SPN 650 - Las venas abiertas de America Latina: 50 Years Later

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When I first went to Chile in December 1990, the country had just transitioned to a form of democratic government after 17 years of dictatorship. Pirated (photocopied) copies of Las venas abiertas de América Latina were also freely available on the streets of Santiago. Originally written in 1971 by Eduardo Galeano in the heat of the Cold War, the book has been described as “a bible for an entire generation of left-wing thinkers.” In this course we will do a close reading of Galeano’s original work and take a retrospective look at how the issues he originally addressed in 1971: economic exploitation, political dominance, colonialism, imperialism, dependency theory, among others, have changed (or not) in Latin America fifty years later in 2021.