Uruguayan journalist and essayist whose Open Veins of Latin America (Las venas abiertas de América Latina, 1971) became, across fifty years, the most widely read political history of the continent — an account of five centuries of extraction from the Indigenous silver mines of Potosí to 20th-century corporate agriculture, written in short, vivid, narratively driven chapters that were deliberately accessible to readers who would never open an academic history book. The book was banned by the military dictatorships in Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile; its 2009 gift from Hugo Chávez to Barack Obama at the Summit of the Americas sent it briefly back to the Amazon bestseller list.
Galeano worked for years as editor of the Montevideo weekly Marcha, was imprisoned and then exiled after the 1973 Uruguayan coup, and spent the next twelve years in Buenos Aires and Barcelona. The Memory of Fire trilogy (Genesis, 1982; Faces and Masks, 1984; Century of the Wind, 1986) is the literary masterwork — a mosaic history of the Americas from pre-Columbian origins to the mid-20th century, told in hundreds of short numbered vignettes, each citing its sources, each carrying a small piece of the whole. It is a formal invention without real precedent, an attempt to write popular history in the register of poetry without losing the scholarly apparatus.
The later short-form books (The Book of Embraces, 1989; Walking Words, 1993; Upside Down, 1998; Mirrors, 2008; Children of the Days, 2012) refined the method into a signature: short, dense, aphoristic paragraphs, written in a prose that is closer to poetry than journalism, cumulatively political. Late in life Galeano disavowed some of the orthodox-Marxist dependency-theory framework of Open Veins as dated — a statement the right seized on as a recantation, which it was not.