Eduardo Galeano

Writer

Born: September 3, 1940;

Died: April 13, 2015.

EDUARDO GALEANO, who has died of lung cancer aged 74, was a writer whose book The Open Veins of Latin America became a classic text for the left in South America and propelled the author to fame.

His work inspired several generations of Latin Americans with powerful, acerbic descriptions of the continent’s exploitation by capitalist and imperialist forces.

The writer defined himself as someone who helped rescue “the kidnapped memory” of Latin America, a “despised and beloved land”.

No work reflected that more than Open Veins, published in 1971. In it, Galeano wrote that Chile with its vast nitrate deposits, Brazil with its abundant rain forests and small Venezuelan towns with oil reserves “had painful reasons to believe in the mortality of fortunes that nature bestows and imperialism usurps”.

Open Veins had such strong resonance in the region that former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a populist always quick to lionise thinkers on the left, handed a copy of the book to US President Barack Obama the first time they met in 2009, calling it “a monument in our Latin American history”.

Galeano remained a sharp critic of capitalism and of US policies to the end. But he shocked many last year when he criticised his signature work, saying it was poorly written and that at the time he did not have the academic formation to take on such a weighty subject.

“I wouldn’t be capable of reading this book again; I’d keel over,” Galeano said while answering questions at a book fair in Brazil. “For me, this prose of the traditional left is extremely leaden, and my physique can’t tolerate it.”

Born in Montevideo in 1940, Eduardo German Hughes Galeano began his career at 14 publishing cartoons under the name Gius because of the difficult pronunciation of Hughes in Spanish. Shortly thereafter, when he began writ- ing news articles, he would use Galeano.

As a young adult, he did several jobs while he wrote on the side: courier, factory worker, bank teller, and stenographer, among others.

From the beginning, his ideology and works embraced ideas on the left. Those ideas forced him into exile in Argentina and Spain during Uruguay’s military dictatorship between 1973 and 1985.

Returning to Uruguay after the return to democracy, he was frequently seen in Montevideo cafés debating with other intellectuals.

He married Helena Villagra in 1976. His two previous marriages ended in divorce. Galeano had one child from his first marriage and two from the second.

Over his career, he would write several more books focused on the politics and economics of the time. Days and Nights of Love and War, published in 1978, examined the military dictatorships in Argentina and Uruguay.

The Memory of Fire, published in the 1980s, is a three-volume narrative of the history of Americas. In The Book of Embraces, published in 1991, Galeano wrote about his views on art, politics and emotion while also offering a withering critique of capitalism. In 1995, Galeano, wrote Soccer in Sun and Shadow, a review of the history of the game he loved.

Despite many accolades and a prolific body of work, Galeano will no doubt be most remembered for Open Veins, a work that reflected a turbulent time in the region that included military dictatorships, heavy foreign investment and a coming of age book for many people growing up in the shadow of the Cuban revolution of 1959.

He is survived by his third wife, Helena Villagra, and his children Veronica, Florencio and Claudio.