Here’s what the novelist Isabel Allende once wrote of Eduardo Galeano: “He has walked up and down Latin America listening to the voices of the poor and the oppressed, as well as those of the leaders and the intellectuals. He has lived with Indians, peasants, guerrillas, soldiers, artists, and outlaws; he has talked to presidents, tyrants, martyrs, priests, heroes, bandits, desperate mothers, and patient prostitutes. He has been bitten by snakes, suffered tropical fevers, walked in the jungle, and survived a massive heart attack; he has been persecuted by repressive regimes as well as by fanatical terrorists. He has opposed military dictatorships and all forms of brutality and exploitation, taking unthinkable risks in defense of human rights. He has more first-hand knowledge of Latin America than anybody else I can think of, and uses it to tell the world of the dreams and disillusions, the hopes and the failures of its people.”
Galeano, the Uruguayan journalist and author of all trades, is in fact one of the freshest voices on this fragile globe of ours. If you want to sample his work, try his latest book, Upside Down, A Primer for the Looking-Glass World, a fabulous series of stories, reports, rants, analyses, and god knows what else that add up to a vision of how the world looks when you’re living south glancing north. If you’ve already read that, go back and visit or revisit his trilogy of the Americas, Memory of Fire, which takes you from the first native myths to our own times.
Or, at the end of a week in which the President has committed our resources to building a woeful missile defense system, part of a project aimed at militarizing space and ensuring that arms races remain the order of the day (and tomorrow) on this planet, just start with this state-of-our-earth piece from December’s Progressive magazine. Tom
The Upside-Down World Eduardo Galeano
Nature Is Very Tired
December 2002
The ProgressiveWho gets the water? The monkey that has the club. Unarmed creature dies of thirst. This lesson from prehistory opens the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
For the Odyssey 2003, President Bush has announced a military budget of one billion dollars a day. The arms industry is the only investment worthy of confidence.
The ruling powers of the planet reason with bombs. They are power itself, a genetically modified power, a gigantic Frankenpower that humiliates nature: It exercises its freedom to convert air into filth and its right to leave humanity without a home; it calls these horrors errors, flattens whoever gets in its way, is deaf to all warnings, and breaks whatever it touches.
Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan journalist, is the author of “Memory of Fire” and “The Open Veins of Latin America.”
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Who gets the water? The monkey that has the club. Unarmed creature dies of thirst. This lesson from prehistory opens the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
For the Odyssey 2003, President Bush has announced a military budget of one billion dollars a day. The arms industry is the only investment worthy of confidence.
The ruling powers of the planet reason with bombs. They are power itself, a genetically modified power, a gigantic Frankenpower that humiliates nature: It exercises its freedom to convert air into filth and its right to leave humanity without a home; it calls these horrors errors, flattens whoever gets in its way, is deaf to all warnings, and breaks whatever it touches.
Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan journalist, is the author of “Memory of Fire” and “The Open Veins of Latin America.”