The trajectory of Open Veins is instructive, as Galeano’s work was received similarly to that of Coates: with liberal adulation and conservative skepticism. One of the main conservative criticisms of both Galeano and Coates’s work is that their presentations are unproductive calls to victimhood.
As conservatives respond en masse to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ recent cover story for The Atlantic on reparations, a similar, older exchange over liberal scholarship is returning to headlines.
The New York Times recently picked up on a month-old story from Brazil in which Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano expressed distaste for his famed 1971 manifesto on the historical roots of the region’s contemporary poverty, Open Veins of Latin America. The book has become a classic in Latin American anti-colonialist academia, laying the blame for Latin American poverty squarely at the feet of the United States and its corporations. Open Veins enjoyed a brief burst of popularity in the U.S. in 2009, when then-president of Venezuela Hugo Chávez famously gifted a copy of the book to President Obama. As Adam Goodman noted at Tropics of Meta, contrary to the Times, Galeano did not “disavow” the historical viewpoint of his book, merely his “leaden” prose and inexperienced presentation. Yet Open Veins’s academic value has long since been relegated to historical conversation-starter, rather than policy inspiration. Marjorie Miller illustrated the changed value of the book in the L.A. Times in 2009:
Today, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the economic failure of Cuba, Open Veins seems dated. The military governments of South and Central America have been replaced by independent, democratically elected leaders who do not take their cues from United Fruit or the United States. …
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