On this day in 1940, one of South America’s most influential revolutionary thinkers and writers, Eduardo Galeano, was born in Uruguay.
What made him one of the continent’s most influential figures to this day?
Galeano started work at 14, taking jobs as a factory worker, messenger, bank cashier, and typist.
He also started making political cartoons for the weekly column for the weekly newspaper column of future Tupamaros guerrilla leader Raúl Sendic.
Galeano’s genuine passion for writing soon emerged, and he taught himself to become a journalist. Aged only 26 he founded his own independent left-wing newspaper, Época.
He interviewed notable figures like Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and Salvador Allende.
Throughout his career spanning fiction, art, poetry, journalism, political analysis, and history, Galeano dedicated his work to the struggles of South America’s working-class peasants and indigenous populations.
In his groundbreaking work “Open Veins of Latin America,” Galeano pioneered a distinctive style that interwove myth, fact, and the experiences of the oppressed.
Simultaneously, the book exposed the exploitative practices of the US and Europe: “Our wealth has perpetually generated our poverty by nurturing the prosperity of others.”
In 1973, Galeano faced imprisonment and later fled to Argentina when a US-backed coup brought Juan María Bordaberry Arocena to power.
His work was suppressed in Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile.
A mere three years later, Galeano found himself added to a death-squad hitlist in Argentina, which another US-backed dictator, Jorge Videla, then ruled.
This forced him into another exile, this time to Spain, shortly after the end of the fascist Franco regime.
#Socialismo #Revolucionario #Marxismo