been defeated in Mexico, and a century would pass before anything came of their demands for the emancipation of the dispossessed and the recovery of usurped lands.

  Down south it was José Artigas who personified the agrarian revolution. This man, the victim of impassioned vilification by official historians, led the masses during the heroic years from 1811 to 1820, in the area now occupied by Uruguay and the Argentine provinces of Santa Fe, Corrientes, Entre Ríos, Misiones, and Córdoba. He wanted to lay economic, social, and political foundations for a Great Fatherland within the frontiers of the old Rio de la Plata viceroyalty, and was the most important and clear-headed of the leaders who resisted the annihilating centralism of the port of Buenos Aires. 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—and by an oligarchy which, true to form, sold him out as soon as they saw the implications of his program of social demands.

  Patriots took up arms to follow Artigas. They were mostly poor country people, rugged gauchos, Indians who rediscovered their dignity in the struggle, slaves who won freedom by joining the independence army. The cowboys’ revolution set the pampas aflame. Buenos Aires’s betrayal in leaving what is now Uruguay in the hands of Spanish power and Portuguese troops produced a mass exodus to the north. A people in arms became a people in flight: men and women, old people and children, abandoned everything to form an endless caravan of horses and carts behind their leader. Artigas called a halt on the Río Uruguay and soon set up his government. By 1815 he controlled a large area from his Purificación camp in Paysandú. “What do you think I saw?” an English traveler reported. “His Excellency the Señor Protector of half the New World sitting on the head of an ox beside a bonfire on the muddy soil of his ranch, eating barbecued meat and drinking gin from a cow’s horn! A dozen ragged officers surrounded him. …”43 Soldiers, aides-de-camp, and scouts rode in at the gallop from all directions. Pacing, hands behind his back, Artigas dictated the revolutionary decrees of his people’s government. Two secretaries—carbon paper didn’t exist—took notes. Thus was born Latin America’s first agrarian reform; it was applied for a year in the “Eastern Province” (today’s Uruguay) and then—after the oligarchy opened the doors of Montevideo to General Lecor, greeted him as a liberator, and conducted him beneath a canopy to a solemn honor-the-invader Te Deum in the Cathedral— smashed by a new Portuguese invasion. Artigas had earlier levied a tariff which heavily taxed foreign merchandise that competed with domestic products—manufactures and crafts which were substantially developed lay within the leader’s dominions. At the same time, he stopped the taxation on the importation of means of production which were needed for economic development, and fixed a trifling duty on such Latin American products as Paraguayan yerba mate and tobacco. The grave-diggers of the revolution were also to bury these tariff measures.

  The agrarian code of 1815—free land, free men—was the most advanced and glorious of the many constitutions the Uruguayans would have. Artigas’s code was no doubt influenced by the ideas of Pedro Rodriguez de Campomanes and Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos in the reformist era of Charles III, but beyond question it was also a revolutionary response to the national need for economic recovery and social justice. It included expropriation and distribution of the lands of “bad Europeans and worse Americans,” who emigrated because of the revolution and were never pardoned. Lands belonging to the revolution’s enemies were expropriated without indemnity—and let it be recalled that these enemies owned the great majority of the latifundios. Children did not have to pay for the sins of their fathers: the code offered them the same as it offered poor patriots. Lands were distributed on the principle that “the most unfortunate will be the most privileged.” Indians, in Artigas’s view, had “the chief right.” The essence of this agrarian reform was to settle the rural poor on the land, making a peasant out of the gaucho who was accustomed to a roving life in war and to clandestine activities and smuggling in peace. Subsequent La Plata basin governments would mercilessly suppress the gaucho, forcing him to work as a peon on big estates, but Artigas wanted to make him an owner of land: the rebel gauchos began to enjoy honest work, built ranches and corrals, and planted their first crops.

  Foreign intervention wiped it all out. The oligarchy reared its head and took vengeance. The validity of Artigas’ land distribution was legislatively repudiated. From 1820 until the end of the century, the poor patriots who had benefited from the agrarian reform were violently evicted. The only land they kept was enough to be buried in. The defeated Artigas had gone to Paraguay, to die alone after a long exile of austerity and silence. The land titles he had issued were without value: gove
rnment attorney Bernardo Bustamante, for example, said that “the worthlessness of the said documents” was clear at first sight. Meanwhile, “order” restored, his government hastened to celebrate the first constitution of an independent Uruguay, that fragment of the Great Fatherland Artigas had vainly fought to consolidate.

  The code of 1815 contained special clauses to avoid the accumulation of land in a few hands. In our day the Uruguayan countryside looks like a desert: 500 families monopolize half of all the land and, to crown their power, also control three-quarters of the capital invested in industry and banking. Agrarian reform projects pile up in the parliamentary cemetery while the countryside is depopulated: unemployment proliferates and the number of people occupied in agriculture steadily dwindles from one dramatic census to another. The country makes its living from wool and meat, but its pastures contain fewer sheep and fewer cows than at the beginning of our century. The backwardness of production methods is reflected in the low yields from livestock—dependent for food on periodic rains and natural soil fertility—and from crop farming. Meat production per animal is not even half that of France or Germany, and the same applies to milk in comparison with New Zealand, Denmark, and Holland. Every sheep produces a kilogram less wool than in Australia. Per hectare wheat yields are three times lower than in France, corn seven times lower than in the United States. The big landowners send their profits abroad, spend their summers at Punta del Este, and do not reside at their latifundios even in winter, paying occasional visits in their own airplanes. When the Asociación Rural was founded a century ago, two-thirds of its members already made their homes in the capital. The extensive production, left to nature and hungry peons, causes them no headaches.

  And it certainly pays off. The rents and profits of cattle capitalists now amount to no less than $75 million a year.* Despite low yields, profits stay up because of extremely low costs. A landscape without people: the biggest latifundios provide work for barely two people per 1,000 hectares, and then not for the whole year. The always available labor supply accumulates miserably in hut settlements beside the ranches. The gaucho of folklore, the subject of paintings and poems, is a far cry from the peon who works the broad, hostile lands today. Instead of leather boots, he wears frayed sandals; instead of a wide belt adorned with gold or silver, an ordinary belt, or merely a knotted cord. The producers of meat have lost the right to eat it: rarely do these Creoles have access to the typical Creole roast, juicy tender meat turning golden over a fire. Misleadingly rosy international statistics notwithstanding, the truth is that pasta-and-chicken innards stew—no source of protein—is the basic diet of the Uruguayan campesino.

  * In the period of the rise of national industry, strongly subsidized and protected by the state, a large part of agricultural profits went into new factories. When industry entered its cycle of crisis, surplus capital from cattle-raising was diverted in other directions; Punta del Este’s most useless and luxurious mansions were built on the nation’s misfortune. Speculators then began feverishly fishing in the turbid waters of inflation. Above all, there was a flight of the capital and profits that the country produces year by year. According to official figures, between 1962 and 1966, $250 million fled Uruguay for safe Swiss and U.S. banks. There was also, two decades ago, the flight of young people from countryside to city, seeking jobs in developing industry. Today it continues by land or by sea to foreign countries, although their fate is of course not the same. The capital is received with open arms, but the uprooted pilgrims have to face a cold and uncertain destiny. The Uruguay of 1971, shaken by profound crisis, is no longer the oasis of peace and progress that attracted European immigrants; it is a turbulent land condemning its own inhabitants to emigration. It produces violence and exports people as naturally as it produces and exports meat and wool.

  ARTEMIO CRUZ AND THE SECOND DEATH OF EMILIANO ZAPATA

  Just a century after the Artigas land code, Emiliano Zapata introduced far-reaching agrarian reform in his zone of revolutionary jurisdiction in southern Mexico. It was five years after the dictator Porfirio Díaz had celebrated with huge fiestas the centenary of the Grito de Dolores, the beginning of the Mexican war of independence from Spain. The official Mexico of frock-coated gentlemen olympically ignored the real Mexico whose poverty fed their splendor. In this republic of outcasts, workers’ wages had not risen by a centavo since the historic rising of the priest Miguel Hidalgo in 1810. In 1910, 800-odd latifundistas, many of them foreigners, owned almost all the national territory. They were urban princelings who lived in the capital or in Europe and very occasionally visited their estates—where they slept shielded by high, buttressed walls of dark stone. On the other side of the walls, the peons huddled in adobe hovels. Of a population of 15 million, 12 million depended on rural wages, almost all of which were paid at the hacienda company stores in astronomically priced beans, flour, and liquor. Prison, barracks, and vestry shared the task of combating the natural defects of the Indians who, as a member of one illustrious family put it, were born “weak, drunk, and thieving.” With the worker tied by inherited debts or by legal contract, slavery was the actual labor system on Yucatán henequen plantations, on the tobacco plantations of the Valle Nacional, on Chiapas and Tabasco timberland and fruit orchards, and on the rubber, coffee, sugarcane, tobacco, and fruit plantations of Veracruz, Oaxaca, and Morelos. In a fine report on his visit, John Kenneth Turner wrote that “the United States has virtually reduced Diaz to a political dependency, and by so doing has virtually transformed Mexico into a slave colony of the United States.”44 U.S. capital made juicy profits directly or indirectly from its association with the dictatorship. “The Americanization of Mexico of which Wall Street boasts,” wrote Turner, “is being accomplished and accomplished with a vengeance.”45

  In 1845 the United States had annexed the Mexican territories of Texas and California, where it restored slavery in the name of civilization. Mexico also lost the present states of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah—more than half the country. The stolen territory was equal in size to present-day Argentina. “Poor Mexico!” it has been said ever since, “so far from God and so close to the United States!” After the invasion, the rest of Mexico’s mutilated territory suffered from U.S. investments in copper, petroleum, rubber, sugar, banking, and transportation. Far from guiltless in the extermination of the Maya and Yaqui Indians on Yucatán henequen plantations—concentration camps where men, women, and children were bought and sold like mules—was the Standard Oil affiliate American Cordage Trust, which bought more than half the henequen and could sell it cheap at a handsome profit. But sometimes, as Turner discovered, the exploitation of slave labor was direct. A North American administrador bought press-ganged peons in lots at fifty pesos a head. He told Turner: “We always kept them as long as they lasted. … In less than three months we buried more than half of them.”46 *

  * Mexico was the preferred country for U.S. investments: at the end of the century it had almost a third of the U.S. capital invested abroad. In Chihuahua state and in other northern areas, William Randolph Hearst, the “Citizen Kane” of Orson Welles’s film, owned more than 3 million hectares.

  Mexico’s hour of revenge struck in 1910: the country rose in arms against Porfirio Díaz. An agricultural leader headed the insurrection in the south: he was Emiliano Zapata, purest of revolutionaries, most loyal to the cause of the poor, most determined to right the wrongs of society.

  For agricultural communities throughout Mexico, the last decades of the nineteenth century had been a period of ruthless pillage. In Morelos, towns and villages were the victims of a bout of land-, water-, and labor-grabbing as sugarcane plantations expanded voraciously. Sugar haciendas dominated the life of the state, and their prosperity had brought with it modern mills, big distilleries, and railroad spurs. In Anenecuilco, where Zapata lived and to which he belonged body and soul, the plundered peasants claimed the soil they had worked for seven continuous centuries: they were there before Cortés a
rrived. But those who spoke up were marched off to forced labor in Yucatán. Throughout their state, whose good land belonged to seventeen families, they lived considerably worse than the polo ponies the latifundistas pampered in luxurious stables. A law in 1909, providing further seizure of land from its legitimate owners, was the last straw. Zapata, taciturn but famous as the state’s best horsebreaker and respected by all for his honesty and courage, turned guerrillero. The men of the south quickly formed a liberating army.

  Díaz fell and the revolution swept Francisco Indalecio Madero into power. Promises of agrarian reform soon disappeared in a fog of “institutionalism.” On his wedding day, Zapata had to interrupt the party: the government had sent General Victoriano Huerta’s troops to crush him. According to the learned pundits in the city, the hero had become a “bandit.” In November 1911 Zapata proclaimed the Plan de Ayala and wrote: “I am resolved to struggle against everything and everybody.”47 The Plan noted that “the overwhelming majority of Mexican communities and citizens are owners of no more than the land they walk on,” and proposed that the property of enemies of the revolution be nationalized, that lands usurped by the latifundista avalanche be returned to their legal owners, and that a third of the remaining hacendados’ lands be expropriated. The Plan de Ayala became a magnet, drawing thousands upon thousands of peasants into Zapata’s ranks. Zapata denounced “the infamous pretension” of reducing everything to a mere change of men in government: the revolution was not being made for that.