Writer Eduardo Galeano, Voice of Latin America's Left, Dead at 74

Award-winning Uruguayan writer and thinker Eduardo Galeano, considered a leading voice of Latin America’s left, has died at 74.

The world-renowned author, who had been diagnosed with lung cancer, died in Montevideo on Monday.

The novelist and journalist—whose work transcended genre and who once said “all written work constitutes literature, even graffiti”—was the prolific author of books including Memory of Fire, a three-volume narrative of the history of North and South America; The Book of Embraces, described by Library Journal as a “literary scrapbook, mixing memoir, documentary, essay, and prose poem”; and The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, which analyses five centuries of economic and political exploitation in the region, perpetrated first by Europe and later by the United States.

The last book brought Galeano into the spotlight 36 years after its original publication, when in 2009 the late Hugo Chavez, then president of Venezuela, gave President Barack Obama a paperback copy.

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Galeano, a regular contributor to The Progressive and the New Internationalist, was a powerful critic of both capitalism and imperialism in every form.

“This world is not democratic at all,” Galeano told the Guardian in 2013. “The most powerful institutions, the IMF [International Monetary Fund] and the World Bank belong to three or four countries. The others are watching. The world is organized by the war economy and the war culture.”

According to Reuters:

He returned to Montevideo in 1985.