Say what you will about the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez; he had chutzpah. What better place to a make a point about Latin America’s colonial inheritance than in front of the world’s media? So it was with a sense of occasion that the smiling Chávez strode across the floor of the Summit of the Americas conference in April 2009 to present US President Barack Obama with a book. And not just any book. It was a copy, in Spanish, of Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano’s 1973 classic, The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent.
Cheeky, yes, but the point was made: history is important. Galeano’s analysis of the continent’s economic plight was not new – the book summed up, in a swashbuckling and provocative style, what economists like Raúl Prebisch and Andre Gunder Frank had been arguing for years. They had a term for it: ‘dependency theory’. Galeano gave the theory ‘street cred’, hauling it out of the murky backwaters of academia. (Years later he explained his book’s enduring popularity to the New York Times, calling it a work of political economy ‘written in the style of a novel about love or pirates’.)
