Death of the writer Eduardo Galeano – Les Echos

The Uruguayan writer died in Montevideo at the age of 74. His most famous novel, “The Open Veins of Latin America”, was hosted by Hugo Chavez to Barack Obama.

Uruguayan writer and journalist Eduardo Galeano, author of famous novel “The Open Veins of Latin America”, died Monday at 74 years to cancer in Montevideo. He was hospitalized since last week.

Born in 1940 in Montevideo, Eduardo Galeano fell to 14 in the pot up to date, and manages to sell a political cartoon in a weekly newspaper of the Uruguayan Socialist Party. He then began a career as a journalist, first in the very intellectual weekly “Marcha” (Mario Vargas Llosa Mario Benedetti or contributed to it) and the “Epoca” newspaper. In the 70s, the military dictatorship in Uruguay moved, causing the exile of Galeano to Argentina where he founded in Buenos Aires the magazine “Crisis”. However, he returned in 1976, after the coup of 24 March that installs the ruling military junta in Argentina and then flew to Europe: he lived in Barcelona until 1985 before joining the Uruguay to live the first years of the return to democracy. There he founded the weekly “Brecha”. “I have not had the chance to know Scheherazade, I have not learned the art of storytelling in the palaces of Baghdad, my universities were old Montevideo cafes” , confided -it in 2009 in Madrid.

“Fondly”

Released in 1971 in Spanish and translated in twenty languages, “The Open Veins of Latin America” ​​is his most famous work: the final indictment against the “plundering” of the American continent since the arrival of the first Spanish settlers, has become one of the works of Reference thought left the 70 and 80, then the global justice movement. It was censored during military rule in Uruguay, Argentina and Chile. In 2009, at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, then President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, had offered a copy to Barack Obama, he signed “For Obama. Affectionately “. “I thought it was a Chávez book itself [...] I was going to give him one of mine” , had then US President joked .

Eduardo Galeano was close to Chavez, but it also got home last March, Bolivian President Evo Morales. Among his other notable works that combine documentary, fiction, historical narrative, analysis or journalism, we find “Chronic Latin American”, “Fire Memories” I, II and III, “Football: light and shadow,” “wandering Lyrics “” Voices of Time “…