Eduardo Galeano once said, “It’s worthwhile to die for things without which it’s not worthwhile to live.” One could also say that he writes about only that which is worthwhile only to those who want to know the truth and to know life as it is and as it has been for our Latin American neighbors. With this book Mr. Galeano answers the questions about Latin America’s history that our U.S. textbooks do not include. He provides for Latin American history what Howard Zinn has provided for American history. Mr. Galeano provides the history of a continent through the eyes of the people. When you read this book you can easily understand why Hugo Chavez, of Venezuela, gave the book to President Obama when they were first in the same room together shortly after Obama took office. One can only hope Obama took time to read it.

Eduardo Galeano was editor and chief of Marcha, a weekly journal with contributors such as Mario Vargas Llosa and Mario Benedetti. In 1973 after a military coup in his country of Uruguay, Mr. Galeano was imprisoned and then exiled. In exile in Argentina, he started the magazine Crisis. In 1976, another military coup forced him from Argentina and put him on a list of those condemned to death. He moved to Spain where he wrote Memory of Fire.

Open Veins of Latin America won the Casas de America prize in 1970 and was the first of his books to be translated into English. In the book Galeano has organized Latin American history into five centuries of exploitation. With eloquence he weaves imagery and facts to describe how foreign countries and corporations ripped open the veins to steal the gold, silver, cacao and cotton, rubber and coffee, fruit, hides and wool, petroleum, iron, nickel, manganese, copper, aluminum ore, nitrates, and tin; filling their own coffers at the expense of the people of Latin America. He rightfully argues that the wealth and power of many countries and many international corporations are built in part on the resources stolen from Central and South America; thus leaving the vast majority of the people of these countries to live in poverty. He explains the politics of Latin America and how the upper class and those in the governing class were subservient to foreign powers, and later to the foreign corporations, the IMF, and the World Bank. “In this world of ours, a world of powerful centers and subjugated outposts, there is no wealth that must not be held in some suspicion.”

Mr. Galeano documents the statistics and facts of exploitation, murder, and genocide. “The human murder by poverty in Latin America is secret; every year without making a sound, three Hiroshima bombs explode over communities that have become accustomed to suffering with clenched teeth.” Even today millions of people south of the U.S. border to the tip of South America live on less than a dollar a day. And only in the recent past have these countries sought their freedom from the IMF and the World Bank. As Galeano writes, “Numerous daggers glint beneath the cloak of aid to poor countries.”

The best testimony for this book can not come from me, a North American who by the very fact that I live in the oppressor nation have benefited indirectly from the oppression and wealth stolen from the continent, but from the people of which and for whom he writes.

Such as “The girl who was quietly reading Open Veins to her companion in a bus in Bogata, and finally stood up and read it aloud to all the passengers. The woman who fled from Santiago in the days of the Chilean bloodbath with this book wrapped inside her baby’s diapers. The student who went from one book store to another for a week in Buenos Aires’s Calle Corrienttes, reading bits of it in each store because he hadn’t the money to buy it.”

Galeano wrote, “I’m a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past of America above all and above all that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to amnesia.” He is also a writer obsessed with the truth. Once anyone reads this book they will know the truth and they will never be able to have amnesia again.