Eduardo Galeano

Eduardo Hughes Galeano was a Uruguayan journalist, essayist, and novelist born in Montevideo in 1940 and died in the same city in 2015. He left school early and began drawing political cartoons for the Socialist Party weekly El Sol at fourteen, then moved into reporting and editing at the daily El Diario, the weekly Marcha, and the magazine Época.

His 1971 book Las venas abiertas de América Latina, translated into English as Open Veins of Latin America, traced five centuries of European and North American extraction of metals, agricultural goods, and labor from the continent. The book was banned by the military dictatorships that took power in Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile during the 1970s, and Galeano spent years in exile, first in Buenos Aires and then in Barcelona, while it became a touchstone of the Latin American left.

Returning to Montevideo after the Uruguayan dictatorship ended in 1985, he wrote his three-volume Memoria del fuego (1982–1986), a mosaic history of the Americas told in hundreds of brief vignettes drawn from chronicles, songs, and oral tradition. Later books such as El libro de los abrazos, Patas arriba, Espejos, and Los hijos de los días continued his short-form approach, weaving together history, journalism, and parable.

Galeano also wrote El fútbol a sol y sombra (1995), a celebrated meditation on soccer and politics. In 2009 the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez handed a copy of Open Veins to U.S. President Barack Obama at a regional summit, briefly returning the book to international bestseller lists. He died of lung cancer at the age of seventy-four.

The name Eduardo is the Spanish and Portuguese form of Edward, from Old English Ēadweard, meaning rich guard or wealthy protector. Carried into Iberia through the medieval English saint-king Edward the Confessor, it became common across Latin America. He wore it as the byline of a chronicler of the dispossessed.