‘Voices of Time’: Legendary Uruguayan Writer Eduardo Galeano on Immigration, Latin America, Iraq, Writing, and Soccer
AMY GOODMAN: It’s very good to have you with us. Let’s start where we left off in headlines, and that’s the issue of immigration. How do you see, as you look from the south to the United States in the north, the issue of the wall, the issue of the treatment of immigrants in this country?
EDUARDO GALEANO: It’s a sad story. A daily sad story. I wonder if our time will be remembered as a period, a terrible period in human history, in which money was free to go and come and come back and go again. But people, not.
AMY GOODMAN: You wrote about immigration in your new book Voices of Time.
EDUARDO GALEANO: Yes. There are some stories about it.
AMY GOODMAN: Could you read an excerpt?
EDUARDO GALEANO: One of them, which is quite short. It’s a document on history. Scientific. Pure science. Objective. There is a religion of objectivity here, so I respect it. And this is — you’ll see, you’ll see.
‘Christopher Columbus couldn’t discover America, because he didn’t have a visa or even a passport.
Pedro Alvares Cabral couldn’t get off the boat in Brazil, because he might have been carrying smallpox, measles, the flu or other foreign plagues.
Hernan Cortes and Francisco Pizarro never even began the conquest of Mexico and Peru, because they didn’t have working papers.
Pedro de Alvarado was turned away from Guatemala, and Pedro de Valdivia couldn’t even enter Chile, because they didn’t bring proof of a clean record.
And the Mayflower pilgrims were sent back to sea from the coast of Massachusetts: the immigration quotas were full.’
…JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to ask you, you’ve, obviously, over the decades now you spanned enormous changes that have been occurring in Latin America. You were yourself imprisoned during the military dictatorship in Uruguay. You know directly of the problems of Operation Condor and the other terror that spread across the continent in those years. And now there’s enormous changes occurring in many of these countries, if not economically, certainly politically at this point. Your sense of how Latin America is changing or has changed in recent decades?
EDUARDO GALEANO: Yes, I think that all these recent events, elections won by progressive forces and a lot of different movings, is like something that’s moving on and expressing a need, a will of change, but we are carrying a very heavy burden on our backs, which is what I call ‘the traditional culture of impotence,’ which is something condemning you, dooming you to be eternally crippled, because there is a cultural saying and repeating, “You can’t.” You can’t walk with your own legs. You are not able to think with your own head. You cannot feel with your own heart, and so you’re obliged to buy legs, heart, mind, outside as import products. This is our worst enemy, I think.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Much of your writing is about memory. You say the great problem of amnesia in Latin America. Could you talk about that a little bit?
EDUARDO GALEANO: Yeah. It’s forbidden to remember. I’m not in love with the past, you know. For instance, I’m a very bad visitor in museums, because I get bored soon, and I always prefer a live life and in present days. But there is no frontier between past and present when you can revisit the past and make it alive again. And then it would be a good mirror to look at yourself and to understand. Perhaps it would help to understand your present actuality, your present reality. If you don’t know where do you come from, it would be very difficult to understand where are you going.
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