** For example, Uruguay agreed to increase its imports of machinery from Brazil in exchange for such favors as a supply of Brazilian electrical energy to northern Uruguay. Today the Uruguayan departments of Artigas and Rivera cannot raise their consumption of energy without Brazil’s permission.
Recent years have seen a revival of the competition between the agents for imperialist interests installed in the Brazilian and Argentine governments on the troublesome question of continental leadership. Everything suggests that Argentina is in no condition to resist the powerful Brazilian challenge: Brazil has double the land area and four times the population, produces nearly three times as much steel, double the cement, more than double the electric energy, and renews its merchant fleet fifteen times as fast. Furthermore, in the past two decades, its rate of economic growth has been considerably greater than Argentina’s. Until recently Argentina produced more cars and trucks than Brazil, but at the present rate Brazil’s auto industry will be three times larger than Argentina’s by 1975 and its fleet—equal to Argentina’s in 1966—will be as big as that of all Latin America put together. Brazil offers foreign investors its far-flung potential market, its fabulous natural wealth, the strategic importance of its territory—sharing boundaries as it does with all the South American countries except Ecuador and Chile—and all the conditions for U.S. enterprises on its soil to advance with seven league boots. It has cheaper and more abundant labor than its rival: the average wage level is three times lower than in Argentina and the unemployed run into the millions. It is no accident that one-third of the processed and semiprocessed products sold within the LAFTA zone come from Brazil. This is the country called upon to become the axis of all Latin America’s liberation or servitude. Perhaps Senator Fulbright was not aware of the full significance of his words when, in public statements in 1965, he attributed to Brazil the mission of directing the Common Market of Latin America.
AS SIMÓN BOLÍVAR PROPHESIED: “WE SHALL NEVER BE HAPPY, NEVER!”
For U.S. imperialism to be able to “integrate and rule” Latin America today, it was necessary for the British Empire to help divide and rule us yesterday. An archipelago of disconnected countries came into being as a result of the frustration of our national unity. When the peoples in arms won independence, Latin America stood on the stage of history with a common bond of tradition between its diverse regions, territorially united, speaking two languages of the same origin, Spanish and Portuguese. But lacking one essential condition to form one great nation—economic community.
The poles of prosperity that flourished to supply Europe’s need for metals and foodstuffs were not interconnected: the ribs of the fan had their vertex across the ocean. People and capital were displaced according to the rising and falling fate of gold or sugar, silver or indigo, and only the ports and the capitals, the leeches of the productive regions, had a permanent existence. Latin America was born as a single territory in the imaginations and hopes of Simón Bolívar, José Artigas, and José de San Martín, but was broken in advance by the basic deformations of the colonial system. The oligarchies of the free trade ports consolidated this structure of fragmentation, which was their source of profit: those sagacious traders could not incubate the national unity that was the essence of the European and U.S. bourgeoisie. Throughout the past century the British, Spain’s and Portugal’s heirs since before independence, perfected this structure by means of diplomats’ white-gloved intrigues, bankers’ extortions, and the merchants’ capacity for seduction. “For us the fatherland is America,” Bolívar proclaimed; but Gran Colombia was divided into five countries and the liberator died defeated: “We shall never be happy, never!” he said to General Urdaneta. Betrayed by Buenos Aires, San Martín stripped off the insignia of command and Artigas, who called his soldiers Americans, went to a solitary exile’s death in Paraguay: the Río de la Plata viceroyalty had been divided into four. Francisco de Morazán, creator of the federal republic of Central America, died before a firing squad,* and the waist of America was split into five pieces—Panama, the canal with the rank of republic invented by Teddy Roosevelt, was added later.
* As Gregorio Bustamante Maceo described it: “He ordered them to ready their arms, bared his head, ordered them to aim, corrected the aim, gave the command to fire, and fell; still he raised his bleeding head and said, I am alive; another volley ended his life.”91
In the plaza of Tegucigalpa, the band plays light music every Sunday night at the foot of Morazán’s bronze statue. But the inscription is wrong; this is not the equestrian likeness of the champion of Central American unity. The Hondurans who went to Paris soon after the shooting to commission a sculptor on the government’s behalf spent the money on a spree and ended up buying a statue of Marshal Ney in the flea market. Central America’s tragedy rapidly became farce.
Today the world sees the result: any of the multinational corporations operates with more coherence and sense of unity than the congeries of islands that is Latin America, broken up by so many frontiers and such a lack of communication. What integration can be achieved among themselves by countries that have not even been able to integrate internally? Each country suffers from deep fissures in its own body, bitter social divisions and unresolved tensions between its great marginal deserts and its urban oases. The drama is reproduced on the regional level. The railroads and highways, created to transport foreign products by the shortest routes, still bear irrefutable witness to Latin America’s impotence or incapacity to make the national dream of its heroes come true. Brazil has no permanent land connections with three of its neighbors, Colombia, Peru, and Venezuela; Atlantic seaboard cities have no direct cable communications with Pacific cities, so that telegrams between Buenos Aires and Lima, or Rio de Janeiro and Bogotá, have to go through New York; the same with telephone communications between the Caribbean and the south. Each Latin American country still identifies itself with its own port—a negation of its roots and real identity—to such an extent that almost all intraregional trade goes by sea: inland transport is virtually nonexistent. Furthermore, the global freight cartel fixes rates and itineraries to suit itself, and Latin America merely endures the exorbitant charges and ridiculous routes. Of the 118 regular shipping lines operating in the region only seventeen fly regional flags; freightage bleeds the Latin American economy of $2.6 billion a year.92 Thus merchandise shipped from Pôrto Alegre to Montevideo arrives faster if it goes via Hamburg, and the same for Uruguayan wool bound for the United States; freightage from Buenos Aires to a Mexican gulf port is more than 25 percent lower if the shipment goes via Southampton.93 Shipment of timber from Mexico to Venezuela costs more than double the shipment of timber from Finland to Venezuela, although the maps still insist that Mexico is closer. A direct shipment of chemical products from Buenos Aires to Tampico in Mexico costs far more than if it is routed via New Orleans.94
What the United States set out to achieve for itself, and did achieve, is certainly different. Seven years after their independence, the thirteen colonies had doubled their territory, already extending beyond the Alleghenies to the banks of the Mississippi, and four years after that they forged their unity by creating a common market. Purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803 again doubled the land area; then came Florida and, at midcentury, the invasion and amputation of half of Mexico in the name of “manifest destiny.” Then the purchase of Alaska and the usurpation of Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. The colonies made themselves a nation, and the nation made itself an empire, putting into practice aims clearly expressed and pursued from the remote days of the “founding fathers.” While the north of America grew, developing internally within its expanding frontiers, the south developed outwardly and blew into fragments like a grenade.
In the present process of integration we neither re-encountet our origins nor come nearer to our goals. Bolívar prophesied shrewdly that the United States seemed fated by Providence to plague America with woes in the name of liberty. General Motors
or IBM will not step graciously into our shoes and raise the old banners of unity and emancipation which fell in battle; nor can heroes betrayed yesterday be redeemed by the traitors of today. It is a big load of rottenness that has to be sent to the bottom of the sea on the march to Latin America’s reconstruction. The task lies in the hands of the dispossessed, the humiliated, the accursed. The Latin American cause is above all a social cause: the rebirth of Latin America must start with the overthrow of its masters, country by country. We are entering times of rebellion and change. There are those who believe that destiny rests on the knees of the gods; but the truth is that it confronts the conscience of man with a burning challenge.
Part III
Seven Years After
Seven years have gone by since Open Veins of Latin America was first published.
This book was written to have a talk with people. A non-specialized writer wanted to tell a non-specialized public about certain facts that official history, history as told by conquerors, hides or lies about.
The most heartening response came not from the book pages in the press but from real incidents in the streets. The girl who was quietly reading Open Veins to her companion in a bus in Bogotá, and finally stood up and read it aloud to all the passengers. The woman who fled from Santiago in the days of the Chilean bloodbath with this book wrapped inside her baby’s diapers. The student who went from one bookstore to another for a week in Buenos Aires’s Calle Corrientes, reading bits of it in each store because he hadn’t the money to buy it.
And the most favorable reviews came not from any prestigious critic but from the military dictatorships that praised the book by banning it. For example, Open Veins is unobtainable either in my country, Uruguay, or in Chile; in Argentina the authorities denounced it on TV and in the press as a corrupter of youth. As Bias de Otero remarked, “They don’t let people see what I write because I write what I see.”
I don’t think there is a vanity in the pleasure I have had, as time went by, in seeing that Open Veins has not been a mute book.
I know I can be accused of sacrilege in writing about political economy in the style of a novel about love or pirates. But I confess I get a pain from reading valuable works by certain sociologists, political experts, economists, and historians who write in code. Hermetic language isn’t the invariable and inevitable price of profundity. In some cases it can simply conceal incapacity for communication raised to the category of intellectual virtue. I suspect that boredom can thus often serve to sanctify the established order, confirming that knowledge is a privilege of the elite.
Something similar occurs, one might add, with a certain militant literature aimed at a public of the converted. For all its revolutionary rhetoric, a language that mechanically repeats the same clichés, adjectives, and declamatory formulas for the same ears seems conformist to me. It could be that this parochial literature is as remote from revolution as pornography is remote from eroticism.
One writes to try and answer the questions that buzz in one’s head, obstinate flies that disturb one’s sleep; and what one writes can take on collective sense when it coincides in some way with the social necessity for a reply. I wrote Open Veins to spread some ideas of other people, and some experiences of my own, which might dispel a little of the fog from questions always pursuing us: Is Latin America a region condemned to humiliation and poverty? Condemned by whom? Is God, is Nature, to blame? The oppressive climate, racial inferiority? Religion, customs? Or may not its plight be a product of history, made by human beings and so, unmakable by human beings?
Veneration for the past has always seemed to me reactionary. The right chooses to talk about the past because it prefers dead people: a quiet world, a quiet time. The powerful who legitimize their privileges by heredity cultivate nostalgia. History is studied as if we were visiting a museum; but this collection of mummies is a swindle. They lie to us about the past as they lie to us about the present: they mask the face of reality. They force the oppressed victims to absorb an alien, dessicated, sterile memory fabricated by the oppressor, so that they will resign themselves to a life that isn’t theirs as if it were the only one possible.
Open Veins seeks to portray the past as something always convoked by the present, a live memory of our own day. A search for keys in past history to help explain our time—a time that also makes history—on the basis that the first condition for changing reality is to understand it. This is no catalog of heroes, dressed as if for a masked ball, who die in battle making long solemn pronouncements; rather it probes for the sound and footprints of the multitudes who traced the paths we walk today. Open Veins has its roots in reality but also in other books—better books than this one—which have helped us recognize what we are so as to know what we can be, and see where we come from so as to reckon more clearly where we’re going. That reality and those books show that underdevelopment in Latin America is a consequence of development elsewhere, that we Latin Americans are poor because the ground we tread is rich, and that places privileged by nature have been cursed by history. In this world of ours, a world of powerful centers and subjugated outposts, there is no wealth that must not be held in some suspicion.
In the years since the first edition of Open Veins, history has not ceased to be a cruel mistress to us.
The system has multiplied hunger and fear; wealth has become more and more concentrated, poverty more and more widespread. That is recognized by the documents of specialized international organizations, in whose aseptic vocabulary our oppressed territories are “countries in process of development” and the pitiless impoverishment of the working class is “regressive income distribution.”
The international Moloch-machine has kept on grinding: countries at the service of commodities, people at the service of things.
With the passage of time methods of exporting crises are perfected. Monopoly capital reaches its highest peak of concentration, and international domination of markets, credits, and investments makes possible the systematic and growing transfer of contradictions: the outposts pay the price for the prosperity of the centers.
The international market remains one of the master keys to this operation. There the multinational corporations impose their dictatorship—multinational (as Paul Sweezy explains) because they operate in many countries, yet highly and assuredly national in ownership and control. The global organization of inequality is not affected by the fact that (for example) Brazil now exports Volkswagens to other South American countries and to the distant markets of Africa and the Middle East. In the last analysis it is the German Volkswagen concern that has considered it more convenient to export cars to certain markets from its Brazilian affiliate: the low production costs and cheap labor are Brazilian, the high profits are German.
Nor is the straitjacket magically broken when some raw material manages to escape from the curse of low prices. This has been the case with petroleum since 1973. Isn’t petroleum an international business? Standard Oil of New Jersey (now known as Exxon), Royal Dutch/Shell, Gulf. Are they Arabian or Latin American enterprises? Who takes home the lion’s share? The hubbub raised against oil-producing countries has in fact been most revealing. They dared defend their prices and immediately became the scapegoats for inflation and unemployment in Europe and the United States. Did the most developed countries ever consult with anyone before raising the price of any of their products? For twenty years the price of oil sagged and sagged. Its paltry market quotation represented a giant subsidy for the world’s great industrial centers whose products at the same time got dearer and dearer. Relative to the ceaseless price rises of U.S. and European products, the new price of oil has no more than brought it back to its 1952 levels. Crude oil merely recovered in 1973 the purchasing power it had two decades earlier.
Among the important events of these seven years was the nationalization of oil in Venezuela. It didn’t break Venezuela’s dependency with respect to refining and marketing, but it opened a new space of autonomy. From soon a
fter its birth the state concern Petróleos de Venezuela took first place among Latin America’s 500 biggest enterprises. It began seeking markets apart from the traditional ones and rapidly found fifty new customers.
But as always when the state takes over a country’s principal wealth, it is appropriate to ask who runs the state. Nationalization of basic resources doesn’t in itself imply redistribution of income for the majority’s benefit, nor does it necessarily endanger the power and privileges of the dominant minority. In Venezuela the economy of waste and extravagance continues intact. The neon-lit center is as resplendent as ever with the squandermania of a multimillionaire class. In 1976 imports rose by 25 percent, largely to finance the super-luxury articles which inundate the Venezuelan market. Commodity fetishism as a symbol of power, human existence reduced to competitive and consumer relationships. In the ocean of underdevelopment the privileged minority apes the lifestyle and fashions of the richest members of the world’s most opulent societies. In the bedlam of Caracas, as in New York, commodities that are “natural” by definition—air, light, silence— become ever costlier and costlier. “Watch out,” warns Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonso, patriarch of Venezuela’s nationalism and prophet of the recovery of its oil, “one can die from indigestion as well as from hunger.”1
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