The Huffington
Post | By Alana
Horowitz
Posted: 04/13/2015
9:00 am EDT Updated: 19 minutes ago
Award-winning
Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano and leading leftwing intellectual has died, El Pais reported.
He was 74.
Galeano was best
known for his 1971 anti-imperialist work, "Open Veins of Latin
America," which details Latin America's exploitation at the hands of
foreign powers, beginning with Spanish colonization five centuries ago and
continuing to the present with the United States. The book was banned for years across the continent,
including in Uruguay,
at the hands of military dictatorships. Galeano himself was arrested and exiled after a military
coup lead by Juan Maria Bordaberry took over Uruguay in 1973.
The book has been
widely praised and has been translated into at least 20 languages. In 2009, the Guardian called Galeano "one of the most
well-known and celebrated writers in Latin America."
"We have a
memory cut in pieces," he once told "Democracy Now. "And I write trying
to recover our real memory, the memory of humankind, what I call the human rainbow,
which is much more colorful and beautiful than the other one, the other
rainbow. But the human rainbow had been mutilated by machismo, racism,
militarism and a lot of other isms, who have been terribly killing our
greatness, our possible greatness, our possible beauty."
He had been diagnosed with cancer twice and, according to
El Pais, was admitted to the hospital on Friday related to his
illness.
