Upon the end of my senior year of High School, I encountered Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano for the first time. I’ve never considered myself a rebel, but his book “Open Veins of Latin America” sparked some kind of internal rage toward my societal beliefs — a passionate feeling that battled in my mind for a while. With Galeano’s death last April, I couldn’t help but reflect on Open Veins.

It’s easy to get enthralled by his ideas. His prose is simple, straightforward and defiant; I was initially captivated, the same way the Latin American youth from the seventies were. Without introduction, he directly jumps to narrate the atrocities colonizers committed and follows in protesting the abuse world powers have been committing over time. It’s been a while since I read the book, but I remember feeling that my own history had been written with blood and pain, a gory sentiment that shattered me inside.

I must recognize Galeano’s talent: the hypnotic rhythm of his prose, the way he blends biography, history, reporting and storytelling and his will to participate actively in civic life. However, despite being initially carried away by his words, I’ve grown skeptical of his analysis. Open Veins, in my opinion, should be interpreted as a novel, a caricature of a Marxist dogmatism and a sentiment of the Latin American middle class rather than a faithful depiction of the region’s reality. Let me explain why.

The greatest danger of the book is not its content, but the idea that lies behind it. It absolves us from the responsibility to write our own history; it victimizes our people. We excuse ourselves for the social, political and economic problems and so the northern neighbor becomes our enemy, the one with the burden, the only one to blame. We crave freedom from them, we claim the land is ours and then we fail to account for our duties.

Maybe the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did represent a looting policy, but that becomes irrelevant in Galeano’s time and moreover, it becomes irrelevant today. While the conquistadors used violence, multinational companies are nowadays providing voluntary exchanges that offer investments, innovations and labor opportunities. International commerce is based on peaceful negotiations and it is our responsibility to seek fairness in them.

The economic order that he raises can’t be fully attributed to planning from North American governments and then to the tentacles of multinational companies that plunder every place they set themselves into. It’s naïve to believe that today’s world powers don’t have a certain control over the formation of economic order. They do. Especially when non-intervention is abandoned and there is international involvement over local conflicts across the world. But assuming, as Galeano did, that all international trade is meant to continue the looting of the past, is not accurate. The dependency theory, spawned in part by him, becomes irrelevant in an increasingly dependent world where most current events might affect the social-economical order of a nation. It is on us to respond to these circumstances in the best way possible.

“More wealth has little Switzerland without ever winning an inch of foreign territory,” mentioned Plinio Mendoza, Carlos Montaner and Alvaro Llosa in “Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot”, considered the antithesis of Open Veins.

Wealth and development in other nations are not attributed to the loathing of our resources. The precious metals might have had a small economic boom in the short run in Europe during the colonial time, and the United States might have benefited from importing natural resources, but I would say that there are others factors that have promoted European and U.S. development. Therefore, our poverty is not a symptom of the wealth of world powers, but rather a consequence of not creating favorable conditions for investment and capital formation. And as long as we keep thinking that we are poor because they are rich, our region will remain as it is today.

According to the New York Times obituary of Galeano, he disavowed the book entirely. But I think he just offered an honest critique of himself as a young author who hadn’t yet lived and learned enough to take over the venture of portraying the complexity of Latin America’s reality. It’s not that he is wrong; I think he always intended to be at the side of moral right, but protest literature has its limitations.

Setting aside my current perspective of the book, I wouldn’t change my initial reaction of reading Galeano. In the end, the book gave me the idea that everyone — from individuals to nations — can mature from a youthful destruction into a useful construction of ourselves. It said to me that anyone, even Galeano, could grow aside from premature ideas, evolve, change and take lead of our own history again.