Eduardo Galeano, 8 years later

 This Thursday, April 13th, marks eight years since the death of Eduardo Galeano. And on this date, as has been the case throughout these years, I feel even more strongly the same immense void he left, a void that inhabits my soul day after day.

 I presume he would be especially attentive to what happens in Brazil, which he called his second homeland. And also to what happens in this increasingly troubled and confusing world.

 A few weeks ago I finished translating a series of articles written by Galeano during a particularly tumultuous period the world experienced, a time of constant tension: the years between 1989 and 1992.  

 The texts have been compiled into a book called "Being Like Them," which L&PM is expected to release soon.

 Galeano addresses events ranging from the fall of the Berlin Wall to what was happening in both the United States and Latin America. He covers the times of the end of the Berlin Wall, the upheaval in Eastern European countries, and the turbulence in our own regions.

 What caught my attention, besides the consistently excellent writing, sprinkled with indignation and hope, is that despite including the date they were written at the end, the texts in this book are strangely current. They bear a date but are not dated.

 It often happens that, as time passes, the memory of writers who have passed away fades. This is not the case with Galeano. His books continue to be devoured by readers everywhere.

 I think this happens not only because of the quality of the text and the enduring, always accurate and sharp perspective, but also because of the way Galeano approached his craft.

 Here is an explanation he gave regarding the system in which the world lives:

 – A system that breaks everything it touches. A system that separates the soul from the body, the past from the present, public discourse from private discourse, emotion from reason. In short, it separates people from each other, divorces the present from the past, and each person from all others. Within each of us, inhabitants of our time, it is very difficult to reconstruct the unity of perspective. Everything tends to... to break this unit.  

And further on:

The same thing happens when we are taught history. What we are taught is a history of disconnection, that is, a history that happened in Europe or America or even within our own country, but without any connection to what was happening at the same time in the rest of the world. Or with what had happened before and what would happen after. There is a disconnection in space and time, in the teaching of history, in the transmission of memory. And this is not a casual disconnection: it corresponds to the need for disconnection in a cultural system of detachment.  

- To fight against this, I gather, or try to gather, the fragments of this broken memory, this dismembered identity, and recover them with the idea of ​​integrating them into a living, cohesive structure.  

 Because here in today's Brazil, he would have thousands and thousands of fragments of that memory to gather, memories that were shattered over four tortuous years. Dark years that, somehow, he was fortunate enough not to witness...