As Veias Abertas da América Latina

Eduardo Galeano presents Latin America's history from the colonial period to the 1970s as a series of acts of extraction. He covers the Spanish gold and silver mines, the sugar and cotton plantations, the rubber boom, the bananas and the oil, and he shows how each of these brought foreign wealth and left local poverty. Galeano argues that the continent has been forced to specialize in raw materials for others' benefit, and that the regions that supplied the most are the ones left poorest. He writes with anger, irony and a poet's sense of image.

Students of history and politics will find it useful, as will readers who want to understand the roots of the region's inequality. It is a classic of Latin American left-wing writing that continues to be quoted.

Deep, outward-looking and clear-cut; a moderate read.

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