Latin America is a very wealthy region, but the people who live there do not benefit from this wealth. It is not because the people are lazy. If Starbucks paid agricultural workers a fair and living wage for picking coffee beans, your morning cup of joe would be prohibitively expensive. Latin America is poor because capitalism has made it poor. In order to flourish, capitalism requires access to cheap and easily exploitable resources, both of the human and natural varieties.
Capitalism excels at enriching industrialized countries at the cost to the rest of the world.
In the midst of this situation, Galeano continues to be a voice calling out for social justice and a more humane world. Galeano refuses to fall into a defeatist attitude of victimization or to retreat into an abstract and irrelevant ivory tower. From his birth in Montevideo, Uruguay, in South America, in 1940, Galeano has remained politically engaged in a struggle to improve the world in which we live. He entered journalism as a political caricaturist for a socialist newspaper in Uruguay, and has edited other newspapers and publications. Because of these activities, he was imprisoned and forced into exile in Argentina and Spain for eleven years.