Galeano, Eduardo

(1940– )

   Uruguayan journalist, essayist, and historian. Born in Montevideo into a middle-class family of Welsh, German, Spanish, and Italian ancestry as Eduardo Hughes Galeano. In 1954 he began his career in journalism as a political cartoonist for the socialist weekly El Sol. He signed his cartoons “Gius,” a word play on the difficult pronunciation of his paternal surname, Hughes, in Spanish. In the 1960s he published his first articles, adopting his maternal surname, Galeano, as nom de plume. From 1960 to 1964 he was editor-in-chief of the influential weekly Marcha and editor of the daily Época. From 1965 to 1973 he was editor-in-chief of the University Press in Montevideo. He was jailed in the months leading to the 1973 coup. Upon his release, he went into exile in Argentina. In Buenos Aires he founded and edited the cultural magazine Crisis. After the Argentine military coup in 1976, Galeano went into exile in Barcelona, Spain. He returned to Uruguay in 1985 after the restoration of democracy and the election of Julio María Sanguinetti as president. He is presently editor-in-chief of the editorial house El Chanchito.

   A vigorous critic of capitalist models, Galeano’s best-known work is Las venas abiertas de América Latina (1971, translated as Open Veins of Latin America), an economic analysis of five centuries of exploitation in Latin America. Las venas was a best seller in Latin America and was routinely banned in several countries. Galeano continued his trajectory in the trilogy Memoria del fuego (1982–1986, translated as Memory of Fire in 1985–1988). Translated into more than 20 languages, Memoria del fuego weaves fiction and history, folklore, and memoirs into a narrative that defies easy classification. In 1978 he published Días y noches de amor y de guerra (translated as Days and Nights of Love and War in 2000), which one critic has described as “a testimony to the power of fear to silence a population . . . a testimony to the courage of those who refuse to be silenced.” The author of more than 30 books, Galeano received the prestigious Casa de las Américas award in 1975 and 1978. In 1993 Danish editors honored him with the Aloa award. In 1989 Memoria del fuego received awards from the Uruguayan Ministry of Culture and the American Book Award from Washington University. In 1999 the Lannan Foundation of New Mexico awarded its first Cultural Prize for Freedom to Galeano in recognition of his work.