THE OPEN VEINS OF LATIN AMERICA.

The international division of labor is that some countries specialize in winning and others in losing. Our region of the world, which today we call Latin America, was precocious: it specialized in losing from the remote times when the Renaissance Europeans rushed through the sea and sank their teeth into their throats. Centuries passed and Latin America perfected its functions This va is not the kingdom of wonders where reality defeated the fable and the imagination was humiliated by the trophies of the conquest, the gold deposits and the silver mountains. But the region continues working as a maid. It continues to exist to serve the needs of others, as a source and reserve of oil and iron, copper and meat, fruits and coffee, raw materials and food destined for the rich countries that earn by consuming them, much more than what Latin America earns by producing them. The taxes charged by buyers are much higher than the prices received by sellers; and at the end of the day, as Covey T. Oliver, coordinator of the Alliance for Progress, declared in July 1968, "talking about fair prices today is a medieval concept. We are in the midst of free commercialization ... »The more freedom is granted to businesses, the more prisons it becomes necessary to build for those who suffer from business. Our systems of inquisitors and executioners do not only work for the dominant external market; they also provide plentiful sources of income flowing from borrowing and foreign investment in domestic dominated markets. "We have heard of concessions made by Latin America to foreign capital, but not of concessions made by the United States to the capital of other countries ... We do not give concessions," warned, back in 1913, the American president Woodrow Wilson. He was sure: "A country," he said, "is possessed and dominated by the capital that has been invested in it." And he was right On the way we even lost the right to call ourselves Americans, although Haitians and Cubans had already appeared in history, as new peoples, a century before the Mayflower pilgrims settled on the shores of Plymouth. Now America is, for the world, nothing more than the United States: we inhabit, at most, a sub-America, a second-class America, of nebulous identification.

It is Latin America, the region of open veins. From the discovery until our days, everything has always been transmuted into European or, later, North American capital, and as such it has accumulated and accumulates in the distant power centers. Everything: the earth, its fruits and its depths rich in minerals, men and their capacity for work and consumption, natural resources and human resources. The mode of production and the class structure of each place have been successively determined, from the outside, by their incorporation into the universal gear of capitalism. Each one has been assigned a function, always for the benefit of the development of the foreign metropolis on duty, and the chain of successive dependencies, which has more than two links, and which also includes, inside, has become infinite. of Latin America, the oppression of small countries by their larger neighbors and, within each country, the exploitation that large cities and ports exert on their internal sources of food and labor (Four centuries ago, they were already born sixteen of the twenty most populated Latin American cities of today.)

For those who conceive history as a competition, the backwardness and misery of Latin America are nothing but the result of its failure. We lost; others won. But it happens that those who won, won because we lost: the history of underdevelopment in Latin America integrates, as has been said, the history of the development of world capitalism. `Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated our poverty to feed the prosperity of others: the empires and their native caporales. In colonial and neo-colonial alchemy, the gold is transformed into scrap, and the food is turned into poison. Potosi, Zacatecas and Ouro Preto plummeted from the peak of the splendors of precious metals to the deep hole of the empty tunnels, and the ruin was the destiny of the Chilean pampas of the saltpeter and the Amazonian rubber forest; the sugar northeast of Brazil, the Argentine forests of the quebracho or certain oil towns of Lake Maracaibo have painful reasons to believe in the mortality of the fortunes that nature grants and imperialism usurps. The rain that irrigates the centers of imperialist power drowns the vast suburbs of the system. In the same way, and symmetrically, the well-being of our dominant classes-dominant inward, dominated from the outside-is the curse of our multitudes condemned to a life of beasts of burden.

The gap extends. By the middle of the previous century, the standard of living of the rich countries of the world exceeded the level of the poor countries by fifty percent. Development develops inequality: Richard Nixon announced, in April 1969, in his speech to the OAS, that at the end of the twentieth century per capita income in the United States will be fifteen times higher than income in Latin America. The strength of the whole imperialist system rests on the necessary inequality of the parties that form it, and that inequality assumes increasingly dramatic magnitudes. The oppressor countries are becoming increasingly rich in absolute terms, but much more in relative terms, by the dynamism of the growing disparity. Central capitalism can afford to create and believe its own myths of opulence, but myths are not eaten, and the poor countries that make up the vast peripheral capitalism know it well. The average income of a North American citizen is seven times higher than that of a Latin American and increases at a rate ten times more intense. And the averages deceive, by the unfathomable abysses that open, south of the Rio Grande, among the many poor and the few rich in the region. On the cusp, in effect, six millions of Latin Americans monopolize, according to the United Nations, the same income as one hundred and forty million people located at the base of the social pyramid. There are sixty million peasants whose fortune amounts to twenty-five cents a day; at the other extreme the pimps of misfortune have the luxury of accumulating five billion dollars in their private accounts in Switzerland or the United States, and waste in ostentation and sterile luxury -feel and challenge- and in unproductive investments, that constitute nothing less than half of the total investment, the capital that Latin America could allocate to the replacement, expansion and creation of sources of production and labor. Always incorporated into the constellation of imperialist power, our ruling classes have no interest in finding out whether patriotism could be more profitable than betrayal or whether begging is the only possible form of international politics. Mortgage sovereignty because "there is no other way"; the alibis of the oligarchy confuse the impotence of a social class with the presumed watt of destiny of each nation.

Josué de Castro declares: "I, who have received an international prize for peace, think that, unfortunately, there is no other solution than violence for Latin America." One hundred and twenty million children are agitated in the center of this storm. The population of Latin America grows like no other; in half a century it more than tripled. Every minute a child dies of illness or hunger, but in the year 2000 there will be six hundred and fifty million Latin Americans, and half will be less than fifteen years of age: a time bomb. Among the two hundred and eighty million Latin Americans there are, at the end of 1970, fifty million unemployed or under-employed and close to one hundred million illiterates; half of Latin Americans live clustered in unhealthy housing. The three largest markets in Latin America -Argentina, Brazil and Mexico- do not even match the consumption capacity of France or West Germany, although the population of our three large companies far exceeds that of any European country. Latin America today produces, in relation to the population, less food than before the last world war, and its per capita exports have declined three times, at constant prices, since the eve of the 1929 crisis._ The system is very rational from the point of view of its foreign owners and our bourgeoisie of commission agents, who sold the soul to the Devil at a price that would have shamed Fausto_. But the system is so irrational for all others that the more it develops the more it exacerbates its imbalances and tensions, its fiery contradictions. Even industrialization, dependent and late, which comfortably coexists with latifundio and the structures of inequality, contributes to sowing unemployment instead of helping to solve it; poverty is widespread and wealth is concentrated in this region that has immense legions of fallen arms that multiply tirelessly. New factories are installed in the privileged poles of development -São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Mexico City- but less labor is needed every time. The system has not foreseen this small annoyance: what is left over is people. And people reproduce. Love is made with enthusiasm and without precautions. Every time more people are left by the roadside, without work in the countryside, where the latifundio reigns with its gigantic wastelands, and without work in the city, where they reign.
the machines: the system vomits men. The American missions massively sterilize women and plant pills, diaphragms, spirals, condoms and marked almanacs, but they harvest children; Porfiriously, Latin American children continue to be born, claiming their natural right to obtain a place under the sun in these splendid lands that could offer to all what almost everyone denies.

At the beginning of November of 1968, Richard Nixon proved aloud that the Alliance for Progress had reached seven years of life and, nevertheless, malnutrition and food shortages in Latin America had worsened. A few months earlier, in April, George W. Ball wrote in Life: "At least for the next few decades, the discontent of the poorer nations will not mean a threat of world destruction. As shameful as it may be, the world has lived, for generations, two thirds poor and one third rich. Unfair as it may be, the power of poor countries is limited. " Ball had led the delegation of the United States to the First Conference on Trade and Development in Geneva, and had voted against nine of the twelve general principles approved by the conference in order to alleviate the disadvantages of underdeveloped countries in international trade. The massacres of poverty in Latin America are secret; every year, three Hiroshima bombs explode silently, without any crash, over these people who have the habit of suffering with clenched teeth. This systematic violence, not apparent but real, is increasing: its crimes are not disseminated in the red chronicle, but in the statistics of the FAO. Ball says that impunity is still possible, because the poor can not unleash the world war, but the Empire worries: unable to multiply the loaves, it does its best to suppress the diners. "Fight poverty, kill a beggar!" Scribbled a master of black humor on a wall of the city of La Paz. What are the heirs of Malthus proposing but killing all the next beggars before they are born? Robert McNamara, the president of the World Bank who had been president of the Ford and Secretary of Defense, affirms that the demographic explosion constitutes the greatest obstacle to the progress of Latin America and announces that the World Bank will give priority, in its loans, to the countries that implement plans for birth control.
McNamara notes with pity that the brains of the poor think twenty-five percent less, and the technocrats of the World Bank (who were born) make computers buzz and generate very complicated tongue twisters about the advantages of not being born: "If a developing country that It has an average per capita income of 150 to 200 dollars per year. It manages to reduce its fertility by 50 percent in a period of 25 years, after 30 years its per capita income will be at least 40 percent higher than the level it would have reached otherwise, and twice as high after 60 years, "says one of the agency's documents. The phrase of Lyndon Johnson has become famous: "Five dollars, invested against the growth of the population are more effective than one hundred dollars invested in the economic growth". Dwight Eisenhower predicted that if the inhabitants of the earth continued to multiply at the same pace, not only. It would exacerbate the danger of the revolution, but would also produce "a degradation of the standard of living of all peoples, including ours."

The United States does not suffer, borders inside, the problem of the birth explosion, but they worry as anyone to spread and impose, in the four cardinal points, family planning. Not only the government; also Rockefeller and the Ford Foundation suffer nightmares with millions of children advancing, like locusts, from the horizons of the Third World. Plato and Aristotle had dealt with the subject before Malthus and McNamara; however, in our times, all this universal offensive has a well-defined function: it is proposed to justify the very unequal distribution of income between countries and between social classes, convincing the poor that poverty is the result of children who are not avoided and put a dam to the advance of the fury of the masses in movement and rebellion. Intrauterine devices compete with bombs and shrapnel in Southeast Asia in an effort to stop the growth of the population of Vietnam._ In Latin America it is more hygienic and effective to kill the guerrillas in the wombs than in the mountains or in the streets_. Several American missions have sterilized thousands of women in the Amazon, despite the fact that this is the most deserted habitable zone on the planet. In most of the Latin American countries, people do not spare: lack. Brazil has 38 times fewer inhabitants per square kilometer than Belgium; Paraguay, 49 times less than England; Peru, 32 times less than Japan. Haiti and El Salvador, human anthills of Latin America, have a lower population density than that of Italy. The pretexts invoked offend intelligence; Real intentions ignite outrage. After all, no less than half of the territories of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay and Venezuela are inhabited by anyone. No Latin American population grows less than that of Uruguay, a country of old people, and yet no other nation has been so punished, in recent years, by a crisis that seems to drag it to the last circle of the underworld. Uruguay is empty and its fertile grasslands could feed a population infinitely greater than the one that today suffers, on its soil, so many hardships.

More than a century ago, a foreign minister in Guatemala had prophetically sentenced: "It would be curious if the remedy was born from the very heart of the United States, from where evil comes." Dead and buried the Alliance for Progress, the Empire now proposes, with more panic than generosity, to solve the problems of Latin America by eliminating in advance the Latin Americans. In Washington they already have reason to suspect that poor people do not prefer to be poor. But you cannot want the end without wanting the means: those who deny the liberation of Latin America, also deny our only possible rebirth, and in passing absolve the structures in force. Young people multiply, get up, listen: what does the voice of the system offer them? The system speaks a surrealist language: it proposes to avoid births in these empty lands; he thinks that capital is lacking in countries where capital remains but is wasted; denominates aid to the deforming orthopedics of the loans and to the drain of wealth that the foreign investments provoke; summons the latifundistas to carry out the agrarian reform and the oligarchy. To put social justice into practice. The class struggle does not exist - it is decreed - rather than because of the foreign agents that ignite it, but instead social classes exist, and the oppression of some by others is called the western style of life. The Marines' criminal expeditions are aimed at restoring order and social peace, and dictatorships addicted to Washington found in the prisons the rule of law and prohibit strikes and annihilate unions to protect freedom of work.

We have everything prohibit, except cross each other arms? Poverty is not written in the stars; Underdevelopment is not the fruit of a dark design of God. There are years of revolution, times of redemption. The ruling classes put the beards in soaking, and at the same time announce the hell for all. In a certain way, the right is right when it identifies itself with tranquility and order: it is the order, in effect, of the daily humiliation of the majorities, but order at the end: the tranquility that injustice remains unjust and hungry hunger. If the future is transformed into a box of surprises, the conservative shouts, rightly: "I have been betrayed." And the ideologists of impotence, the slaves who look at themselves with the eyes of the master, do not delay in making their clamor heard. The bronze eagle of the Maine, shot down on the day of the victory of the Cuban revolution, is now abandoned, with broken wings, under a portal in the old quarter of Havana. From Cuba onwards, other countries have also initiated the experience of change through different channels and through different means: the perpetuation of the current order of things is the perpetuation of crime.
The ghosts of all the revolutions strangled or betrayed throughout the tortured Latin American history appear in the new experiences, just as the present times had been sensed and engendered by the contradictions of the past.

History is a prophet with a look back: for what it was, and against what it was, announces what it will be. So in this book, which wants to offer a history of looting and at the same time tell how the current mechanisms of dispossession work, the conquerors appear in the caravels and, nearby, the technocrats in the jets, Hernán Cortés and the marines, the the kingdom's corregidores and the missions of the International Monetary Fund, the dividends of the slave traders and the profits of the General Motors. Also the defeated heroes and the revolutions of our days, the infamies and the dead and resurrected hopes: the fecund sacrifices. When Alexander von Humboldt investigated the customs of the ancient indigenous inhabitants of the plateaus of Bogota, he learned that the Indians called the victims of ritual ceremonies quihica. Quihica meant door: the death of each elected one opened a new cycle of one hundred and eighty-five moons