Eduardo Galeano

Who is Eduardo Galeano?

Eduardo Galeano was a Uruguayan journalist and writer from Montevideo whose work combined history, political analysis, and literary narrative to examine Latin America's colonial and economic history. He gained international attention with "Las venas abiertas de América Latina" (Open Veins of Latin America, 1971), a sweeping critique of centuries of foreign exploitation of Latin American resources, which became one of the most widely read works of Latin American political literature and was later famously given as a gift from Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez to U.S. president Barack Obama in 2009. Following the 1973 military coup in Uruguay, Galeano was imprisoned briefly and then went into exile, first in Argentina and later in Spain, continuing to write and edit through the years of dictatorship. His major later work, the "Memoria del fuego" (Memory of Fire) trilogy (1982-1986), reimagined the history of the Americas through hundreds of short narrative vignettes blending fact and literary form. He returned to Uruguay after the restoration of democracy and remained a prominent public voice on Latin American politics, history, and inequality until his death in Montevideo in 2015.

Sources: Eduardo Galeano, Las venas abiertas de América Latina (1971) · Eduardo Galeano, Memoria del fuego trilogy (1982-1986) · Eduardo Galeano, El libro de los abrazos (1989)