Eduardo Galeano and Florestan Fernandes: Latin America against the empire (I)

Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano (September 3, 1940 – April 13, 2015) definitively entered the pantheon of Latin American progressive thought for the best and noblest reasons. Unwilling to adhere to the cultural and political control exercised by the local elite associated with the expropriating economic interests of the North American empire, Galeano observed this phenomenon that has plagued the entirety of Latin America throughout history, moreover, with singular lethality since the rise of the United States of America (USA) to a first-magnitude global power.  

As September approaches, Galeano would have turned 80, a festive occasion reserved for those who have rendered good service to humanity, as was the case with the genius of Florestan Fernandes (July 22, 1920 – August 10, 1995), who would have turned 100 this July. The anniversary, in itself, is insufficient reason to compare Florestan to Galeano; rather, it is the relevant dialogue between the substance of their work that matters. Their perspectives on life and its objects of analysis share an identical viewpoint: that of those who live at the bottom, under the heavy heel of boots, while the national state entities that represent them remain shackled by imperial power, incapable of operating institutionally in the best interests of their citizens, whose status as subjects of law fails to transcend mere formality. Florestan and Galeano recognized the limitations of the forms of the Latin American bourgeois state over the economy, politics, and society, mediated by the exercise of raw power by the Latin American elite over its people, highlighting in this particular aspect the power of Marxist theory. 

Galeano's work is marked by very particular traits that intertwine politics, philosophy, literature, and the economic dimension of the ongoing process of colonization, articulated with the talent characteristic of literary masters, further tempering his lines with a remarkable humanist perspective. Galeano's position is frank and absolutely contradictory to the foreign policy reserved by the empire for Latin America, while Florestan's sociology, maintaining this critical line, inaugurates in the native language the densest analytical focus on the contempt for Black people by the structures of Brazilian society, from its very genesis under the guise of cordiality, only credible to those who have never experienced discrimination firsthand, the "service entrances," the dismissal of job interviews for "not meeting the profile," etc. 

Galeano entered the history of progressive thought in Latin America with his iconic *Open Veins of Latin America* (1989), which has deeply penetrated several generations since its publication in 1971. Galeano aligned himself with those who do not passively witness the structural hunting of men by empire and capitalism, focusing especially on Latin Americans and Caribbeans. This open hunting was carried out by the powers of each era, and Latin America and the Caribbean experienced firsthand the weight of each of them, from Haiti to Cuba, from Colombia to Venezuela, passing through the Dominican Republic and Brazil. Galeano's literature echoes the voice of the peoples silenced before the overwhelming force of transnational oligarchs articulated in the high political offices of imperial nations, oriented towards extracting mineral wealth in the same intense proportion as the blood of individuals through the maximization of their labor power.  

The forces of pure oppression subjugate countries that Galeano classified as experts in winning, contrasting them with those that specialize in losing. There is a specific inaccuracy in the reading, given that it would be more appropriate to highlight the role of experts in handing over wealth through skillful rhetoric endowed with remarkable persuasive potential, delivered to media-corporate manipulation, invariably claiming that either the resources are handed over to foreign exploitation (concealing the very low price!) or the lack of resources of the nationals will impose the non-utilization of them and, consequently, the complete loss of any collective benefit. The convergence with Galeano cannot transcend the limit of literary stylistics, because beyond that we would suggest blaming the victim. Cold political analysis imposes the recognition that neither Latin America nor the Caribbean are experts in defeats, but rather in waging inglorious struggles. Popular forces are submerged, immobilized, historically, but not definitively, incapacitated for reaction. Historical defeats may hinder the immediate flourishing of peoples, but in no case do they stifle the cultivation of the driving forces necessary for the outbreak of reaction and the assertion of national sovereignty.  

The empire undertakes successive actions to disable and disconnect popular forces from their instruments of reaction. Thus, it successfully maintains imperial activity based on the economic results of extracting labor and wealth, from oil and iron to rare earths, from meat and fruit to coffee, and the appropriation of companies and colonization of local governments and institutions. Historical developments in Latin America have only reinforced the intensity of efforts to concentrate power within the empire's orbit, as observed by the masterful political sociology of Florestan Fernandes, who in his book *Power and Counterpower in Latin America* reports the elite's preoccupation with nothing more than "[...] preventing the colonial legacy from disintegrating, from slipping through their fingers." Florestan Fernandes and Galeano find themselves at the same crossroads where the national elite and the imperialist co-optation strategy converge to organize the plunder. 

 Modern occupation by foreign armed forces is unnecessary to guarantee the success of the expropriation process. Gunboats on the coast or foreign uniforms armed in the streets are unnecessary when modern technological, financial, and legal-political weaponry, supported by national uniforms, perfectly fulfills the role of overseers interested in outsourcing expropriation in favor of the empire's interests. This is the protective wall against the emergence of nationalist forces interested in developmentalist projects like those of Celso Furtado, but also concerned with guaranteeing minimum rights for workers, as was the case with Getúlio Vargas and João Goulart, who were quickly targeted by imperialist political forces with ambitions to exert a position of determination over the internal structure of capitalist production, counting on important internal partners such as in the dependency theory constituted on the right under the pen of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, always comfortable in his submissive adherence to the empire. 

Both Florestan Fernandes and Galeano analyze the power strategies orchestrated from the metropolises, which are linked to local elites interested in reconfiguring the colonial project under new historical forms. However, in any of these new guises, they are essentially committed to preventing political projects aimed at building an independent nation. Galeano observes that the Latin American elite maintains a consistent line of support for imperialist power, an analysis that makes it clear that "our ruling classes have no interest whatsoever in investigating whether patriotism might be more profitable than treason or whether mendicancy is the only possible form of international politics." Effectively, there is no sense of belonging to the territorial space of birth or attachment to culture; on the contrary, they have been transformed into specters of the metropolis. This is the process that, for Galeano, embodies the "mortgage of sovereignty," which occurs in the minds of these national specters due to the supposed lack of another path, something that, in truth, are "alibis of the oligarchy [that] self-servingly confuse the impotence of a social class with the presumed void of destiny of each nation." 

The only historical alternative, announced centuries ago by the Latin American elite and practiced by them, is to serve as a broker of local wealth and as an efficient intermediary for the domination of bodies that will exploit their own lands without benefit to themselves or their families. The deepest layer, the culture and worldview of the Latin American elite are well represented by the Brazilian elite, whose ethos is imprinted with a set of ethnographic, anthropological, and philosophical-political perversions typical of societies devoid of a sense of appreciation for humanity.  

The cultural perversion common to the Latin American elite—continuing to exert dominance over the mass of bodies they deem inferior, composed of Black people and Indigenous peoples—is a harmful element to the creation of the latent existential space in the works of Florestan Fernandes and Galeano. The Latin American elite, which replaced Indigenous people with large groups of Black people brought in for labor, continues to aspire to a position analogous to that of slave owners of yesteryear, today paying meager wages, nullifying social and labor rights, eliminating healthcare and precautionary retirement plans; in short, they project an economy in which they extract everything from the land and from bodies, immediately replaced like parts by newer ones, full of energy and functional for the productive system.  

Documented and analyzed by Galeano, under the memory of the human and natural resource devastation imposed by the first Spanish invaders of the continent, the Latin American elite gave way to radical exploitation under conditions analogous to those of the enslaved people of those early times when law had neither form nor substance, to times when law has form but remains without materiality. An expressive contemporary mineral metaphor for the perception of the expropriation of nature without any reparation or return to the people who are the true owners of the riches is the case of Venezuelan oil. In his celebrated *Open Veins of Latin America*, Galeano already drew attention to a fact that remains relevant in various producing countries, narrating that the subsidiaries of oil companies in the colonies were organized to send crude oil to their headquarters where their companies refine it to sell it back as gasoline at a price considerably higher than that paid for the crude oil to the producing colonies.  

The Latin American elite, as portrayed in both Florestan Fernandes and Eduardo Galeano, is characterized by its ambition to maintain the exploitative structure typical of the colonial world. However, they must confront the new challenges imposed by the alteration of the state and legal models, whose bourgeois conception dictates the use of new instruments for exercising dominance. Lacking the legal and political structure of the colonial regime, which legitimized slavery and the expropriation of labor and national wealth, manipulations, tricks, and stratagems are employed to undermine the political power of the sovereign recognized by the democratic model—the people. Thus, Latin America and the Caribbean experienced multiple coups d'état that demoralized political life and discredited the true power of the people. This undermines belief in the bourgeois rule of law and the promises of democracy, paving the way for its authoritarian enemies. We will continue to address this and other related themes in this article, to be published tomorrow in this space.        

(HE FOLLOWS).